ABSTRACT
Practitioners in some occupations must know things that, if misused, could injure their clients in various ways, such as secrets or human weaknesses, or which medicines are poisons. The practitioner must be trusted with that knowledge to do the job, whereas if a laymen held it, he would be presumed to have some guilty purpose. Others, because of their work, view aspects of society objectively that are sacred to laymen, and this, too, is a kind of “guilty knowledge,” because to make it public would be to threaten society as a whole. Such occupations often live in distinctive ways or wear outward signs of distinction that advertise that they are licensed to hold and use these dangerous kinds of knowledge.
