A votive plaque known as the Ninnion Tablet depicting elements of the Eleusinian Mysteries,
discovered in the sanctuary at Eleusis (mid-4th century BC)

"I pray that ours won't hang around for anything like a hundredth as long."

The modern organization is fundamentally indistinguishable from a cult. It perceives its secrets as its primacy, and self-importantly considers everything it does a proprietary secret. It expects employees as well as visitors to sign the cheesiest of legal documents, the holy NDA [Non Disclosure Agreement], a contract of truly questionable authority threatening severe penalties should the signer even inadvertently spill any beans. Some of these 'agreements' also insist that anything an employee or visitor utters inside automatically becomes the sole property of the proprietor without even a distant mention of compensation for that creation. These are privileged reprobates concerned first with dominion. These questionable contracts are agreements in name only, standing more accurately as coercements, my-way-or-the-highway insistences rarely open for negotiation. If a vendor, contractor, or employee doesn't like the terms, they're perfectly free to lump it. Period.

Later, when asked a straightforward question, a disgruntled ex might legally refuse to answer by claiming their speech stifled by a prior agreement. A witness to a crime won't even have to insist upon refusing to testify to avoid self-incrimination by just insisting on the existence of certain documentation sealing a perverse covenant. And, no, you may not see the contract because the terms of the coercement preclude anyone not party to it seeing the conditions it covers. NDAs are the tools of a now burgeoning criminal class, oligarchs and wannabe scoff-laws, keeping their own counsel. They contain their underlying conspiracies with these questionable coercions, occasionally suing the pants off someone they suspect has whispered these so-called secrets out of turn. It's alarming enough that our 'great' corporations universally employ these abominations. With the elevation of our current incumbent, they're, for the first time outside of our public intelligence community, now universally employed with absolute impunity within our very own government administration; So much for We The Freaking People. It seems that suddenly everything has become a deep, dark secret.

This cloaking device creates the most opaque operational environment imaginable. They deem that not even the list of individuals visiting Our President can be made public, to protect some principle of privacy nobody's ever before imagined. Anything uttered, they insist, when in the company of Our President becomes the proprietary property of some imaginary entity that, as near as I can tell, doesn't even exist. Who has access, anyway, and what presumably nefarious uses do those holding this privileged access put these secrets to? It seems, besides the usual insider trading shenanigans common to corporate secret holders, the sole purpose of withholding this once public information has become to bolster reelection potential under the overwhelming and probably correct presumption that if The Public had access to the truth, we'd likely string up the whispering bastards.

Our Pandemic loves these NDAs, for they prevent even the more pedestrian facts from proliferating. The emanating numbers seem at least previously par-boiled and most certainly seasoned with the monosodium glutamate of positive spin. No fact should ever properly escape from this kangaroo isolation chamber, lest it make our sorry-assed chief executive look worse than he actually is, a purpose which has eroded to become its opposite. When a truth is committed, it's considered a high crime however much of a misdemeanor it might actually be and legal authority's resorted to, implying that the truth amounts to leaked rumor, proof found in the obvious fact that it was uttered by someone who violated their pseudo sacred oath not to disclose what's really going on. Our Justice Department brings suit, usually at considerable expense, the apparent sole purpose being to attempt to transform simple truth into legally questionable rumor. If you wonder what happened to our pandemic response, look no further. Our government manages solely by painstakingly engineered rumor now. Our damned pandemic apparently loves this approach, even if the majority of us don't.

Look, the recipe for the secret sauce was never secret except in name only. Anyone with a jar of mayonnaise and a bottle of cheap ketchup can concoct a perfect replication without even a moment's focused contemplation. The super secret formula for Coke®, reportedly kept under lock and key and shared very narrowly for generations, is no great secret, either, for anyone caring to partake can choose a much cheaper knock-off store brand without ever sensing a difference from the original. In a world running increasingly on hype, the secret is virtually always that there is no underlying secret, just a cultish mystique intended to prolong some dominion. We play these games in lieu of feeling shamed by our tenaciously shameful behavior. We knew what The Pentagon Papers reported before those papers were leaked. Brave journalists had been reporting on the gist of their disclosures for years while experiencing unending harassment from those charged with defending and enforcing Non Disclosures. The secret was already out and the leak just confirmed while discrediting the secret-keepers, a worthy enough goal, I suppose.

We are not better off keeping secrets and secrets always, always, always come out, only amplified by the former attempts to prevent their disclosure. The NDAs themselves take away their real mystique, replacing it with nothing more than a sorry form of opacity. We can hear the noises behind the locked door, and we can well imagine the shenanigans occurring there. We tend to imagine worse than what actually occurs. I could argue that the primary product of NDAs is not secured secrets, but ever greater distrust in the authenticity of their keepers. Heck, we don't even need to wait for their lips to move to know full well that they're lying to us, their only defense that they've previously been coerced into signing a questionable agreement. The Eleusinian Mysteries replayed their secret rituals for two millenniums. I pray that ours won't hang around for anything like a hundredth as long.

©2020 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #WhatNow?, #PureSchmaltz