Discretion and Transparency

The Confession by Giuseppe Molteni, c. 1838

Lately I've been thinking about discretion. It's the strangest of virtues: you're only aware of it when one is indiscrete. Should someone talk of another behind their back, we assume that this someone will cross us, too. There must be a word for this category, where you're only aware of it when it is violated. Trust is like this too, and I guess it's appropriate that trust and discretion tend to be two sides of the same coin.

I hesitate to even classify discretion as a virtue, because to me, a virtue is celebrated. And you can't celebrate things which you lack awareness. It makes me wonder if discretion is in the midst of a downcycle. Our world seems to honor transparency these days. You can pretty much get a free pass for anything as long as you're up front about your intentions.

On the other hand, it can be hard to even demonstrate what discretion looks like. I'm unable to provide examples without being imprudent myself. For as much as I talk about here and elsewhere, there's a locked box of things which are off limits. Yet, I don't go around telling people I will keep something quiet, I just keep it to myself.

I get the sense that most people aren't trustworthy these days. Or, at the very least, the general consensus is that nobody really trusts anyone else. Whether or not they can actually be trusted is something else entirely.

My hypothesis is that it's never been easier to blabber on about anything and everything, even the nonconsequential things. People rush to admit their own secrets, so it seems that they're not practiced in the art of discretion. And, really, do you want to be the first person to give them a chance?

If anything, transparency (the opposite of discretion) has replaced prudence as a cardinal virtue. That's interesting in an age of virtue signalling. It's easy to make a public proclamation of "truth" but impossible to do so with secrets. We value explicitness more than anything, in both literary and pornographic meanings of that word.

So much of today's culture makes sense when viewed through this lens. I'm a proud sex worker. Here's how my heroin addiction helps me be a better person. Five ways my non-monogomous relationship improved my life.

Transparency, as a virtue, has enabled lifestyles of vice, which have historically been pushed to the margins of social life. Not only have people broken the norms, but they are proudly flaunting them now. It's no longer enough to get away with something. You've got to let everyone know you pulled one over on them, whoever that is.

I can't help but wonder what is lost with such nakedness. Innocence, for starters. I don't think you can go back unscathed. Sometimes you hear about people who have been reformed and are much better for their struggles, but I imagine the ratios there aren't favorable. More often people continue spiralling. And maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe those are cautionary tales for the rest of us, and the victims of vice are some kind of modern scapegoating mechanism.

These hedonists don't seem to fully grasp causes and effects. It's not that prospective employers and friends and partners don't want to trust them. It's that the hedonists have previously shown their capacity to put themselves above others...blatant selfishness. So any reasonable person is going to be skeptical of even the most reformed child of vice.

I guess it all comes down to cringes personal responsibility. That's the lame but obvious answer...tried and trued advice passed down for eternity.

But, to play a little bit, I think we can probably meme ourselves into a better spot. I think that Making Commitment Cool Again is a start. One can assume that behind a given commitment are these intangible qualities like discretion. Maybe we could also play our cards a little closer to the vest. You know, intimacy doesn't need to be a speedrun. Good things take time, and remaining playfully reserved could introduce some mystery to life.

We could also just roll our eyes and yawn whenever someone says look at me...watch me flash my private life. Tell them to do some psychoanalysis or maybe create some art that may help them reconcile their troubled psyche. I'm sure there's all kinds of fun stuff in Freud and Jung about the unconscious that might be helpful to them.

At the end of the day, it's clear that we live in an increasingly low-trust world. Trust is foundational for being able to negotiate with friends and foes, so if we can turn that ship around I think we'll find that a lot of other problems become much easier to solve.