Parenting & Family Quote by Sissela Bok

Bok opens with a sly democratic gambit: before secrecy becomes a state weapon or a corporate policy, it is a childhood skill. By calling everyone an "expert", she cuts against the prestige that usually shields secrecy from scrutiny. You do not need clearance to understand the feeling of holding something back, the private thrill of being the only keeper of a fact. The move is strategic: it recruits the reader's own memories as evidence, making secrecy feel intimate before it becomes political.

Her phrasing balances seduction and cost. "Mystery and attraction" frames secrecy as an aesthetic experience, not just a moral dilemma. Then comes the pivot: "power" and "burden" in the same breath. That pairing is the subtext of her broader project as an ethicist: secrecy is not an aberration; it's a technology of human relations. It can carve out agency ("breathing space") in a world that constantly demands access. It can also become a weight, an internal toll that accrues interest the longer the concealment lasts.

Context matters: Bok wrote in an era shaped by post-Watergate suspicion, Cold War classification, and rising institutional opacity, when the rhetoric of "national security" was often used to end arguments rather than win them. By beginning at "earliest childhood", she implies that our comfort with secrecy is precisely what makes us vulnerable to its abuse. The quote quietly warns: because secrecy can protect, it can also justify itself. The ethical task is to keep that double nature in view, resisting both naive transparency worship and the lazy romance of the hidden.