In any culture, through any language, I don’t think a single child has managed to escape the sentiment in a sing-song sort of voice, pronounced with a universal glee by little peers so pleased with the artifice of wisdom that either their cheeks hurt from smiling, or their toes hurt from curling, or both. It’s the kind of neener-neener glee that somehow, despite the strokes of time, experience, and the supposed maturity that comes with these things, seems to stick with people as they age, possibly like visceral fat. Or if you prefer, the particular comforting taste of grandmother’s cookie recipe (though I’m not convinced the two aren’t connected).
“I-know-something-you-don’t know,” so the taunt goes, although it mutates in time to take on any number of cheap and shiny disguises, and these manage to fool a fair amount of people, sometimes on a cyclical track that makes the grind of nine-to-five work look like nothing special. From its overt beginnings on the school grounds, the notion moves to media, and trickles back into the social floatsam when the bright lights of advertising lose a bulb or two. You’ll recognize it easily should you come across the sales pages, squeeze pages, landing pages, bonus pages, or any of the pages possibly attributable to internet marketing, that modern translation of the late-night infomercial the production of which has unfortunately been made accessible to just about anything with an ISP and a drool bucket.
Among the great “secrets” of this “secret” “methodology” is to, well, insist that you know the secret. To a problem that people have, whether it’s a lack of cash, a lack of libido, an excess of appetite, an attachment to some substance, or whatever else tends to stubbornly ail the population at large as it steadfastly ignores its ultimate issue of stagnant, bored defeatism. Promise people that you’ve found the answer and are holding it at arm’s reach, just past the point of payment, and they will get their wallets out, so the idea goes. And it works.
Far from being limited to the consumer magic of the internet, however, the fabrication of the mysterious need not be sought much father than a fetid fast food joint or sauce bottle. Now, I can understand why fast food places would want to keep their constituents mysterious. I’m not so sure why sauces get the same treatment, but maybe people assume they have to give you something extra if you’re buying a product without solids in it. I, for one, could go for a free sauce surprise, sorta like the old Cracker Jacks gimmick, with a toy soldier or a little pea-shooter in the Bearnaise. Anyway, the ages-old allure of the “secret ingredient” looms in many an overpriced mouthful, sating people’s desire to be let in, if only a little, on what the other kids know, if not sating their actual hunger.
People concoct more than over-the-counter items and re-hashed words of advice to masquerade as secrets, though. Entire experiences, statuses, and relationships have been used to perpetuate the separation of people in those parts of life where nature didn’t see fit to make the distinction itself. From tight-lipped initiates in the Eleusinian Mysteries to military people fond of citing “clearance,” from the creation of a complicated handshake to the small dictionary of exotic yet paradoxically uninspired nouns of Scientology, we march on, making up secret shit, in flavors only slightly removed from the simple taste of that old childhood taunt.
Yet the self is somehow not included in this popular system of secrets. The idea that someone might know exactly who they are, but is keeping it from you (neener neener!) sounds preposterous. In general, people seem to cling to one of two totems when it comes to the mystery of the self. Either they have no idea about their own identity, and are only too happy to subscribe to lovesong lyrics proposing that a partner knows them better than they know their own self, or else they spend the majority of their free time coming up with contrived ways to “express” themselves to others.
You would think that if there was one great secret truly worth knowing, and truly worth rubbing in the faces of the other kids, it’d be the mystery of your own identity, the essence of who you are. Isn’t that, after all, a thing more powerful than a secret program to quit smoking, seeing as it’s you who carries it out? Isn’t that, after all, more interesting than a spice you’ll savor once or twice and pass through this very self of yours? And isn’t it more valuable than the knowledge of another being, supreme or not, whom you would worship with this self?
I say it is. And that isn’t just some secret I was told.
I Know Something You Don’t Know
In any culture, through any language, I don’t think a single child has managed to escape the sentiment in a sing-song sort of voice, pronounced with a universal glee by little peers so pleased with the artifice of wisdom that either their cheeks hurt from smiling, or their toes hurt from curling, or both. It’s the kind of neener-neener glee that somehow, despite the strokes of time, experience, and the supposed maturity that comes with these things, seems to stick with people as they age, possibly like visceral fat. Or if you prefer, the particular comforting taste of grandmother’s cookie recipe (though I’m not convinced the two aren’t connected).
“I-know-something-you-don’t know,” so the taunt goes, although it mutates in time to take on any number of cheap and shiny disguises, and these manage to fool a fair amount of people, sometimes on a cyclical track that makes the grind of nine-to-five work look like nothing special. From its overt beginnings on the school grounds, the notion moves to media, and trickles back into the social floatsam when the bright lights of advertising lose a bulb or two. You’ll recognize it easily should you come across the sales pages, squeeze pages, landing pages, bonus pages, or any of the pages possibly attributable to internet marketing, that modern translation of the late-night infomercial the production of which has unfortunately been made accessible to just about anything with an ISP and a drool bucket.
Among the great “secrets” of this “secret” “methodology” is to, well, insist that you know the secret. To a problem that people have, whether it’s a lack of cash, a lack of libido, an excess of appetite, an attachment to some substance, or whatever else tends to stubbornly ail the population at large as it steadfastly ignores its ultimate issue of stagnant, bored defeatism. Promise people that you’ve found the answer and are holding it at arm’s reach, just past the point of payment, and they will get their wallets out, so the idea goes. And it works.
Far from being limited to the consumer magic of the internet, however, the fabrication of the mysterious need not be sought much father than a fetid fast food joint or sauce bottle. Now, I can understand why fast food places would want to keep their constituents mysterious. I’m not so sure why sauces get the same treatment, but maybe people assume they have to give you something extra if you’re buying a product without solids in it. I, for one, could go for a free sauce surprise, sorta like the old Cracker Jacks gimmick, with a toy soldier or a little pea-shooter in the Bearnaise. Anyway, the ages-old allure of the “secret ingredient” looms in many an overpriced mouthful, sating people’s desire to be let in, if only a little, on what the other kids know, if not sating their actual hunger.
People concoct more than over-the-counter items and re-hashed words of advice to masquerade as secrets, though. Entire experiences, statuses, and relationships have been used to perpetuate the separation of people in those parts of life where nature didn’t see fit to make the distinction itself. From tight-lipped initiates in the Eleusinian Mysteries to military people fond of citing “clearance,” from the creation of a complicated handshake to the small dictionary of exotic yet paradoxically uninspired nouns of Scientology, we march on, making up secret shit, in flavors only slightly removed from the simple taste of that old childhood taunt.
Yet the self is somehow not included in this popular system of secrets. The idea that someone might know exactly who they are, but is keeping it from you (neener neener!) sounds preposterous. In general, people seem to cling to one of two totems when it comes to the mystery of the self. Either they have no idea about their own identity, and are only too happy to subscribe to lovesong lyrics proposing that a partner knows them better than they know their own self, or else they spend the majority of their free time coming up with contrived ways to “express” themselves to others.
You would think that if there was one great secret truly worth knowing, and truly worth rubbing in the faces of the other kids, it’d be the mystery of your own identity, the essence of who you are. Isn’t that, after all, a thing more powerful than a secret program to quit smoking, seeing as it’s you who carries it out? Isn’t that, after all, more interesting than a spice you’ll savor once or twice and pass through this very self of yours? And isn’t it more valuable than the knowledge of another being, supreme or not, whom you would worship with this self?
I say it is. And that isn’t just some secret I was told.