Why We Love Secrets (And Why It’s Dangerous)
We crave secrets, fear them, and chase them. But why do governments hide the truth—and why does our obsession with the unknown never fade?
There is something irresistible about the phrase “top secret.” Two simple words, each in red ink, can bring any reader, casual or not, to a screeching halt. They evoke visions of locked vaults, whispered meetings, dim hallways and the buzz of fluorescent lights in windowless rooms. We don’t know what the secret is, after all — only that, whatever it is, we want it.
But this obsession is not mere cinematic phantasmagoria. It’s in our coding — curiosity, it turns out, is among the oldest survival instincts. But our general national obsession with secrecy, particularly the type mummified in government and military murk, is more than nosiness. It’s about trust. Power. Control. And perhaps, just perhaps, it’s about who we are when we don’t know something.
Let’s unpack that.
I. Secrets as Power
Governments don’t keep secrets because they’re entertaining. They hold on to them because secrets are strategic. Information is leverage. The fewer people know a key detail — be it a password, a position, a plan — the fewer the chances that what they know can be stolen.
But there’s a flip side. To keep a secret is not only to keep others from knowing — it is to make a hierarchy of knowledge. And that hierarchy reinforces control.
Information other people don’t have is that which makes you strong. It makes you important. You have been entrusted. The full story was known only to court officials in ancient days. There are no Grades of Access to the information now: clearances are levels in a game that most of us never get to play. “Need to know” is not just policy — but identity.
That’s how secrets create institutions. The CIA, the NSA, MI6 — these organizations are there to deal in secrets. To collect, to shield, and to weaponize information. Without secrets, they’re empty buildings. With them, they become guardians of nations — or monsters in the dark, depending on your view of the world.
But here’s the catch: the stronger alchemy the secret grants, the more harmful it is to hold on to.
II. The Seduction of Not Knowing
Let’s cross to the other side for a moment. If political governments are addicted to secrecy for their very survival, how about the rest of us? Why on earth are we, the people, so fixated on this notion of secret knowledge?
Some of it is curiosity, plain and simple. But it runs deeper than that. It's highly psychological not to be allowed to know something.
It pricks at our ego. “Who decides for me what I’m supposed to be able to understand?
It activates imagination. “If they’re concealing that, what must it be?”
It fuels distrust. “What other lying are they doing?”
And where we don’t know, we fill in. That’s where conspiracy theories originate — not from ignorance, but from panting intelligence. People who pose questions and get stonewalled do not simply shrug and walk away. They dig deeper. And if no answers come, they make them up.
It’s the emotional analogue to pareidolia — the way we detect faces in clouds, or meaning in static. The brain abhors a vacuum. So when secrets are held from the public, that is not creating safety. It creates suspicion.
That’s also why official secrecy nearly always ends up backfiring in the long run. It forces the public to guess, and the guesses are often far worse than reality.
III. "Age Transparency... or So We Thought."
We were once promised that the internet would democratize truth. That every time a government file or classified memo exists, that it will eventually get online. That the age of information would make secrecy a relic.
That didn’t happen.
No, we live in an era of information overload. Too many documents. Too many conflicting voices. The result isn’t clarity—it’s noise. Disinformation is simply another nail in the secrecy tool chest. And in reality, there are times it works better than nothing. If you cannot protect a secret, bury it under 50,000 lies and call that the truth.
Whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning didn’t just leak secrets. They reminded us that the true danger is not always in what we don’t know but what we know only indistinctly. Half of the truth, when tortured through bias and fear, could be a more pernicious force than the full lie.
It is the new paradox of secrecy: we have more access to information than ever, but we trust almost none of it. Our suspicion is sharper. Our paranoia, better informed. We’re drowning in leaks, documents, FOIA requests — but still, it feels as though the real action lies just outside our grasp.
IV. Why Conspiracy Theories Flourish
Here’s where things get uncomfortable.
It’s in the shadows of secrecy where conspiracy theories thrive. Not because people are idiots or gullible, but because they are ravenous for coherence. The human mind longs for a story. Where the official narrative has holes, we will fill them in.
This is not always irrational. Throughout history, crackpots have sometimes been right. MK-Ultra, COINTELPRO, the Tuskegee Study — each of these was once a fringe rumor but is today understood as plain historical fact.
So it’s not totally nutso to think governments are lying. They do. They have. They will.
But the more serious risk is that we hunger for “the truth” so badly that we will accept any explanation — no matter how extreme — rather than emptiness. That’s how you end up with flat earth, fake moon landings, lizard people. The secret becomes the truth just because it is not what we were told.
In that way, secrets become religious artifacts. They provide belief. They offer meaning. And when someone is convinced of a hidden truth, nothing that contradicts that belief can change their mind — because evidence, in this cosmology, is part of the lie.
V. Why Governments Can't Stop
So why don’t nations just throw open the books?
Because they can’t.
Not only out of a concern for security, or out of a sense of pride. But because secrets are structural. Once you construct a system around classified information, transparency would now be a threat to the system.
Think of a government in which every decision, every memo, every sliver of intelligence is public. It would paralyze leadership. It would fuel enemies. It would obliterate diplomatic channels. It’s impossible to run a country while narrating every step in real-time.
The most democratic of nations have to have some measure of operational secrecy." But the line is hazy and, once it begins to move, it can be manipulated. When secrecy is employed not to protect the people but to shield the powerful from accountability, it is tyranny in all but name.
That’s why leaks exist. That’s why journalism matters. If it’s not pressure, then secrecy will be the default, not exception.
VI. The Mythology of the Secret
More than a political question, there is something almost mythic about secrets. Notions of secrets that are obscured from the masses predate both government and history. Think about:
The Garden of Eden and the forbidden fruit of knowledge of good and evil
The Holy Grail, hidden to most, desired by many
The Masons, the Illuminati and other secret societies
Curiosity about the Roswell incident and aliens in general
Even the literal patch of desert, Area 51, has become a totem of the modern myth of government secrecy.
These are stories that endure not because we think they are all true literally but because they address something far deeper in us: the desire to believe there is more to the stories than they let us see.
The hidden file. The closed door. The truth behind the curtain.
It gives us something to race around.
VII. Living With the Unknown
The reality is that secrecy is never going anywhere. Neither is curiosity. Our lives are tugged by both.
So the question isn’t really should there be secrets? — it’s how can we live with them?
We can demand oversight. We can support investigative journalism. We can safeguard whistleblowers and push back against propaganda. We can raise children to think for themselves rather than teaching them to passively believe or passively oppose.
And, even more importantly, we can learn to sit with the fact that we’re simply not going to know everything. That some mysteries remain. That doesn't every file get declassified. That power sometimes hides.
Not because we’re fine with it.
Only because the alternative is worse: a world where secrets aren’t the grist of curiosity. A society where we stop asking, period.
Final Note: The Secret Mirror
In the final analysis, secrecy is a mirror. It's informed by what the keeper as well as seeker values.
When governments cover up truths in the name of order, we should inquire: At what cost?
When citizens are chasing secrets in order to reclaim a feeling of empowerment, we have to ask: To what end?
Some secrets are necessary. Others are abuses yet to be revealed. And the most difficult part is knowing who’s who — especially when they both sport the same red stamp.
We may never know all of the answers.
But we must continue to ask.