It’s no secret that staying silent can cause as much harm as telling fibs

We applaud ourselves and others for keeping secrets, even though, when you think about it, every secret is really a lie of sorts. Being a trusted confidante, not blabbing in a world of super-sharing, is a good thing, right?

If secrets are OK but lies are not, how come they are so often linked in our thinking?

Most of us can probably count the big lies we have told on one hand. Those are the lies that wake us up in the middle of the night or stop us in mid-sentence when we recall them. Few and far between.

But how many fingers do we need to count the secrets, big and small, we have held over the years? They’re the ones we promised not to pass on, or the ones we decided we’d keep to ourselves just in case. So many more of those over a lifetime.

And here’s the thing. We applaud ourselves and others for keeping secrets, even though, when you think about it, every secret is really a lie of sorts. Being a trusted confidante, not blabbing in a world of super-sharing, is a good thing, right? Telling a lie, even a fib, is something we try to stamp out of our kids from a young age. But secrets? Well those we privilege from the start with nursery rhymes like: “Can you keep a secret? I don’t suppose you can.”

There you have it – a cultural embedding of the need to hold your tongue even if you end up lying by omission.

So, if secrets are OK but lies are not how come they are so often linked in our thinking? Secrets and Lies, the 1996 movie by Mike Leigh, is all about managing the fallout when a black Londoner discovers her biological mother is white. It’s a popular title, used in a 2014 Network Ten detective series which spawned an American version the following year. Then there’s the memoir written by my former colleague, journalist David Meagher, and published in 2023 in which he revealed the sexual abuse he had suffered as a child and which he had hidden. The title, Secrets and Lies: A story of justice, perseverance and the life that comes after, is another reminder of the healing possible from breaking those cones of ­silence.

If you Google “secrets and lies and philosophy” you will find plenty to debate about how much they overlap. One example from a 2018 essay by James Edwin Mahon in Oxford Academic argues that, while the traditional idea is that keeping secrets is prima facie morally permissible, lying is prima facie morally wrong, – it’s more correct to say that both are morally wrong but lying is worse than keeping secrets, “all things considered”.

So it’s morally messy and there is much to be said for a certain amount of discretion, but some secrets are surely too big to hold and arguably need to be told. Think, for example, of the women who have held secret the paternity of their children. Yes, it’s pragmatic and protective and understandable but it’s still a lie, right? Even if we recognise the damage and heartbreak that truth can cause, there is at least scope for thinking of the longer-term damage that secrets – once revealed – can unleash. It’s not the initial mistake but the ongoing deception that so often is so corrosive. And in a world of DNA testing, the big reveals are – like love – all around us and the secrets are no longer so easy to keep.

Not surprisingly, many of the secrets we are asked to keep have something to do with sex. After all, who really worries these days about revealing that you cheated on your tax or cheated on anything? Who cares if everyone knows you’ve had a boob job or get a regular Botox injection?

When faking it can get you elected president of the United States, there’s no need to keep your implants a secret.

But infidelity? Yep, that’s still a problem no matter how cool we are, and one that society – as well as the individual involved – prefers to keep under wraps. Indeed, you might need your toes as well as your fingers to calculate the times you’ve been recruited to keep those kind of secrets. The other secret that society was keen to keep for a very long time was the sexual and emotional violence within families – surely one of the big fat lies of recent times. Thankfully the damaging silence over such crimes has ended and in the process perhaps has reminded us of the dangers of teaching our kids how to keep a secret.

There’s a school of thought that says we need little white lies to keep the world ticking over. Why tell a friend you’d rather stay home than see a movie with them when you can lie and say you have had Covid-19? I’m not so sure. There’s always the fear you’ll be caught out when the friend arrives with chicken soup and depending on your stress levels, it’s might just be easier to tell the truth.

Breaking or keeping a secret is much more complicated and depends on a stack of factors. But like the philosophers suggest, don’t think you’re on the side of the angels when you stay silent.