Too Many Secrets

There is a glut of organizations in the world of fiction whose sole purpose is to keep secret the strange, bizarre and unearthly things that inhabit the world. The thing is, it gets to the point where there are so many people in these organizations and so many of them that it almost seems like what’s the point? No point in keeping a secret if everyone knows it.

Now Torchwood makes a bit of sense. It’s a small team (though when it was first introduced it was a large organization) of only about five people, with their operations based in the one place they can do the most good. However, while they are supposed to be a secret organization, everyone seems to know about them. The police are constantly holding up traffic or roping off areas waiting for Torchwood to show up. It’s not hard to figure out this is a shady organization if every single time a strange case occurs around Cardiff, this one group is called in. And the truly mysterious thing is that in the first episode they tried to keep themselves hidden from Gwen (the character through whom the audience is introduced to the team). They even go so far as to erase her memory only to flat out introduce themselves to her later in the episode. So while Torchwood is designed to be able to keep secrets well, they’re really bad at it.

The real organization that baffles me on how they can keep secrets are the Men in Black. This is a huge government agency with supposedly hundreds of members. At the least they have twenty-six members (each member being assigned a letter of the alphabet). When you have a large government agency, you have bureaucracy. Torchwood can work under the radar but a group like MIB must leave a paper trail. While the movies suggest they have all manner of alien technologies to help them avoid detection, they can’t completely erase their fingerprints on everything. Even the movies acknowledge that they have been discovered by the press, although that press is usually the supermarket tabloids. Plus how do these super secret agents make doctors appointments. Do the MIB have special MIB doctors they go to? It’s hard to fill out an insurance form if your only identifying feature is a letter.

One of my favorite secret organizations never actually had a name.  Which just makes them that much more amazing since they devolve this secret malevolent organization into the realm of just being office workers. I am of course referring to the evil technicians in the movie Cabin in the Woods. While not really a secret society like Torchwood or MIB, since they are not really keeping the secrets of the world hidden from the general public, these evil technicians are apparently the secret architects behind every single horror movie plot ever. Using planted agents and a variety of sophisticated technology, they orchestrate the plot to any number of horror flicks, insuring that the correct mixture of victims die to fulfill an ancient ritual.

Secret organizations aren’t just in the realm of fiction. The Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Knights Templar, and many other groups are believed by many to be real groups and to secretly control the fate of every man woman and child throughout the world. Of course there is an obvious logic problem when one looks at the state of these private men’s clubs, which is in truth all they are. Every secret society started out as just a group for like minded individuals to meet and gather and they have continued as such. Far from being the masters of the universe, they are simply excuses to get away from the wife for a while.

The simple truth is, secret societies into today’s society would be impossible to maintain. In a world with Twitter, Facebook and any number of other ways to contact complete strangers, a secret is spread at the speed of bandwidth. And to be honest, most humans are gossipy to begin with. We can’t help but let others know how much we know. The urge to brag is too strong. If there really was a worldwide conspiracy there would be people desperate to let their friends and family know they are a part of it.