Accumulate Risk

Become Weaker When Shared

Conceal

Create Disorientation

Create Distance

Create Doubt

Create Fragility

Create Friction Across Generations

Create Illegibility

Create Instability

Create Obscurity

Grow In Darkness

Invite Suspicion

Make Complexity Dangerous

Make Coordination Difficult

Make Knowledge Fragile

Make The Future Invisible

Quietly Divide

Slow Trust

Spoil

Tempt

secrecy

is a failure of second-order thinking. When one tells you a secret, they are at the same time offering evidence that the secret need not be kept.

Failure of second-order thinking: he tells you a secret and somehow expects you to keep it, when he just gave you evidence that he can't keep it himself. (Taleb)

is structurally incorporated into the modern subject as an event at a particular historical moment. It takes form, again, as an event, along with the establishment of the confessional within Christianity.

In his lecture 'Sexuality and Power' (1978), Foucault traces the moment at which secrecy was structurally incorporated into the modern subject to the establishment of the 'shepherd = pastoral power' in Christianity. In this religious system, the 'shepherd = pastor' plays the privileged role of 'knowing and monitoring everything about the individual' and exercising 'continuous control' for the salvation of the individuals as a flock of sheep. This role can be seen specifically in the mechanism of the confessional in churches. Here, a person 'must communicate [ ] everything that happens in the secret recesses of his soul' to the 'the shepherd = pastor,' who acts as the 'teacher of truth.' Foucault points out, however, that a critical illusion is produced at this moment without the person's awareness. When the person 'confesses,' it appears that 'something that was already there' is expressed and heard. What is happening here, however, is that this 'something' is actually formed and recognized for the first time through the act of representation... in other words, confession is an event that produces the dimension of 'sin,' and thus a dimension of the subject's 'reality = truth,' through the 'direction of the soul.' Foucault then concludes that the 'inner world,' 'self-consciousness' and 'subjectivity' which characterize modern Europe are nothing less than the effects of this religious=historical apparatus.

 must be performed in public in order for its presence to carry any social weight.

But just as secrecy is something that must be performed in public in order for its presence to carry any social weight, as I have noted in another context (Herzfeld, 2009), so, too, cultural secrets must be bandied about so that outsiders can intuitively grasp their fundamental ungraspability. (Herzfeld 2009 : 146)

Mysteries are due to secrecy. Francis Bacon

is that which one is capable of keeping only if one does not know.

The only secret a man can keep is the one he doesn't know.

is the only mystery of able men... mystery is the only secrecy of weak and cunning ones.

A proper secrecy is the only mystery of able men... mystery is the only secrecy of weak and cunning ones. Lord chesterfield

is triadic in nature. It concerns the three activities of concealing, keeping hidden, and revealing, and involves three parties: Two who share the secret and a third who does not.

That is why, following a lead from the German sociologist Georg Simmel, secrecy in antiquity as an object of study is most often said to have a 'triadic' nature: the three activities of 'concealing', 'keeping hidden' and 'revealing' knowledge involve, in turn, at least three parties: two people who share the secret and a third party, the ones who do not know it. (dict. of gnosticism 'secrecy 1050)

is not necessarily an indication of having secrets.

A person may be very secretive and yet have no secrets.

secrecy, n.All

secrecy