Secret chamber guilt

The definition supplies its own derivation, which is unusual and worth following. The law of endoreality dictates that the endo-ideal may never be assigned guilt. An accusation against an endo-ideal therefore assigns guilt where the law forbids it, which makes the accuser the one who has broken the law. Nothing about the truth of the accusation enters into this, since the offence is the assignment rather than the falsity, and a true accusation breaks the law more effectively than a false one. That is why discovery is depicted as more grievous than the original act, and why the guilt, shame and punishment pass to the accuser. The forbidden chamber is the construction and secret chamber guilt is the operation it supports, one concealing the guilt of the powerful and the other punishing whoever finds it. Marsh points out that under industrial or state endo-idealism this is often enforced by law, which is where the pattern becomes visible in secrecy statutes and in charges such as lese majeste, libel, false accusation, perversion of justice and violation of secrecy. Her wider point is that the mechanism is old and continuous, since the punishment of curiosity runs from Pandora and Psyche through to the present, and gaslighting is the same reversal performed between individuals, where a rightful accusation is answered with a counter accusation of madness.

Legal scholarship on official secrecy documents the asymmetry, with whistleblower prosecutions frequently succeeding where prosecutions of the conduct disclosed do not, and the state secrets privilege foreclosing cases before their merits. DARVO, Jennifer Freyd's term for deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender, names the interpersonal version precisely and has empirical support in studies of abuse disclosure. Institutional betrayal research covers organizations punishing those who report harm. Marsh's contribution is the derivation, since deriving the reversal from a rule about who may be assigned guilt accounts for why it appears at every scale from a family to a state rather than requiring separate accounts.