On Transparency and Opacity

Every day, people face decisions, large and small. These decisions fall along a spectrum of transparency. Transparency consists of safety and accountability, while opacity is composed of liberty, privacy, and power. If transparency increases, then opacity decreases, and vice versa. Trusting someone allows them to remain opaque, while distrusting someone requires that they become more transparent. The ideas of transparency and opacity can explain seemingly unrelated topics such as Secret Service, sexual harassment, farts, and science.

            The Secret Service protects the President of the United States. They are armed and would take a bullet for the President. The President is physically safe, and the Secret Service is accountable for preventing anyone from harming the President, so transparency has increased. Opacity has decreased, because to protect the President, the Secret Service must know where the President is constantly, so the President has little privacy. The Secret Service doesn’t allow the President to leave the White House without permission, so the President has little liberty to move. The President’s personal power to travel has decreased. If the Secret Service trusted everyone, then the President and the public could be more opaque, but less safe and accountable.

            In sexual harassment, one person makes unwanted sexual behavior to another person. Before the recent wave of accusations, harassment occurred because the commenter imagines that people will not know that the comments have been made. Recently, the targets of harassment have described these experiences publicly. In the process, they are holding the commenters accountable for their behavior, and increasing safety, since future commenters will now know that they will be held accountable. The opacity of the commenters decreased, as they are no longer at liberty to make those comments. Their privacy has decreased, as people have described their behavior, and so their power has decreased. The lack of trust between women and men increases transparency, since opaque situations are avoided.

            On a lighter note, let’s consider farting. If someone farts silently, then they maintain privacy about the fact that they have farted. No one else knows who farted, so the farter cannot be held accountable. The world is less safe from farts. If someone farts audibly, then that person can be held accountable, and the world is safer from farts. The farter doesn’t have the liberty to fart, they couldn’t maintain privacy about the fact that they farted, and they no longer have the power to fart.

            Science is the process of studying a phenomenon. To study a phenomenon, it must be observed, or data gathered. In other words, the phenomenon’s privacy must decrease. Then the phenomenon has less liberty and power, as we know how it behaves, and its effects can be decreased or increased. For example, now that smoking is known to cause lung cancer, we can increase or decrease its occurrence by changing the number of people smoking. If I trust that a variable isn’t affecting the phenomenon of interest, then I do not investigate it, and it remains unresearched and opaque.

            Virtue is behaving transparently even when opaque. The virtuous person has nothing to hide, and behaves transparently even when he or she has opacity.

            Generally, when either transparency or opacity increases, the other decreases. However, if a person does not do anything embarrassing, even fart, then they can have safety, accountability, liberty, privacy, and power. By itself, power is not always zero-sum. Someone’s ability to do something does not always decrease another person’s ability to do the same thing. However, transparency and opacity are always inversely related. Opacity is not necessarily unethical, but only opaque people can be unethical without consequence.