"everything about you should be known to anyone that wants to know and you should be able to answer, to that anyone's satisfaction, any question about your actions with a reasonable and rational response".
"anyone that wants to know" is often rephrased as "stakeholders". I often think it's worth remembering that Dracula had stake holders too and they didn't do him all that much good.
Is transparency truly a good idea?
I have a packet of chips next to me. I know they're not healthy. Pure fat and salt wrapped around a piece of potato of sub-atomic thickness. Do I really need to know that in every 50g serve there is 150% of my lifetime's allowance of sodium and enough fat to keep most of the population of the Horn of Africa alive for a month? No. Honestly, I don't want to know. It's not going to change my behaviour - I'm still going to eat the things.
I saw an autopsy once. All those squidgy bits packed so tightly in together. It's not pretty. If you've ever witnessed one it should be enough to convince you that seeing what goes on inside a person is not a good thing. Admire his well chiselled features, his high, academic forehead, and his manly biceps. You don't want to see how any of that is made, trust me. Anything south of the mouth and north of the .. and so forth, is best left to the surgeons. Opacity is our good friend in this case. I suspect that the darkness behind the eyes is also best left un-illuminated. Messrs Escher and Burton have nothing on my brain. And I don't think I'm unique. Men walking up inverted staircases and hands that draw each other are dealt with before breakfast. From then on it gets seriously weird. You really want this to be transparent? If you ask why I did something, do you truly think the answer will make sense? I'll tell you something I think you want to hear but I could be doing it because the little puppet figure with the big head fell off the self-sustaining waterfall and wound up stuck in a room full of prime numbers with a bad base of acalculia. For your sake and that of your loved ones, just take my explanations at face value and don't worry about where they came from.
Sometimes I think real business is like that too. I watch the latest scandal involving quasi-government Australian companies selling wheat to dodgy dictators or going through a suspicious amount of petty cash and brown paper bags and I wonder why I needed to know. Our guys are making a profit. Their guys are eating. Provided we're not burning children or funding another bloody zombie apocalypse movie or committing other crimes against humanity, did I need to look through that particular window? A discrete drawing of the blinds might have been better. The world isn't full of nice people and we have to do business with the world. Far better not to know what we had to wash off our hands afterwards.
If you're spending my money or pouring luminescent putrescence into my waterways as you produce your thneeds then I need to know what you're doing and why - here are my fifteen cents and a nail - but sometimes I think that we, as human beings, need to realise that there is a sane, rational and reasonable world that we need to pretend that we live in and then there's the darkness of real existence - chaotic, unpredictable, random, and existing in fractional dimensions. To take the wrong pill and wake up outside our comfortable Matrix might not be such a good idea - there be dragons.
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