No Secrets

I hear it all the time and see it in the movies - someone has a secret! And once someone discovers that secret, one can be blackmailed into doing evil nasty things that they wouldn't normally otherwise do. And yet, all of this is a lie, since there is no such thing as a secret.

Say you are cheating on your spouse. You probably do not want your spouse to know, hence the word cheating. If you had his/her permission, then it would just be good old fashion sex with someone else. So, with this cheating going on, you think you have a secret. If someone found out and threatened to tell your spouse unless you gave them money, sexual favors, or something else, you might comply in order to keep your secret.

Before all of this, the person with whom you were cheating with knows you were having sex. The person who found out obviously knows as well. Other people along the way probably know as well - probably quite a lot of people actually. Where is the secret? Ah, the secret is that some group of people are in the dark about this piece of knowledge. A secret implies a person or group of people for whom you want control over certain knowledge, not the population at large.

So, what you really have here is that you do not want some people to know something. If the rest of the world knew about your "secret", it wouldn't matter, as long as it wasn't any of the people you want to control the flow of this information to.

I try to have no secrets - ie nothing that people can blackmail me for. Sure, I try to control the flow of information around me, since that is a big part of manipulating people and of life. But if someone finds out, no problem, since I assume that if they were interested in knowing they will eventually find out, and as I said, probably many other people already know.

Like this blog. You are reading it. And yet there are many people close to me who do not know about it. Am I keeping it a secret? By the standard definition, yes. But you can plainly see that I am not, since it is here in a public forum where anyone can find it if they looked. No real secret, even though it might appear that way to those left in the dark.

Not all information is for everyone, but does that make it a secret?

The Edward