What drives us to perform in secret?

I was thinking about this today, based on my current life situation. It seems that secrecy is really in the heart of liberty, an American foundation. Honesty, without secrecy, there is no privacy; fore go privacy and the usual alternative it control (whether governmental, or parental). Perhaps there are other cases I cannot conceive of now, where there IS privacy and NOT control.

The other drive toward secrecy as far as personal accomplishments are concerned is this: without secrecy the magnitude of your accomplishment is constantly kept in check by others, therefore forcing modesty upon you and disallowing you the (perhaps delusional) belief that your actions are grandiose, magnificent, and will lead to a great breakthrough. Though if this breakthrough does occur, the results are normally enough to confound the community for a time. They are puzzled. How did he do it? This questioning of your knowledge, if no one is able to figure the method to your solution, has the potential to lead one to become a legend, and thus gain considerable fame for oneself.

So the costs of secrecy are obvious. Social disentanglement, begets loneliness, begets eventual insanity. The other is the intangible breakthrough, which one strives for, which may never come, because he, the lone-wolf, has chosen to abandon social reevaluations of his work for soundness in direction, with the future hope of social fame.

So I can understand why people take a vow of modesty when they talk to one another, and therefore why the language is suffering so much as thoughts become more and more abstract. "What are you up to?; Oh NOTHING". These thoughts are meaningless, but I believe there is a good reason, though an unconscious one in most people for keeping to themselves, it is the preservation of their own liberties, by not divulging everything to anyone who asks.