The Ubiquity of Secrecy
Professor Edward Luttwak, an American historian, has written an opinion piece for UnHerd about US national guardsman Jack Teixeira’s leak of sensitive documents online, entitled, “The Real Scandal Behind the Pentagon Leak.” Luttwak argues that classification of information in the American government is overwrought and meaningless. Sometimes a document is classified because of a single sentence, “itself of trivial importance,” he writes. It’s an example of what the author calls a “mindless mass production and very wide distribution of supposedly secret and relatively few seriously secret documents.”
But this is only yet another example of a world obsessed with increasingly minute degrees of control. Whether in banking, traffic regulations, or cyber security, every action is examined in insufferable detail for its risk with a singular ‘better safe than sorry attitude’ and few other considerations in place. Digital technology abets this, because this is what it does best. But this is also yet another indication of the manifestation and splendour of left-brain thinking, as described by scholar and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist in his landmark book The Master and His Emissary.
We’ve written much here about how human perception and behaviour are affected by which of the brain’s two hemispherical outlooks we habitually lean upon—as individuals and a culture. Unlike the context-driven right brain, the focus of the left hemisphere is tediously narrow and prefers minuatiae. It will more readily hone-in on the sentence, rather than take in the whole document (never mind the document’s place in the universe). And the left brain’s desire for control defaults to safety. That means one more classification, traffic rule, or security check equals ‘better safe than sorry.’ This is because it only sees that thin slice of the world and, critically, not the larger context in which it is embedded, and where it derives its meaning and relevance.
We’ve become more left-brained as a culture in the West to such an extreme that we are, at times, our own worst enemies.
According to Luttwak, toothpaste purchase is classified as “secret” if used by the US Special Operations Command. On a more plebeian level, a flat tire or minor accident on a motorway in the UK can lead to an hyper-allergic emergency and police services response, resulting in a lane closure and a miles-long misery for thousands of commuters. All due to the overblown reaction to a minor incident.
Left hemisphere dominance breeds such misery because it misevaluates the relevance of an issue, making the minor major, and turning the world effectively upside down; thereby interrupting the crucial flow we need to live fruitful and fulfilled lives.
If we’re to make any progress in rolling back these errors of perception that hamstring our societies, we need to become more literate in the psychological and behavioural drivers of our actions.
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