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I agree that keeping our organizations traditional secrets intact is of great importance...but I think it is for a different reason that isn't compromised if one disloyal person spills the beans to someone.
In many of our organizations' pasts the secrets were a necessity to be able to identify ourselves as members to each other without identifying it to the outside world. Many fraternities started as secret societies (as did Delt) and if the administration of the institutions we were located out found out who our members were they would be expelled (which for students attending elite higher education back in the 1800's was professional and social suicide). So maintaining the secrecy of our activities through passwords, handshakes, signs, and disguising the meaning of certain things within symbols to ensure that only loyal members were privy to important information-was a very practical tradition. As our orgs grew over the past few centuries and we all eventually became public organizations, those secret traditions became more and more symbolically important as they bonded current members to their brotherhood or sisterhood's history and past.
I think we all agree that knowing a handshake, or a password obviously doesn't make someone a brother or sister. I think it's because the meaning behind the tradition isn't there for a non-member. Without the meaning and experience behind membership, which can't be told or shown by some bitter or drunk ex-member, knowing a handshake is like knowing simple trivia.
Think about the experience we members go through to learn those secrets, the great things we learn about ourselves and others through our involvement in our orgs, and the symbolic experience of our Ritual, the most carefully guarded secret, as it's a defining ceremony for our orgs. Even if someone found a Ritual book of any fraternity or sorority, figured out who it belonged to (as I'm sure many don't have the name of the org printed anywhere in it), someone may read on paper words and actions that we perform, but they'll never experience them in the context that true and loyal members do. Strangers won't feel that connection, that pride, that we do. And that's what protects our traditions, secrets, mysteries, and Rituals, from loosing any importance or reverence, even if a few outsiders stumble across some trivia about them.
Does this mean I'm saying it's all ok if someone publishes our stuff for the whole world to read...no, absolutely not. But a leak here or there is not the end of the world and is bound to happen when you have orgs as large as some of ours. Perhaps some of these leaks are even an eye opening disappointment to outsiders or Greek opponents when they realize that we're not hiding anything bad or illegal...
I agree 100% that keeping our secrets is a task that symbolizes our loyalty and respect towards our orgs, and our personal character. And that's why every member should WANT to keep them, and good members understand that, and do.
I don't think any quote is more appropriate than:
"From the outside looking in you could never understand it. From the inside looking out you could never explain it."
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