I was 12 years old when I caught my first glimpse of politics. My family was headed to the Virgin Islands and I was inspecting the wonders of our ship. One of the stewards informed me that I could walk through the ship’s bar but couldn’t stop for a drink, as I was underage and not privy to such amusements. During one of my walk-throughs I glanced at a TV hanging from the ceiling to see Richard Nixon say he was resigning his presidency.

I asked my dad what had happened to make our president quit. His answer confused me: “He didn’t do anything others haven’t done, he just got caught.” Knowing nothing of politics, I could sense there was an undercurrent to it; all wasn’t as it appeared. Nixon was dealing in a world of secrecy, and got caught in it.

Since then, I’ve kept my eyes open, in case I might see something. I’ve looked around, going so far as even trying to see through my own eyes. Today, I see my dad is gone. And secrecy is alive and well. 

Secrecy, by practical definition, means: something that is not transparent. But what’s wrong with transparency? It’s no secret that any healthy, meaningful relationship is directly proportional to a certain degree of transparency. If it’s good relations we’re after then something’s amiss.

Secrecy also means power or influence over those who don’t know the secrets. So secrecy must be related to power. And, if absolute power corrupts absolutely, then absolute secrecy — by association — can’t be good. Yet, secrecy seems to be the order of the day, across many fronts. And we are left but to wonder … absolutely.

Sure, the sophisticated understand and are resigned to the concept of secrecy as a necessary and natural part of the political world—of the whole world, in fact. They might also insist that any hope for transparency in the modern world is naïve at best.

I propose that this brand of sophistication is illusory—an obsolete, societal algorithm of thinking that will prove to be unsustainable.

Spies are secret, they can’t be recognized as being a spy, so they can work to gather more secrets; the way The Internet gathers data and transmits the information to discrete data centers is secret, and these data centers are heavily guarded, like military installations. To heap secrets upon secrets and guard them with guns cannot help but add confusion.

Terrorists notwithstanding, I doubt John Adams and Thomas Jefferson would be proud of our corporate fascination with internet surveillance. What of The Declaration of Independence? How independent can we declare ourselves to be when our digital lives are so closely monitored?

Then there are military secrets. Taxpayers pay for the care and maintenance of their military but are not privy to what goes on, because it’s a secret. It is hard to keep a secret in the light of day. Secrets are for the cover of darkness. Secrets are for the night.

In 2010, Julian Assange released government secrets to the world. Today he is in jail. I believe that Assange’s intentions — at least at first — were not malicious. All things being equal, I do respect the gesture of making the truth of geopolitics more widely understood. Though, core-dumping things all at once so quickly and abruptly obviously wasn’t best.

Is it so wrong that the people of the world would know something of the world, could talk openly about how it works and how to make it better? If our governments were more transparent there would be fewer misunderstandings, fewer reasons to fight. More conversations are what we need, not more secrets.

The latest literature suggests that, in the face-to-face, real world, most of our communication — if only subconscious — happens through body language: gestures, facial expressions, lineaments, and other incalculable, contextual nuances.

Every day we’re resorting to more and more online communications, communications which are devoid of these essential, analogue cues —and clues.

Most of the inner-workings of The Internet go unseen. Deep fake videos are getting harder to recognize. Other forms of digital communication strip our conversations bare, leaving us with impoverished words to read on a 2D screen and a picture that’s often been modified in some way — a partial message and an image that isn’t real. What level of understanding can be built on this? What sorts of relationships are being engineered through digital social media?

I understand that some things must be kept secret. But where is the line of too much secrecy? To find this line we need open conversations to build good relationships upon which to discuss things; and good relationships are built on understanding, but understanding stands no chance in a world of too many secrets.

Governments of the world are, by default, political, and constantly fighting and maneuvering — for secrets. A glowing transparency of daylight would instill fresh air and new wind into the nature of our conversations.

Then Secretary of State Clinton said Wikileaks is endangering lives by making this secret information public. But what about all of the lives that have been endangered, and lost, over the battle for secrets — war, in other words?

As I’ve been typing these words there’s no telling how many secrets have been hoovered and gathered due to our cyber-wars and legal data collection. To say that one side is guilty and the other not would not be fair. “They aren’t doing anything that others haven’t done.” Everybody does it, because everybody has to, to stay in the game. And the game is about collecting information, collecting secrets.