Secrecy - power trip or legitimate tool.
Secrecy is exceedingly powerful and therefore dangerous. It can be based on fear expressed as protection of weakness to avoid the feeling of vulnerability and/or expressed as power, or the desire for it, through manipulating information. It can be based on the need and right to know and protect your boundaries. It can be based on a real desire for empowerment of others. It can be based on condescension. It can be away of protecting the purity and the quality of information. It is also something that happens naturally and accidentally because you don’t know what other people want or need to know and none of us know everything about ourselves or what we are going to do in different situations.
All of us withhold information that embarrasses us for fear of the reactions other people. We do this with our words but more importantly with our actions and the subtler non-verbal language of behaviours behind those actions that express the way we organise our feelings to hide from ourselves uncomfortable and painful reactions.
Control of information is the most personal power we all have and since that control is about how it is shared it is social. What and how information is shared is how we delineate the groups live in. The people who have broader positions of influence in those groups maintain, create and enforce their positions through they use of information. We see the way that nations use secrecy as a weapon of war. Even business has “commercial in confidence” as an important source of economic power. Copyright and other intellectual property rights are ways of controlling information and profiting from it when secrecy would be self-defeating.
Secrecy can be empowering because sometimes it is important for people to find information and knowledge for themselves through experience. Someone else telling you can be disempowering because it is about them showing what they know rather than what they are sharing. And sometimes people just will not hear the information behind what is said and so must be supported while they find out in their own ways. It can also be the result of people thinking you cannot handle knowing it so they hold back. It is a hard call to know when it is right to share your perceptions of another human and when to hold shut waiting for them to realise. When is secrecy dishonesty, and when it is respect?
Secrecy is also a natural reality. The truth is that you have a right to share information about yourself as you see fit; it is part of your natural boundaries and is part of your integrity as a person. The fact is you have information inside you that you have to decide to share. This choice is central to your psychic boundary, for many it is the line both within and around them that defines their sense of self, things they can’t make choices about are traitors and enemies. These are often the sources of the vulnerabilities causing people to keep secrets about themselves as a way of artificially feeling empowered by trying to hide the weaknesses from the world that most scare them. Sometimes secrecy is the only power or control they feel in their relationship with that part of themselves. So secrecy can be a way of resisting the world in order to feel a separate sense of self, of identity.
We cannot share everything we know and feel instantly, it comes through the limitations of our body and personality. Information and knowledge change over time and through the process of sharing. How you share this process of communication is an expression of your values, your personality, your desires and fears, self-knowledge and maturity, and those of your partners in it. It is mostly emotional reflexes that limit your actual freedoms rather than your believed freedoms. This conflict is among many we have that distract us from knowing everything about our decision-making processes so that we can accidentally keep information from people important to us. We do not always know what information is important to other people and so they can experience something as a secret held when it was just not shared because you did not know the information was wanted.
Each of us has elements of ourselves that are known and unknown to ourselves, some of which are shared and unshared. Then there is what other people know and do not know about us that can be shared and unshared. Then there is the intersection of all these because there are the lines between the things we know about ourselves that others also know and things they know about us that they can not share with us – our blind spots. In psychology they call it the “Johari Window” (named after the first names of its inventors, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham). This knowledge is dynamic with all the participants learning about each other through the life of their relationships. As mentioned there are the lines between choice and its absence on all sides that influence the way this process plays out.
Blind spots can be experienced as secrecy by outsiders and as weaknesses by insiders.
Another aspect of secrecy is the attempt to control the purity of the knowledge and information being shared but controlling the people who learn it. In a lot of spiritual traditions the aim is to keep the knowledge pure as it is passed down. In business it is the desire to keep the knowledge under the control of the management and shareholders so the power and money stay in the hands of its owners.
The central elements of secrecy are, in no particular order, choice and its absence on a personal and interpersonal and social level leading to power and control of people, knowledge and information; known and unknowns that can be known and that cannot; the boundaries delineating internal from external; intentions like fear, empowerment, resistance; and finally it exists between people and is a way people try to control the nature and structure of their relationships.
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