How Do You Keep a Scandalous Secret?
One thing about teaching community college history is that you wind up hearing quite a few conspiracy theories — some true, some mythical, some indeterminate.
When the subject of conspiracy comes up in my classes, one thing I sometimes say is that there are three basic ways to keep a scandalous secret a secret. First, you can make sure that very few people know it. Second, you can let a lot of people know it, but make sure they’re committed to keeping quiet. And third, you can let a lot of people know it, but set things up so that they don’t consider the secret scandalous.
The first of these three is the safest, of course. Someone who doesn’t know your secret can’t betray it. But it’s often hard to get a really good conspiracy going with a really small group of conspirators. This is a big reason that I’ve concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald probably acted alone — all of the posited alternative theories I’ve seen that account for all the circumstances of the assassination attempt require conspiracies so broad as to be likely unsustainable. Big secrets are hard to keep secret when lots of people know them.
Which brings us to the third, often neglected, way of maintaining a secret — don’t treat it as a big deal. The Tuskeegee syphilis experiments went on for four decades with an ever-growing list of practitioners, bureaucrats,
When the subject of conspiracy comes up in my classes, one thing I sometimes say is that there are three basic ways to keep a scandalous secret a secret. First, you can make sure that very few people know it. Second, you can let a lot of people know it, but make sure they’re committed to keeping quiet. And third, you can let a lot of people know it, but set things up so that they don’t consider the secret scandalous.
The first of these three is the safest, of course. Someone who doesn’t know your secret can’t betray it. But it’s often hard to get a really good conspiracy going with a really small group of conspirators. This is a big reason that I’ve concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald probably acted alone — all of the posited alternative theories I’ve seen that account for all the circumstances of the assassination attempt require conspiracies so broad as to be likely unsustainable. Big secrets are hard to keep secret when lots of people know them.
Which brings us to the third, often neglected, way of maintaining a secret — don’t treat it as a big deal. The Tuskeegee syphilis experiments went on for four decades with an ever-growing list of practitioners, bureaucrats,
