Episode 39 - Secrets

Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, David Pena-Guzmán,

Ellie: 0:08

and I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:11

the podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors,

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. David, I'm guessing that you, like most people, have some secrets. Am I right?

David: 0:34

Absolutely not. I am an open book.

Ellie: 0:39

With like the maniacal laugh?

David: 0:42

Open book with tons of footnotes.

Ellie: 0:45

I actually feel like I don't have that many secrets, but like, I'm sure I do have some, you know, and I've kept things.

David: 0:51

Well, I, I know you have some.

Ellie: 0:55

What? You know I have some because you know my secrets? Or because you know that I must have some.

David: 1:01

Well, I know some of your secrets after 10 years of friendship, you know, there have been those drunken discussions at the end of a night out.

Ellie: 1:10

What?

David: 1:11

Uh, where secrets are shared bi-directionally. So, um.

Ellie: 1:14

You just let out a secret, which is that I have been drunk at least once.

David: 1:18

Well that's not really a secret.

Ellie: 1:21

We spent our twenties living in a big city.

David: 1:23

Yeah. So I don't have tons of secrets, but I do have some of them. And I really have to trace this back to me being an openly queer man who was in the closet for a super long time. Um, you know, I came out when I was 17, 18, and then more fully when I was 19 was sort of completely and I vowed-

Ellie: 1:47

Opening of the closet door.

David: 1:48

Yeah. It was like, what, what's the, what's the English word for when it makes that sound like, *eee*

Ellie: 1:54

Creak.

David: 1:54

Yeah, it was, I creeping, uh, I, yeah. Oh, well I was creeping . Ellie: Creeping. The door was creaking as I exiting it. Um, but ever since coming out, I realized what a weight off of my shoulders. It was to tell that particular truth that I vowed to live my life with most things upfront. So I am the kind of person that will hide in plain sight, precisely by putting things in the open to prevent them from brewing inside and from then taking power over me because I did have this secret that was so psychologically damaging for such a long time.

Ellie: 2:39

Yeah, and I, I think, I mean, that's something I definitely want to come back to is this idea of the secret as psychic poison, and needing to sort of bring it to light in order to cure oneself. Um, I also just want to note, I feel so bad for our listeners right now because they're like tuning into an episode on secrets and then we spend the first couple of minutes being like, I have secrets. I have secrets too. Yes, Ellie. I know some of your secrets, but then we just, like, aren't telling them any of them, like, I mean, you mentioned, you know, coming out, that's obviously an extremely important one, but then besides that, we're just like, yeah, we won't tell our listeners our secrets, like wink, wink. Um, so let's get into some juicy hypothetical's so that we don't have to actually divulge our secrets on air right now. So let's say that you are hosting a pool party. And you discover about 10 minutes before the first guests are supposed to arrive that there's a dead rat in the pool. You know if you tell the people coming to the pool party that there's a dead rat in the pool, or that there was a dead rat in the pool, cause you know, you're gonna get rid of it before they show up. You know that it will kind of ruin the pool party because nobody will actually be able to go in the pool and it's a super hot day. But you also know that if you don't tell them, that there was a dead rat in the pool, you're withholding what might seem like important information. And so what you do is you Google, is a dead rat in pool safe. You find out that actually according to the pH level and chlorine level of the pool, it's fine. And so you dispose of the rat prior to their arrival. Do you tell them?

David: 4:11

I would not tell people that. Um, uh, so for two reasons, the first one is that if the research shows that there is no danger, then they just don't need to know that. You know, like it's just going to freak people out, and it's going to be a distraction. So I wouldn't say anything. I would have my pool party. I would watch everybody jump in the pool, splash around and I would just, you know, say a prayer or two for, for, the recently deceased rat that has people jumping on its grave.

Ellie: 4:42

And that's presumably because you're seeing the interest in their fun, right? They want to have a good time at the pool party as outweighing their interest in the truth, which would be kind of misleading for them cause then there's a kind of ick factor, disgusting rat, but like it's actually not unhealthy.

David: 4:59

Yeah. So I actually don't think they have a legitimate claim to knowing that particular kind of truth, given how I know they would probably react.

Ellie: 5:08

Okay. What if you're not a hundred percent sure that the chlorine levels are high enough?

David: 5:13

My personal interest in being a good host and throwing an amazing pool party will outweigh any adverse consequences of there being carcasses in the pool. I would take out like a dead donkey and not tell anybody. Well, and since, we are throwing around hypotheticals, let me put one on the table for you, Ellie. So one thing that has happened during COVID is that a lot of people are doing everything that they used to do outside of the home inside the home. And that includes therapy. So people are talking to their therapist about their issues, their problems, their predicaments, and in some cases they'll be talking to their therapist, let's say about interpersonal conflict that they're having with their roommates, when the roommates are in the room next door unintentionally overhearing the therapy session in which their roommate is talking to their therapist about them.

Ellie: 6:17

I read an article about that.

David: 6:18

Okay. Yeah. So we probably read the same article.

So my question for you is: 6:20

if you have a roommate and your roommate is talking to their therapist about you and you hear the details, do you keep the fact that you know what they said secret, or do you talk to them about it?

Ellie: 6:40

I keep it secret for sure, because-

David: 6:43

That was very quick.

Ellie: 6:45

Well, I think at the space of living with other people, especially when it's a roommate situation rather than like an intimate partner or family member situation, it's really important to enable folks to feel like they have privacy, um, and so I feel like there's a lot of things I would overhear back when I had roommates that I wouldn't mention, like overhearing a roommates vibrator, right. And, and not wanting to like, make it clearer that, you know, I was hearing something private that was going on because that's their prerogative. It's like I throw in some earplugs and just leave it at that. And so I would say, yeah, I wouldn't tell them what I had overheard. If it were a recurring issue that I was overhearing their therapy session, I would maybe say to them like, Hey, I just want to let you know your room isn't totally soundproof. Um, and maybe like, you, you might want to go into a different, you know, space for therapy, but I don't know, if they just have a bedroom, then there's no other place to go. Yeah I would probably just like put in, again, earplugs or headphones or leave the house while they have therapy to give them their privacy.

David: 7:54

But if they said something that you very strongly disagree with, I just like imagine them being like Ellie has never cleaned the bathroom and she leaves her hair all over the pots and pans in the kitchen and I'm sick and tired of living with her. And I cannot wait for her boyfriend to dump her so that she then has to move away or something, like just something really intense like that, you know, like I kind of don't know how you can bring up, Hey, the room is not soundproof without at the same time giving away the secret that I heard what you said. And now, you know, because you know what you said.

Ellie: 8:33

Ooh. Ooh. I mean, it has to do for me with whether- what, what is the objective? Am I trying to punish the roommate? Cause-

David: 8:41

Yes.

Ellie: 8:42

letting them know seems like a good idea. Am I trying to change the dynamic? If I'm trying to change the dynamic, I hate to admit this, this is not a good trait, I'm probably going to like passive aggressively note when I last cleaned the bathroom and how recent it was, rather than letting them know, I actually overheard it. Oh, I don't know.

David: 9:04

Uh, secrets are tricky. Today we are talking about

Ellie: 9:14

secrets. When is it okay to keep a secret?

David: 9:19

What role do secrets play in forming social bonds of love and friendship?

Ellie: 9:24

And what about government secrets? Does the government have a right to keep secrets from its citizens? And under what circumstances? David, we just shared with our listeners a couple of hypothetical secrets. I want to bring another one into the mix that has been analyzed by a professional philosopher. So there's a New York Times column called The Ethicist in which a professional philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah, basically gives people advice on their ethical problems. I want to tell you about one which asks the following question: should I tell my friend's husband that she's having an affair? Picture a couple named Jane and Peter. There's a guy who's really good friends with Jane and Peter. He doesn't disclose his own name. And he says that he's he's especially good friends with Jane. But he's also become good friends with Peter since Peter and Jane got married. He since found out that Jane is having an affair with Martin, and this is not some casual affair. Jane has known Martin most of her adult life and the affair actually predated Jane's marriage to Peter. Jane and Martin can't really be together because they live in different places. And Martin has a family of his own. But once or twice a year, Jane and Martin get together and have, you know, a romantic lovers weekend tryst. And then Jane goes back to her husband, Peter. Now the guy writing to the ethicist wants to know: should he tell Peter, his friend, about Jane, his even closer friend's, affair? What would you do in this situation?

David: 11:06

I don't know that I can justify this morally, but I think I would keep the secret, but I would actively refuse to partake in the coverup. So I would make it very clear to my friend Jane that I do not, under any circumstances, want to be put in a position in which I have to lie, because the truth is that I feel like she's putting me in a really difficult situation in which I'm doomed, right. Either I betray her or I continue betraying Peter, who is also now my friend.

Ellie: 11:42

But let's say, David, that you and Peter are just grabbing drinks, the two of you, and he's like, Hey, I'm kind of weirded out by how often Jean's been going on business trips. It's been really hard for me, like, do you think there's anything fishy going on?

David: 11:58

I would lie, honestly. I would say I don't know, but if you feel like there's something wrong, you should confront Jane about it and let her know that you have these feelings. My hope there would be that this would then trigger Jane to reveal the truth on her own. And maybe I would reach a point in which I would have to confront Jane and say, Jane, you need to come clean about the affair. And if you don't, from this moment forward, don't expect me to cover for you any longer, because now you're being a bad friend to me.

Ellie: 12:34

Yeah. But you know that Peter's also going to be pissed if he finds out and then he's like, David, you lied to me. You said you didn't know, but you actually did know.

David: 12:42

Correct. And I think Peter would be right in having that reaction towards me. And I would hope that I could explain to Peter that I was in a moral predicament that in many ways is tragic, right. Because again, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. And ultimately like I'm not the person that created this situation.

Ellie: 13:04

Yeah. Well, and I think another thing to bring in the mix here is that, according to the person writing to the ethicist, he actually thinks that the affair is good for their marriage. It provides a sort of nice outlet for Jane. Jane and Peter have a super strong marriage. And so he actually doesn't think that it's like ruining the marriage. He thinks that the affair is maybe a good thing for the marriage, but then he also wonders what would happen if Peter finds out that I've been lying this whole time. And he sort of like, can't live with himself in thinking about that.

David: 13:40

Yeah, definitely. And I just can't see how it can be good for the marriage if the revelation threatens to destroy all the relationships involved, right. Um, so it seems like it's good for Jane to let out some steam, but I can't see exactly how this is good for Peter, especially if we're working under the pretty reasonable assumption that Peter is not aware of it and is not okay with it, right. Like he would not have agreed to this.

Ellie: 14:09

Well, and what one of the things that Appiah says, and I'll also tell you a little bit more in a second about what his answer was as the professional ethicist commenting on this story, is that we don't actually really know that Peter and Jane's marriage is good from Peter's perspective. Even though the guy is like good friends with Peter, what if, um, he's not really revealing the whole story about his marriage with Jane and he actually is kind of unhappy with it and maybe is picking up on some kind of vibe that is damaging the marriage. And that vibe is the fact that Jane has been cheating on him this whole time.

David: 14:42

Yeah. And so what would you do Ellie, before we get to the professional answer? I want to, I want us both to be wrong.

Ellie: 14:50

Yeah. I think it is perfectly plausible as somebody who has investments in non-monogamous approaches to love to think that Jane's relationship with Martin- it doesn't have a lot to do with her marriage with Peter. Um, I think it's perfectly plausible that she has a satisfying relationship with Martin and a satisfying relationship with Peter. And that if Peter were to find out that she had been cheating on him, he would maybe misunderstand that as having something to say about her marriage with him, right. Like she would think, oh, she's not satisfied with me, blah, blah, blah, when actually that's not the case. So as, I guess that is to say, I can understand Jane's motivations for keeping the secret. However, it is of course unethical, because even in non-monogamous relationships and this is why people distinguish consensual, or ethical, non-monogamy from cheating, um, it is not ethical to cheat on somebody, but you know, to lie to somebody, right. If you're going to be non-monogamous, you have to be openly nonmonogamous in order for it to be ethical. And so even though I understand Jane's motivations, I don't think the behavior is justified. Okay. So now I'm putting myself in the position of the friend.

David: 16:05

Yeah. What would you do? This is, this is the crux, right? This is where the ethical rubber meets the road.

Ellie: 16:11

Would I tell Peter about it? I don't know.

David: 16:20

I would put them both in the same room and I would be a Machiavellian and concoct a situation in which it came out without it seeming like it was my fault, but I orchestrated the whole thing.

Ellie: 16:32

Oh my God. Yeah, no, I don't know if I want Peter to know about this.

David: 16:38

Really? Even though Peter is your friend, is being actively lied to and presumably being harmed by the dishonesty-

Ellie: 16:48

That's, that's what I'm not sure about. Wouldn't would it not possibly harm him more to know this?

David: 16:54

No. Well, my God, our intuitions are really different here.

Ellie: 16:59

Yeah. I mean, is it, is it maybe a case where what, he doesn't know won't hurt him? I say this so tentatively, because I feel like this is a really messed up position to be holding.

David: 17:08

Yeah, honestly, I just want to be Martin here.

Ellie: 17:14

I think Martin is also cheating on his wife because Martin has like a wife and family, I-

David: 17:19

Well, so then what does Appiah say should happen in this case?

Ellie: 17:25

Like a good philosopher, Appiah is not jumping to conclusions. He's more interested in unpacking and extrapolating the ethical strands involved in this situation. He notes, for instance, that the friend finds himself in a double bind of betrayal, because by not telling Peter, he's betraying Peter, but by telling Peter he would be betraying Jane. And as you mentioned, David, there is a hierarchy there where the friend is closer to Jane than he is to Peter. And so even though you could argue that the betrayal of not telling Peter would be greater than the betrayal of telling Peter and thereby betraying Jane, because what Jane is doing is ethically reprehensible, you sort of have this weird counterbalance where his relationship with Jane is a lot closer than it is with Peter. And Appiah then connects us to what he calls moral narcissism, which is the idea that you are more concerned with the cleanliness of your own hands than with how your conduct shapes the lives around you.

David: 18:30

But I suspect that applies not to the friend, but to Jane, right. So it would be Jane, who is guilty of moral narcissism. Is that right? Or is it, is it the reader?

Ellie: 18:42

I think it's, I think it's actually the reader, the guy who wrote in to-

David: 18:46

Huh.

Ellie: 18:47

To The Ethicist. Um, but, but but Appiah says that the friend who's writing to him is, is actually quite sensitive to this potential pitfall, right. Because the guy says maybe I shouldn't tell Peter because what he doesn't know won't hurt him. Um, and then, and I mean, I'll be honest, I find Appiah's response to be a little bit frustratingly vague or equivocal.

He finishes with the following: 19:12

I suppose it's all in the title of the great Bronzino painting, famous artist, um, that one of Iris Murdoch's characters found so captivating, Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time. If the day comes when Peter asks you, why you helped Jane conceal her betrayal, you can tell him the truth. He won't forgive, but he just may understand. So like I'm getting the vibe that Appiah is saying. Yeah, maybe you don't need to tell Peter, but just be prepared for if and when he finds out. Yeah, he will justifiably be upset with you and yeah, like you said, the friendship might end.

David: 19:49

Yeah. No, I think I would probably prefer giving Jane an ultimatum. Like you need to come clean or next time it comes up and I'm put in a difficult situation, I will come clean for you.

Ellie: 20:03

Yeah.

David: 20:04

Yeah. Uh.

Ellie: 20:06

I'm just gonna probably keep my silence in the same way that I would keep silent about the roommate talking about me to the therapist. I say this with like no pride and no philosophical principles. I'm just saying like what my personal intuitions here are due to my own flawed humanity.

David: 20:23

The bottom line here is that when it comes to secrets that really matter, we are all cowards.

Ellie: 20:31

I have to say though, Appiah's equivocation around this case, I think, does speak to the complexity of secrets from a philosophical perspective. So the author of a book called Secrets, the philosopher Sissela Bok, writes that the weird thing about secrecy is that it's actually morally neutral. And this is what distinguishes secrets from lying. So for Bok, lying is default wrong, right? There's a presumption of negativity. And you know, there might be some cases where it's justified to lie, but the burden of proof is on the person doing the lying to show why the lying was justified. So there is a presumption of negativity. Lying is prima facie wrong. But secrets have no such presumption of negativity. If I'm keeping secret a surprise birthday party that I'm planning for you, that's like totally justified. And that's a pretty pedestrian way of understanding secrets.

David: 21:27

But is it Bok's argument that in general we can move through our life without worrying too much about the secrets that we keep from others, because again, the default assumption is that secrets are different from lying. Lying is normally wrong and you have to justify it, but secrets in general are okay, even if in some cases it might not be okay.

Ellie: 21:49

No, it's not that secrets are okay. It's that the concept of secrecy itself is neutral, then it depends on particular secrets, whether those secrets are okay or not, as opposed to the concept of lying is not neutral. The concept of lying is negative.

David: 22:04

Well, the philosopher James Edwin Mahon disagrees with Bok on this point, and he says that whereas Bok argues that lying and secrets are essentially on different ends of the moral spectrum, with lying being essentially wrong and secret being essentially neutral I suppose, there is in fact, a closer association between secret keeping and lying because according to him, secret keeping is just a form of lying. And therefore there is also a presumption of wrongness when it comes to keeping a secret. Because by definition, when you keep a secret, you are holding information back most of the time from somebody that is entitled to it. And so there is a kind of moral injury. The moral wrong that belongs to the act of keeping a secret consists in two things. The first one is that you're not sharing information that is relevant for the other person in the context of whatever conversation you're having, right. And the second part of that is that it's information that, if the tables were turned, you would want to know. So if you put yourself in the interlocutors shoes, you would feel like you should be told that information.

Ellie: 23:29

Okay. I mean, I wonder if that's a little bit of a narrow conception of secret keeping though, because Bok defines secrecy as intentional concealment. So there definitely is this sense of like withholding and doing so deliberately, right. If I like just forget to tell somebody something important-

David: 23:47

Well, that's not a secret.

Ellie: 23:48

for them- from them, right. Like it, it has to be deliberate. but I don't know that we necessarily associate secrets just with stuff that would be relevant for the person to know, right. Like I have secrets that I- like some of my secrets would have nothing to do with say our friendship, David, but I would still consider them secrets I keep from you. It's just that, why would I tell you them? Like, they're, you know, not particularly relevant to us, like you wouldn't need to know that. So that seems really different, like that's-

David: 24:17

No, but we might draw a distinction here between having a secret, like if I have a secret that has nothing to do with you, Ellie, um, versus keeping a secret from you. And that's what Mahon is talking about. So he's operating with a slightly different definition of a secret than Bok. So Bok says whenever you intentionally withhold information, that's a secret, period. It's a very broad definition of secret-keeping. Mahon says no, when we're talking about keeping secrets, we mean something a little bit more specific, which is keeping information from somebody that is relevant to them in that we would want to know if the tables were turned, right? Those are the secrets that people are interested in morally. And those kinds of secrets, he says, are prima facie wrong, even if you can justify them in particular circumstances, based on the context.

Ellie: 25:16

I don't know that that makes that much sense to me, but here's, here's one potential counterexample if I'm understanding Mahon's argument correctly, as you're describing it. Let's say that I am a screenwriter and I've been hired to write the screenplay by this producer and the producer wants the screenplay to be amazing. It's, you know, a fantastic coming of age story. And the producer asks me about a month in to see the draft that I'm working on and I'm like, absolutely not. I can't show you the draft and not only am I not going to show you the draft, I'm actually going to keep secret the way that the screenplay is headed, right, the direction that it's going. And my reason for that is that the overall end product is going to be better if you, as a producer, don't mess with my creative process, So I want to keep the details of my creative process and of the plot secret from the producer, who is somebody who obviously has a vested interest in where the screenplay is headed. It sounds like according to man's definition, that would be wrong, whereas according to Bok, Hey, maybe that's just the magnitude of planning a surprise party. And we have plenty of times when we should and are morally licensed to keep our plans secret from somebody else.

David: 26:30

Yeah. So imagine that this screenwriter is telling their producer I cannot show you anything because of my creative process, but secretly it's because they have writer's block and they haven't produced anything, and they just keep pushing the deadline back and back and promising something that they probably are not going to be able to deliver.

Ellie: 26:49

Sounds familiar from many students asking for further and further extensions on papers.

David: 26:53

Thought you were talking about your own research, but then you-

Ellie: 26:55

Oh God no, I'm dogmatic about deadlines.

David: 26:58

Um, but in, in that case, I think Mahon would say that that is in fact unethical-

Ellie: 27:05

Yeah. Well, and I think that would be.

David: 27:06

information from a producer that has an interest in knowing whether you will meet your deadline. So, yes, I think that would be a moral violation for Mahon, but maybe just morally neutral for Bok. Is that right?

Ellie: 27:21

Yeah, but my claim is not, what if the person has writer's block, it's what if the person is really making amazing headway and having all kinds of creative inspiration, but they don't want to-

David: 27:30

Then there's no secret.

Ellie: 27:32

No, you're keeping the plot secret from the producer and waiting until the end to reveal it. I feel like secrecy is such a key part of so many people's creative processes.

David: 27:41

But I think here one could argue the producer is entitled to know whether they will have a product on their table at the end of the month, but they are not entitled for reasons of creative freedom and the creative process to know the details of the plot until that forms an organic whole in the mind of the writer. So in that case, we're not really talking about keeping a secret that somebody is entitled to. And so that would be why it doesn't fit the definition that I gave from Mahon.

Ellie: 28:14

And it might also draw a distinction that Bok is super interested in, which is the distinction between secrecy and privacy, right. Because maybe keeping private the details of your creative process is not the same as keeping things secret. And Bok says that in our contemporary Western world, we tend to associate secrecy and privacy and even conflate them, but actually there's plenty of things that are private, but not secret and vice versa. The Psychologist Carl Jung thought that secrets are psychic poison because they alienated the individual from the community. Secrets, I think that's a really common conception of them, right, that they sort of fester there. They become infected wounds unless you bring them to light. We might think for instance, about the Edgar Allen Poe story, "The Telltale Heart."

David: 29:32

Oh yes.

Ellie: 29:32

Where this man murders another guy in cold blood and ends up confessing to the police because he is so preoccupied by the imagined sound of the man's heartbeat, right.

David: 29:45

Yeah. Cause it- doesn't he like bury him under the floor and then just, he hears like a thumping, um, and then he-

Ellie: 29:51

The thumping of his own conscience.

David: 29:53

can't handle it.

Ellie: 29:54

Yes, exactly.

David: 29:56

Yeah. Or even the notion of toxicity. That's precisely how I described the secret of my sexuality upon coming out, right. Like this dark thing that was festering and that I needed to purge in order to move on with my life. But the Edgar Allen Poe story points to the association that happens in our minds between keeping a secret and having this interior, mental life, like an inner theater in which our inner voice speaks to us and tells us to either tell things or not tell things. And the philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle argues in her book, In Defense of Secrets, that the very notion of a subjective interiority, this space within us, typically that we associate with the chest or with the breast, is a relatively recent historical creation that emerged with the rise of medieval Christianity. So she says back in the day, if you go to the pre medieval world, like the ancient Greeks, or even before to the Homeric period, people talked about secrets, but secrets were always external, right? They were worried about the secrets of the world or the secrets of the gods or the secrets of nature. But it's only with the rise of medieval Christianity that you have the rise of confessional demands that force subjects to start reflecting on their own interiority, on their own desires. And that's how you see the creation of this inner chamber, like the me that I carry within that houses all the secrets.

Ellie: 31:37

Ah, which, you know, I'm like obsessed with, as somebody who works on selfhood and the ways that we relate to ourselves, this idea that interiority is sort of invented at a particular moment in time and associated with, um, you know, to go back to the Poe story, guilt, guilt, a guilty conscience, right, as being a sort of secret that we live with is super interesting. But sort of related to this, the word secret comes from the Latin secretum, which means something hidden or set apart. So the original idea with a secret is its something that is set off from, let's say, the public sphere of consumption.

David: 32:11

Well, it's interesting that you point this out because Dufourmontelle, in one of the opening chapters to her book, points out that the etymology comes from an agricultural practice during the early medieval period, when farmers would harvest the crops and then they would have to essentially separate the wheat from the chaff. And the chaff would not actually make it into a public market. So this act of setting apart and keeping away from the public, which originates in agriculture, then gets taken up in relation to the self and subjectivity where we keep something inside instead of putting it out in the public space.

Ellie: 32:53

Okay. So secrets are the original chaff of the soul. Although we have such a different view of it, because it's actually like- now we think about secrets as what are most essential to ourselves, right? Like they're, they're the core of the wheat to use like a terribly mixed metaphor.

David: 33:07

Yeah. The core of the wheat that is actually the chaff of the subject.

Ellie: 33:10

kernel.

David: 33:11

This is just-

Ellie: 33:13

I know, I know. Now we just sound like Deleuze and Guattari, who incidentally had something to say about the secret in A Thousand Plateaus. The 20th century, French theorists, Gilles Deleuze and Guattari talk about the secret as a secretion. And so they actually say that, you know, we think about the secret as something that is hidden, that is anti-social. But in fact, a secret is a secret only by virtue of the possibility of its being exposed, or to use the metaphor of the secretion, of it's being leaked. Jacques Derrida has a bit of a similar view, um, where he says that the secret, from the very beginning, always already has an inner witness. So if I'm keeping a secret, I am both the potential teller of the secret, and also I'm the keeper of the secret.

David: 34:00

Well, and if we think about the self as being both a witness to, and a guardian of, the secret, it means that we have this duality within ourselves, which is why there's always a risk that the secret will come out because one part of us might try to leak it, right? And there's a whole discourse that studies the science of auto-leakage. I guess that's the term that we're going to use for this. Um, and, and that's psychoanalysis. I mean, when you think about the sorts of things that Freud was interested in, when it came to his patients, it was those acts of self betrayal where people give themselves away against their better judgment. So think about like the Freudian slip of the tongue, right, where you're- where you make a little mistake that reveals a fundamental secret about who you are, about your psychic economy, about your impulses, about your needs and desires, but nobody betrayed you. You betrayed yourself. And I think it highlights this Deleuzian-Guattarian notion of leakage, that a secret that could never be leaked would not really be a secret. It would just be an unknown, right. As soon as somebody knows it, it can be spread.

Ellie: 35:19

Well, and I think it's interesting too, you know, to think about the way that this potential for leakage, auto-leakage.

David: 35:26

Um, coined by yours truly.

Ellie: 35:28

I know right. Good, good work, David, um, also is arguably showing that secrets are what make meaningful social relationships possible. So this was a point that the sociologist Georg Simmel made early in the 20th century. He says that secrets are the condition for the social bond, because what defines humans is our ability to tell others about ourselves, right? Um, we are a kind of self narrating animal and I can choose how much to reveal and how much to conceal and that, you know, for him is a pretty distinctively human trait.

David: 36:03

Yeah. And it seems like in order for you to be able to reveal, which is how social bonds are formed for Simmel, you have to be able to conceal in the first place, right? You have to be able to create this inner fort of that which is yours and yours only. And that you then selectively reveal to people with whom you want to form different kinds of relationships, whether that's a romantic relationship, or a friendship.

Ellie: 36:28

Well, and I think that's a nice way of putting it David too, because, um, you're, you're saying that it's the secrets that create the condition for the possibility of the social bond. I, I, yeah, I think that's a helpful clarification.

David: 36:37

And I think for me, it's that secrets do create that interiority, that, according to Dufourmontelle, emerges in the medieval period with Christianity, right. Like I form an inner chamber by virtue of holding some information only to myself and actively keeping it from others. And I think this really puts pressure on this loose philosophical consensus that secrets, as Carl Jung said, are psychic poison. Because if we look at them from this perspective, they're actually what make up the psyche, right? And Dufourmontelle says as much. She says, that's what psychoanalysts do in therapy. They go into the realm of secrets, which is the realm of interiority. And it's not that those secrets always have to come out. In fact, there might be very good reasons for not revealing all secrets and for arguing that we have a right to our secrets, which is an argument that the Martinican philosopher, Edouard Glissant makes. He introduces a term that I really like, which is the right to opacity, where he says, we all as subjects have the right not to be legible to those around us, even our closest relatives.

Ellie: 37:56

And I think that's such a different take than this sort of Enlightenment idea that exposing everything at all times is always the best way of going about life, right? Like I think there's this sort of default presumption in our contemporary American ethos that derives from the Enlightenment, which is that like, yeah, transparency is always a good and like, that's just not true. There's so much that I don't want to know about people and that if I did know about people, I wouldn't really understand.

David: 38:25

Yeah. And I think one way in which we can make this argument is to say that secrets are creative in the sense that they create us as subjects. I am a subject with a certain interior life by virtue of the secrets that I hold within. And if I were to put all of that out for the public to see, maybe I would cease being the kind of subject that I am.

Ellie: 38:50

Yeah, totally. And I, you know, I think here that secret sharing is really important for specific social bonds, right? Such as intimate bonds, the bonds of friendship. And so the idea is that, yeah, I might be opaque to some people, but to others I'm transparent, although that does actually seem like a pretty different view from Glissant's, because you said that he thinks that we have the right to opacity even with our closest friends. But I think about Kant's idea of moral friendship, which he distinguishes from friendship based on feeling. And Immanuel Kant says that moral friendship is the complete confidence of two persons in revealing their secret judgments and feelings to each other, with

the caveat: 39:33

as far as such disclosures are consistent with mutual respect. So according to Kant I'm probably not going to share the secret that I think my friend has like, um, you know, really bad taste in music with them if it's like disrespectful.

David: 39:47

Um.

Ellie: 39:48

But I will share my most intimate secrets with them. And I want to hear their secret judgments and feelings.

David: 39:55

That's what he calls what? Moral friendship? Is that the term that you used? Um, so, so moral friendship, then, is the friendship that you have with your BFF, with whom you can reveal these secrets and have secrets be revealed to you. So there's a trafficking of secrets.

Ellie: 40:13

Well, and not only can reveal your secrets, but should reveal your secrets.

David: 40:16

Yeah, and in thinking about this Kantian notion of moral friendship, I'm just reminded of how powerful the phrase 'I've never told anyone this before' really is, especially in the context of a friendship where the moment somebody says that to you for the first time, you cross a friendship threshold with them, and it introduces a new dynamic where, not only do you know that this person is exposing themselves to you, right, they're opening up that inner chamber and letting you in, but then it gives you confidence that maybe you can do the same in relation to them, um, because there is that maybe this is too rationalistic, but there is a mutually assured destruction, um, logic in place, this insurance. Um, but for, for Kant it seems like that's moral friendship.

Ellie: 41:07

Yeah. And I also want to note here that I think that secret sharing as this essential site of bonding, um, has different gendered scripts in our society. Because social science research suggests that women are much more inclined to what's known as self-disclosure than men are. And so I think a lot of women's bonding relationships and that's not to say that like, all friendships are between people of the same gender or that relationships between people of the same gender are always friendships. But I'm thinking about like maybe a difference between friendships between women and friendships, um, with men whereby women tend to have like fewer secrets from each other, whereas for men, I think there's this sort of image of like the occasional secret that will drop. And it's really powerful when it does, but it doesn't happen that often.

David: 41:53

Yeah. I mean, I share more secrets with women than with men, definitely. But you know, here, there's also the gay friend dynamic, um, which is not quite the same as friendships between, um, let's just say heterosexual men and heterosexual women, which are, I think a little bit more complicated and sometimes even discouraged by a whole set of social dynamics. But, you know, we might ask the question about how secret sharing plays out along the lines of gender, but another question that is philosophically very interesting and ethically fraught is who's secrets do we share with whom? And the recent that I'm raising this issue is because it seems to me that there are certain social practices that are perfectly acceptable by most people, but that maybe introduce an element of ethical ambiguity. And that is the relationship between friendship and romance. So my best friend tells me a lot of secrets. I know their private life. I know, um, I know where the skeletons are buried, uh, you know, reference back to Poe. And when I know those secrets, I hold them dearly. I don't divulge them, but I think even my best friend would know that I'm probably going to share some of those with my partner of seven years, right. So there's this presumption that maybe with your primary partner or a long-term romantic partner, you can share secrets, but then again, under a condition of absolute privacy. And sometimes it even goes the other way, right, where I might tell my best friend something secret about my relationship. And it's hard to know which one ought to take priority or whether any of them should.

Ellie: 43:53

I think honestly, in my daily life, this is where the biggest tensions in secret keeping come up.

It's in the domain of: 44:01

how much can I disclose about other people's lives, um, to the people that I'm really close with. So I do think it's, it's pretty common for a lot of friendships, especially friendships among women to involve high levels of self-disclosure about intimate relationships and I think, frankly, I think a lot of men in relationships with women would be shocked by how much women tell each other. And like, probably angry.

David: 44:32

Oh yeah, I know. Yes. I absolutely agree with that. But I would add that. I think a lot of men would be shocked by how many secrets their man friends reveal in the context of their romantic relationship that they don't share with them as male friends.

Ellie: 44:51

Oh, yeah, totally. But, but you're talking about like the like people's own secrets. Like I would tell a girlfriend way more than I would tell, like a guy friend, if I'm a straight dude, is-

David: 44:59

No, I mean, like, I think man, man friends, that's also another term that I'm coining here. I think a man will tell his partner, let's say a woman, secrets that are relevant to maybe his best bro friend. So the male friends secret life is shared between the friend and his partner.

Ellie: 45:22

I'm getting confused about who's who here? You're saying, let's say- let's- let's imagine. Okay. It's Steve and Brian, you're saying that Steve is telling Brian's secrets.

David: 45:32

Girlfriend. Yes, absolutely. Hands down. And the, and the, and the bro friend has no clue of how much the woman knows.

Ellie: 45:39

Huh. Yeah, that certainly could be. I don't, I mean, I have, I mean, I have no opinion on that as like not Steve or Brian in this situation. But yeah, I, I mean, I think loyalty has so much to do with this but, but it's like more complicated than that because I don't think it's always a sheer matter of being disloyal to somebody when you share their secret to an intimate partner. It might be, I don't know, there, there may be other motivations, like trying to figure out what you should do. So like for instance, maybe I'm coming to a partner asking for advice about what to do with a close friend, but asking for advice requires revealing that close friend secret, and maybe, maybe I'll keep their identity secret. I've totally done that with partners where I'm like, I don't want to tell them which friend I'm talking about, because that would be revealing a friend's secret, and that is unethical. And so then I'm sort of like putting it in a hypothetical, but I don't know if the partner knows enough about your life and those around you, they might know like who you're talking about.

David: 46:49

Yeah. And I mean, not only is there a potential motivation here, which is, as you said, the advice, but I think we need to go back to that notion of auto-leakage, which is a terrible term, but does name something important, which is the gratification that we feel from strengthening a relationship through the divulging of a secret right there. It's just like, like, girl, you're not going to believe what happened. I need to tell you immediately. And I do this with my partner all the time. And that in itself is not a secret that like, I have no secrets with my partner, for the most part. Um, other than like my deep seated secrets as, as a subject, right? Like maybe even the things that are secret to myself, um, from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Ellie: 47:38

Yeah. No and I think that that really says something about the pro-social function, not only of secret telling, but also of gossip, which is, you know, an episode unto itself, which I would love to do at some point. Um, but, but there is this kind of function of like, especially when it, when it pertains to ethical dilemmas, like a friend is doing something that you don't really think is ethical, asking a partner about that reveal something about your partner's ethics and that could be illuminating in its own.

David: 48:07

Yeah. And so there is definitely the pro social dimension to secrets, as well as the anti-social dimension to secrets, right, that they do separate, us in the original Latin something away from the public. And maybe we should just think about secrets as the movement between that private sphere and the public sphere that encloses it, it just like a controlled movement of information across a line that is fundamentally porous. If you're enjoying Overthink, please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts Ellie, I also want to make sure that we talk not just about personal secrets, but about government secrets. You know, those secrets that governments typically keep from the citizenry and that sometimes get leaked by people such as whistleblowers. What do we think about that?

Ellie: 49:42

I mean, I don't know if I can make one blanket statement around government secrecy. But I think that there are often very good reasons why a government might keep secrets. Before we talk about some of those good reasons, though, I want to articulate what I think is a very common view, which is the view that governments should not ever keep secrets from their public. And there are two main proponents of this view. One is good, old Woodrow Wilson, who thought it was unethical for a government to keep any secrets. Although then, um, Sissela Bok talks in her book about how, like, he didn't really make good on this in his actual presidency. And the other is the philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham thought that it was wrong to keep secrets of the public, because he says that secrecy is an instrument of conspiracy. So he opposes secrecy to publicity and says that a government should be like basically essentially public in almost all cases, because otherwise there's going to be open ground for like this sort of secrecy that we see in totalitarian governments, like secret police, you know, manipulating the public.

David: 50:44

Yeah. And I think this is definitely, as you said earlier, part of the legacy of the Enlightenment, which hinged on the notion that you make social and moral progress precisely by shedding light on that which is kept from view, which is why people from the Enlightenment would refer to the era right before them as the Dark Ages, right, where things are hidden, where things are concealed, and when there is no transparency.

Ellie: 51:10

We do have the Renaissance in the middle, but-

David: 51:12

You do have the Renaissance in the middle as the pivot point. Um, but I think you're right that this is a very common view that a lot of people even today would defend, the notion that citizens are entitled to know how their government works. Yet the philosopher Giovanna Borradori has made the argument that this demand for transparency that is so common in modern democratic regimes is misplaced because it's rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of modern power relations in the 21st century. So those who believe that we need transparency at all times are probably operating with what she calls an Orwellian model of power, in which power is centralized in something like the state that holds secrets. And that therefore the revelation of those secrets is tantamount to political resistance. But ultimately for her this call for transparency presupposes that is that there is a center of power, again typically the state.

Ellie: 52:16

Hmm.

David: 52:18

But that's not how power works anymore. Maybe that's how it worked in the early 20th century, but she argues that nowadays the real threat is not the state keeping information from us, but large private corporations. So here think about Facebook, think about Cambridge Analytica, and so on and so forth. But these corporations using the logic of transparency to reach deeper and deeper into our private lives, into the private sphere. So she says we live in a culture that suffers from a fetish for transparency. We, we get off on talking about and demanding transparency without realizing that it's the call for transparency that nowadays is actually the source of our political oppression.

Ellie: 53:06

Wow. I think that's a really compelling claim and it also reminds me of, an argument that our former guest, C. Thi Nguyen, who came to talk to us about games, makes in a essay on transparency and surveillance where he writes that people think transparency increases trust, but actually the opposite is the case. Transparency makes us feel observed. And so there's maybe something- that actually goes back to my, my claim about wanting the roommate to feel privacy, right. I don't want her to know that I could overhear the therapy session because that sort of transparency then suddenly makes her feel surveilled, observed, in her own home, which is really uncomfortable.

David: 53:48

No, that's right. And I think in that particular case of the roommate with the therapy, the point is that maybe she will come to trust you less if she knows the truth, which is that you heard what she was saying about you to her therapist and so on and so forth. And so it really inverses an argument that most of us find intuitive, which is that more transparency is more trust but in fact, if I feel like everybody around me knows everything about me, then in fact, I don't feel like I can trust anybody because I have not separated away from the public, that inner domain.

Ellie: 54:26

Oh, that's such a great connection.

David: 54:27

Yeah. And Borradori uses a really nice term for this, where she says we live in an expository society, a society that pressures us to expose, to reveal, by telling us that that's where our freedom is going to be found, through self-disclosure. But in fact, we live in the kind of culture where now secrets might be sites of agency and political resistance, um, because we turn away that hand that is trying to reach into that inner chamber, which is the hand of marketers and investors and people trying to get data about, you know, the most private recesses of our mind.

Ellie: 55:09

Well, and in relation to this idea that secrecy can provide a means of political resistance, that's something that Bok talks about as well, which is the fact that coercive governments operate largely through secrecy, but it's also through secrecy that people resist those coercive governments, right, through secret networks of information sharing, um, guerrilla warfare, et cetera. On a really different note here, um, you know, just to throw in a good reason for government secrecy or just administrative secrecy more generally, Bok says that one of the things that secrecy provides is the ability for administrations to experiment with different ways of doing things or with different new ideas. So in the same way that I think it's really important for individual artists or creators to have some secrecy around their own creative process, Bok says that concealment insulates administrators from criticism and interference, which allows them to correct mistakes, reverse directions, without being like, oh shoot, we did the wrong thing, right? It gives them this leeway for trying out different things. And that if governments didn't have some modicum of secrecy, they would actually be inclined not to experiment so much because they would be afraid of backlash. And then we'd find ourselves in this like weird sort of conservative situation where like, things are always the same, right. We're not experimenting with innovation.

David: 56:34

Well, and this is an argument that C. Thi Nguyen makes, but raising the decibel a little bit more, because he makes the argument that it's not just that administrations would cease experimenting if they were fully transparent but in fact that full transparency would push administrators to constantly have to cut down overhead costs that maybe make sense to people who are familiar with that domain, with how things work but that to the general public would seem like wasteful. And so if you make all the internal machinations of an institution, so for example, like a government agency or a museum or a nonprofit publicly accessible, then public pressure kicks in and people start saying, well, why are you spending a thousand dollars on this? Why are you spending $5,000 on this? And before you know it, you have a race to the bottom where, paradoxically, as the administration tries to cut down overhead costs in order to satisfy public opinion, it starts hog tying itself and limiting its own ability to achieve its own goals. Because now they don't have what they need in order to operate.

Ellie: 57:50

Mmm.

David: 57:51

Transparency just becomes this cut down for fiscal responsibility.

Ellie: 57:55

And there's a really interesting connection to be made here, to whistleblowing and the function of whistleblowing of like, when is it appropriate? When is it inappropriate, right? And so I think there's a lot to be unpacked that we don't have space to do here today but a whistleblower is essentially a revealer of secret.

David: 58:14

Yeah. And whistleblowing can, in fact, hold very powerful people accountable to the public for things like breaching the law or violating the rights of various sectors of the population. And so that's something that I definitely do not oppose. I am a big defender of whistleblowing, even though I do agree with Borradori and with C. Thi Nguyen that if we pan out this demand for transparency at all times, that unconditional demand is quite problematic.

Ellie: 58:46

So in that case, maybe the friend of Jane and Peter should whistle blow on the relationship.

David: 58:52

Definitely whistle blow. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 59:05

You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even request for life advice.

David: 59:11

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank our audio editor and our production assistants, Sam Hernandez and Anna Solomon.

Ellie: 59:21

Thanks to Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo. Thanks so much for joining us today.