On the Difference Between Privacy and Secrecy

The two words are used as though they name the same thing, and the confusion is convenient for almost everybody. A man who is asked a direct question and does not wish to answer it will say that the matter is private. Sometimes it is. Sometimes he means that he would prefer you to continue believing something untrue.

Privacy is the right to an interior: to thoughts not yet fit for speech, to grief in its early and undignified stages, to the ordinary shabbiness of being a person. A community that does not protect this will produce members who are performing at all hours, and performance is exhausting in a way that eventually turns into resentment.

Secrecy is different in kind. Secrecy is not the absence of disclosure but the presence of an intention: that another person should hold a picture of the world which you know to be false, and which serves you.

A house may keep records without keeping secrets. Whether it does so is not a matter of policy but of temperament, and temperament must be examined more often than policy.

The practical test I have used for thirty years is this. Ask whether the person from whom the thing is withheld would, on learning it, feel that they had been treated well. Not whether they would agree. Whether they would feel treated well. A private matter passes this test easily. A secret rarely does.

I raise this because institutions, including ours, drift^[1]. They begin by protecting the interior lives of their members and end by protecting themselves, and the vocabulary does not change during the drift. The same word covers both stages. That is precisely what makes it useful, and precisely what makes it dangerous.

I have made my own view known to the stewardship on several occasions^[2] and it has not prevailed. I record it here so that it is at least on the shelf.