78. Hide and Seek

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September 2014. Twenty-something writer Lydia Lawrence is making her way through the glass towers and historic buildings of San Francisco's financial dispatch. She's clutching a mysterious white card, an invitation to a place she knows nothing about. I'm trying very hard to look as normal as I possibly can. I'm like, I am definitely not on some kind of weird secret spy mission. Ha ha ha ha. When she arrives at the address the two grey doors marking her destination are inconspicuous.

There was a card reader next to the doors, but So I put my card and the doors opened. As Lydia slips inside, she parts a black and steps into a narrow entryway. Immediately she feels eyes on her. There was like a little chandelier at the top of the entryway and then there was a camera that was obviously watching me. And then there was like a slide going down into darkness. And there were these two big red lights on each side of the slide, and the lights were sort of pulsing.

Lydia stands there, puzzled, understandably. She's not even sure why she's here. And now she needs to go down a slide? Every signal that I'm seeing in this room is telling me like, go down the slide, go down the slide. So I go down the slide. Ha ha ha. And just like that, Lydia is swallowed into a hidden world. One that exists only in whispers and shadows. She's being pulled into a secret society. I really had no idea what I was walking into at all.

I'm Matthew Side, and welcome to Sideways, my show about the ideas that shape our lives with stories of seeing the world. When we think of secret societies, the images come thick and fast, hooded figures, cryptic handshakes, dark rituals. We might be wary of them, but we're also fascinated by them. So today in a world obsessed with transparency, we ask, what is it that keeps drawing us in from the secret treehouse clubs of our childhoods to the carefully guarded mysteries of exclusive lodges?

On this summer's day in twenty fourteen, Lydia Lawrenceon descends at speed into the underbelly of a nondescript San Francisco office building. Slipping down an adult-sized slide stirs feelings which remind her of childhood, in more ways than one. When I was a little girl, I tried to start a secret society in my closet in my house. I called it the Closet Club and I invited a few of my friends, but I think they were less excited about it than I was.

Lydia's journey to this strange building begins a few weeks earlier. She and her friend Justin are having lunch at a roadside restaurant in the remote middle of Nevada. They've already been driving for several hours on their way to Burning Man, a sprawling art and music festival in the desert. We're sitting there and he's like, Can you keep a secret? Well, I think so.

And then he gave me this look, you know, like he raises his eyebrows a little bit and I'm like, Of course I can keep a secret. And then he hands me this card. Lydia holds up the white plastic card. It looks rather like a credit card with a line of zeros along the bottom. Justin passed it to her in a black slipcase, which carries a quiet proposition, written in small gold letters. You have received an invitation to visit the San Francisco House of the Latitude. I'm like, Justin, what is this?

There's also a web address on the card, but it offers no details, just a prompt to book an appointment. For the rest of the trip I'm asking him all these questions, but he just doesn't answer anything. He's like, You're gonna figure it out. So here we are, a few weeks later. After a leap of faith, Lydia emerges from the bottom of the slide.

The room was totally silent, and above the window there was this neon sign that said Shh and there are three doors in this room. I went through the unlocked door. And that led into like a dark tunnel that I had to crawl through. The next room she enters is a tiny library. The shelves are lined with identical books. Lydia picks up one at random and opens it on a lectern in front of her. And suddenly the pages lit up, and I heard a woman's voice begin to speak.

There was an island, and at its center was a village, and on its shore there was a port. And as she's speaking, her words draw themselves in calligraphy on the page. They had their ways passed down for generations. The voice goes on, telling a story about a group of people exploring hidden truths and challenging the ordinary. Lydia was being inducted to the Fable, the symbolic manifesto of the Secretive Latitude Society, written and narrated by members Uriah Findlay and Kat Meeler.

A group of people of like mind and heart is still showing the way through the tunnel. to this very So I watch the entire fable and a voice whispers in the library, Lydia, you need to move on. So she leaves the building and goes back into what you might call the real world. And she's following a trail of cryptic clues hidden in plain sight.

Around San Francisco. The adventure leads us to an arcade a few blocks away from where we started, where Lydia finds herself slipping coins into a retro video game machine. The games would be like interrupted by the staticky vision of this kind of alien being that called itself Krass the Anomaly, and Kras the Anomaly gave you a message, and that was the end of the mission.

This message was the password to enter the Latitude Society's online forums, where all the members would meet and organise the life of the secret society. Lydia was in. I was just like, obviously whoever is doing this is awesome. At the time Lydia was formally inducted, the Latitude Society was pretty new, it'd only been operating for a few months, which might sound surprising, because we generally hear about centuries old orders, like the Freemasons.

Yet secret societies are not relics of the past. You might have heard of the Bilderberg Group, created in the 1950s, or the Order of the Third Bird, founded in the early 2000s. New societies are still quietly sprouting all around the world, because secrecy has not lost its allure.

I have to confess to something, I am not a member of any secret society. I kind of subscribe to the view of Groucho Marx, who said I refuse to join any club that would take me as a member. But having said that, I do feel the draw of the combination of mystery, exclusivity, and stealth, I remember the first time going through the forbidding door of the famous Groucho Club in Soho. It's named ironically after Groucho Mark.

I was in my twenties, and this was the place for media types. And I was like, I'm in, I've arrived. Secret societies are an expression of human needs and desires. So as long as those needs and desires exist, they will find a way to manifest themselves. Rick Spence is a historian from the University of Idaho. He spent decades studying secret societies. His own family background probably influenced his choice of research. On one side of my family were all Freemasons and Eastern Star and Elks.

I remember my grandmother once pointing up at the sign of the Elks Club. It says BPOE, which stands for Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. But she goes, you know what that really stands for? And I go, I don't know, Grandma. She goes, best people on earth. So that was a joke, but I think to me that was an example of how you think that you're special.

This childhood memory touches on attention that German sociologist Georg Simmel explored over a century ago. He was one of the first to analyze the mechanisms of secret societies. and he saw them not just as power-hungry, conspiratorial groups, but as tightly knit circles that provide members with a sense of belonging, exclusivity, and identity.

One of the things that the sense of being exclusive and special can do is to magnify individual and group ego. Let's pick on the Freemasons, because they're out there and they're obvious. Freemasonry was never a secret society of the poor. It appealed to people generally who had some degree of wealth and education already. You're now creating a selective elite within the elite. That's only going to increase their sense of self importance, of specialness, of exclusiveness, of entitlement.

Some of the power of secret societies lies in their selectiveness, and this has often made them discriminatory against minorities and women. Of course, the act of choosing members is by nature exclusionary. Yet for those who are chosen, it rarely feels like others are being shut out. It feels like being invited in. Not because others weren't worthy, but because you, yes, you truly were. It's part of what makes secret societies so intoxicating.

But there is, and I'm sure you've noticed, a screaming paradox. Some of the most famous secret societies aren't secret at all. Yes, you just heard me say famous secret societies. It's an oxymoron. We do know about the existence of the Masons and others. Some groups even have websites openly sharing their activities. It's not their existence that is hidden. It's what goes on within it.

If you were to go in and sort of look at a Masonic initiation or most initiations, what you would see is people apparently walking around doing silly, incomprehensible things. The strange rituals, elaborate initiations, cryptic symbols, Georg Simmel believed that these practices are crucial to turn abstract ideas into something felt and lived. The power isn't so much in the mystery of the practices, but the act of doing them together.

If you think of the Bohemian Club, they have, you know, various elaborate rituals, the cremation of care is one of them, and yes, it's a mock human sacrifice. Everybody dresses up in robes and you've got a whole orchestra and you got a giant forty-foot owl that talks. Looking at it from the outside, it looks silly, but it has real meaning to the people who are part of it.

There's something about the rituals of secret societies that recall a time when secrecy was more about the performance than the secret itself. That time is childhood. When you think about the secrets of childhood, it's not so much about the secret itself as sharing it with somebody else. Me and my best friend Mark growing up had a special place in the woods near the lake where we lived, where we'd meet to talk and conspire. We called it the moon. I have no idea why.

But I do remember the thrill we'd both get from saying to each other, Sh we meet at the moon after school. No one else had a clue what we were talking about, but it was our little secret. Of course, when it's powerful grown men, and it is often men, recreating their own version of Enid Blyton's Secret Seven, secrecy can feel less charming and potentially more concerning.

The influence of secret societies today is hard to deny, especially when you consider how the Favour Bank quietly operates within them. But not all secret groups are about power or control. Lydia Lawrence knew that becoming a member of The Latitude could enable connection in the city's creative community. But the draw wasn't just about influence. The Latitude Society generated a lot of buzz. There were a lot of people who were trying to find it.

By 2015, it was the Talk of San Francisco. It had been founded just a year earlier by game designer and visual artist Jeff Hull. The Society's purpose was to craft experiences to allow its members to live their lives more creatively, blending performance art, rituals, and game mechanics. At its peak, the society counted between twelve hundred and two thousand members. It really felt like I was chosen. It felt like I had joined some kind of weird elite.

The members of the latitude, who often referred to themselves and each other as anomalies, primarily met online to organise activities through secret forums. The main in-person events resembled Lydia's induction, full of puzzles and games. But some within the group devised their own mischievous ways to connect with one another. One of the members was an artist and he would do illustrations for some of the local government stuff.

And he would put latitude symbols in these random public transit ads. No one ever figured this out except for other society members, actually. Lydia embraced that playfulness from the get-go, as well as the art of hiding in plain sight. The marketplace on the website sold these t-shirts that said absolute discretion and had the latitude symbol. And I'm like, wait, what happens if I buy this t-shirt with the slogan of my secret society and just wear it around?

And at one point I went to lunch with like another local artist and he was like, Oh, absolute discretion. Are you an anomaly? And I was like, Oh my god. Yes. Lydia loved it. She'd only just recently moved to San Francisco, and now this powerful sense of belonging was exactly what she had been missing. As a writer herself, she had wanted to connect with the city's artsy side, and in latitude she had found her community.

They just told us to invite people of like mind and heart. I felt like kind of adding my own stamp or treating the invitation with gravitas. Like I'm inviting you, and I thought about inviting you, and this is like a special moment for us, you know. I'd sneak onto this mountaintop in the middle of the night. And then I would have like San Francisco spread out below us while I like gave them the card. What she didn't know was that the latitude's days were quietly running out.

Permit me to offer another confession. I think my wariness of secret societies is only partly about that Groucho Marx line from earlier. I think it's also that I've often felt as somebody on the outside looking in.

I remember when I was at Oxford University, realizing in the third year that some of the other students, particularly frankly from the famous public schools, have been invited to join prestigious societies and had been involved in elaborate initiation ceremonies that have frankly completely passed me by. And so perhaps in a sense it's natural for me to meet secrecy with a measure of suspicion. But here's another thing.

Listening to Lydia's experience, it's so easy to understand the pull of being part of a secret puzzle. That would spark excitement, I think, in almost any of us. All right, all right. Let's go, gentlemen. I hereby reconvene the Dead Poets Society. The brilliant nineteen eighty-nine film Dead Poet Society, directed by Peter Weir, starring Robin Williams and Ethan Hawke, and it's about a group of schoolboys.

Who sneak out at night to read poetry in a cave in the woods, escaping the rules and expectations of their elite boarding school. I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow. To me, what this example shows about secret societies, even if it is rather romanticized, is that well, first, they're not necessarily plotting to take over the world.

Dead Poet Society shows how secret groups can create space for ideas and emotions that don't always fit within the structures of everyday life, much like what the latitude was trying to do for its members. Second, these groups don't need to be exclusive clubs for billionaires or powerful elites. They can exist anywhere, and often do. In fact, the chances are you might already be a part of one.

Mm. I became interested in secrecy because we live in a culture of transparency where secrets are seen solely as dangerous. and negative and I thought they probably had a more complicated function for the individual and for society. Tiffany Jenkins is a cultural historian and author of the recent book Strangers and Intimates The Rise and Fall of Private Life. In it she examines how privacy has been shaped by authority and public opinion in this modern era.

There's this strange notion that people should have no inner secret separate life from everybody else. Basically, if you've got something to hide, you shouldn't be doing it. And I think that reflects a tremendous distrust actually of people. We live in a fascinating age where privacy is unquestionably on the retreat. We're under pressure to share every moment of our lives on social media, but also to express ourselves more openly.

And to be fair, these expectations often come from a good place. But Dr. Jenkins reminds us of the wisdom that we shouldn't live in glass boxes where everyone can see everything about us. I think it's important that secrecy is seen as essential, necessary. If we didn't have it we would have no autonomy, no intimacy, no protection, really.

Every single change, I think, in society and in your own life has begun with a secret and then sharing that secret from one to two and beyond. You know, if you hold a secret, you're having a conversation with yourself about that secret. It's a function that allows self reflection. And then of course it is a place for intimacy.

I think there's something incredibly powerful in this the idea that not everything about us is meant to be visible. Some of the most profound parts of our identity only exist because no one else can see them. And perhaps this nudges us to think beyond the individual, into a broader space, where secrecy can become the context for deeper connections with other people. I mean I think of the in-jokes that only you and your siblings get.

The songs you play with your two best friends before a night out, that look you exchange with a partner across a crowded room. The small secret things that turn a group into a world. Secrecy happens in the personal sphere organically. And it's always very odd to other people when, you know, you're sitting around with somebody else's family and suddenly they burst into laughter about something that seems completely innocuous and meaningless, but for them has meaning.

For me, it was having cinnamon and sugar toast in the morning for a special occasion with my dad. And, you know, there was these pieces of toast slathered in butter, piled high with sugar and cinnamon, and they were delicious. And if I had one now it's disgusting, of course,'cause that's the way it goes. But I still have that amazing memory. Those things that kind of fall upon every family end up being the most profound.

I totally relate to this. Me and Kathy, my wife, have a litany of phrases and looks that capture what you might call a shared tapestry of secrets that confer a certain type of meaning. The place that smells of America. Only my wife would get the significance of this. In fact, that's not quite true, because when I was scripting this,

I mentioned it to my wife, and my son was in the room. And so he said, Where is the place that smells of America? And so now he has been inducted into our secret society, and it was amazing to watch his facial expression. As he would say this again and again throughout the course of the day. Privacy, even secrecy, can foster moments where we weave the invisible threads that bind us together.

So perhaps this is where some of the most powerful secret societies lie. They might not be cloaked in mystery or grand symbols, but in cinnamon toasts and the smell of America. These carefully tended sanctuaries shouldn't be taken for granted. They themselves need to be protected and held with care.

Because there's always a risk that over time something in the atmosphere begins to shift, subtly at first, then unmistakably, and for the latitude society that shift would mark the beginning of the end. I was at work. And Justin, who had originally invited me, was called me and Justin is like, I just heard they're shutting it down.

It's the twenty eighth of september twenty fifteen, a full year after Justin invited Lydia, and recently Lydia had started to feel that among the leaders of the group, something had changed. It's like when someone breaks up with you or something, but you know that it's coming. Jeff Hull, the founder of The Latitude, had been the creative and financial force behind the San Francisco-based secret society.

In 2015 it became clear to Jeff that additional funding would be necessary to keep the project going. He somehow wanted to make it sustainable from the members. So he started charging membership fees after we had joined, I think it was like two hundred forty dollars a month. That moment really pushed kind of a wave of anxiety and confusion and is this for people of like mind and heart or is this just for rich people?

Seeking additional funding for a creative project like Latitude isn't inherently wrong, and there's no suggestion of wrongdoing by Hull or Latitude more generally. But over time, the club began to feel more like a startup. They had a slide deck and they made this whole case for the Latitude Society as like an alternate reality game. They were like, we have this really passionate user base and like they'll buy merchandise and they'll pay for exp I mean, all of it was true.

What had begun as a community-led group seemed to be evolving into more of a venture-backed brand. But not for long. In the last days of September 2015, the latitude closed down abruptly. Jeff had kind of a vision he wanted the world to hear more and more about the Latitude Society, even if they couldn't join. There was sort of this like game of concealment and revelation that he was playing. He wanted to be known and also not known.

Staying hidden to keep the magic alive, but just visible enough to be able to survive. That was the tension that eventually broke the Latitude Society. And it's that familiar pull between integrity and reality, like those hidden cocktail bars that rely on word of mouth. If too many people know, the mystery fades. But if no one knows, it vanishes altogether. And here I think we go back to childhood. It's that same push and pull we all felt as kids playing hide and seek.

The game was never about staying hidden, it was about the thrill and trepidation that someone would find us. The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott said, it's a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found. He was writing about kids, how they need a private inner world, but also the reassurance of being noticed. And I genuinely think that this feeling never disappears.

Both children and adults share this pull to form secret clubs or societies. And I think it's generally not because they're really trying to hide something, but because we long for something worth hiding. And maybe that's what Lydia was drawn to. Not just the mystery of latitude, but the sense that behind all the ritual encode there was something real. Something worth belonging to. That project was frivolous. perhaps silly in some ways, but it was extraordinary.

In the end, when we speak about secret societies, perhaps the secret matters less than the society. It's about the people with whom we choose to build meaning. Thanks to the producer of this episode, Julian Managera Patton, the editor is Hannah Marshall. Engineering and Sound Design by Mark Pittam and our theme tune is by Yuana Shilaru. Sideways is produced by Novel for BBC Radio 4. Two months ago I was just an ordinary mum. From BBC Radio 4, as part of Limelight, This is Mother Cover.

Our system has identified you as a candidate for a position. See this woman here in the photo. She attends a mother and baby group at the By the way, Liz. dangerous? Gwen, what are you doing? No. Listen to the whole series right now. Fast. on BBC Sounds. What on earth is your mummy up to?