1.
Do you speak your mind? Do you say what you want to say? Do you say what you really think and believe, without fear? I don’t. Most people don’t.
Life would be hell.
If you do, good for you—but you’re in the minority.
Most people say one thing publicly and another thing privately. To people they trust. To survive. Out of self-preservation. Or politeness. Or fear. Or some mix.
That's just the way it is. And most people are naturally inclined to self-censor, to shut themselves up long before someone else tells them to shut up.
2.
If someone says something or believes things I completely disagree with, my impulse is not to “have a real conversation about it” but to (usually) smile, judge them intensely, make a note to tell some people later, and try to change the subject. I was taught “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say something at all.”
Be polite to everyone. Talk shit later.
This is the duplicitous Southern way.
But this increasingly strikes me as cowardly. And duplicitous.
Which it is.
I don’t like direct antagonism and confrontation. In person. Most people don’t. They love to have it when they’re safe somewhere behind a screen.
Still, I sometimes wonder what motivates those that feel they must truly, openly, and earnestly speak their minds, all the time.
I think they are brave, or stupid, or narcissistic, or have some ingrained tic, or some combination of the above. Were they encouraged to act like this by their parents? Or did they come to this on their own? Why do they do it?
They claim they “have” to do it. Its an imperative. For truth.
They don’t have to do it.
3.
There’s that great Tahar Djaout quote: “Silence is death, and you, if you talk, you die, and if you remain silent, you die. So, speak out and die.”
Sounds good, sounds true. But Tahar was assassinated.
Jesus said, “if you bring forth what is within you, what is within you can save you. If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
What did Jesus mean by this?
What is it that is so “within” us that Jesus compels us to bring forth?
When the end is crucifixion?
Inside all of us, is a tangled mass of shit—pettiness, trivialities, reactions to the moment, ambition, desire for true expression, desire for revenge, desire for your side to win, mixed with empathy, true conviction, generosity, sublimation to earnest Christian values.
Was it Jesus that compelled you to publish your breakout novel with the biggest publisher?
Really? It was Jesus that made you do it?
Not your class cultural and literary upbringing?
Did Jesus make you start your Substack?
Or make poasts and YouTube videos and podcasts and Tweets and document your life and mind every waking goddamn second?
Was it “that which is within you” that compelled you to get involved in the Culture Wars?
Really?
Everyone’s so insanely full of shit.
4.
In the 1970s, a German political scientist named Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann came up with a theory called “The Spiral of Silence” to make sense of the disparity between publicly expressed and privately held opinions.
The loud get louder. The quiet get quieter.
Everyone just keeps their heads down in the storm, adjusting and adapting in order to survive.
They’re up there, like Greek Gods, flinging thunderbolts at each other day in and day out, but it doesn’t involve us. We’re stuck down here below, monitoring the situation.
That's basically the gist of it.
Human beings, Noelle-Neumann suggested, possess inbuilt hardware to detect the slightest changes in public opinion. This hardware, its very precise, it picks up the slightest change in barometric pressure at the party, at the bus stop, at the bar. Whose social value is growing and whose is shrinking, we are built to sense minute changes in public opinion, in real time. Who eyes are turning toward and who all eyes are turning away from. We can sense the "mood" of a country.
If people sense that an opinion or person is in the minority or is beyond the pale of What’s Currently Acceptable, they shy away and become silent, driven by a primal fear of being associated with something and subsequently isolated or ostracized.
5.
According to Noelle-Neumann, the major fear facing any person before they express a view is: Will these folks frown, argue, or curse my stubbornness? Worse yet, will they snicker or laugh at me? If I say what I really think, will they turn away in contempt or kick me out of the group?
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Individuals who… notice that their own personal opinion is spreading and is being taken over by others, will voice their opinion self-confidently in public.
Thus, shifts in acceptable public opinion are driven onward by the lash, two groups:
a) brave voices who speak their mind long before an opinion has become acceptable.
b) hardcore believers who are so zealous or evangelistic that they can’t be shut up by anyone (Experience tells me there are big personality differences between these two types of avante-garde-types.)
6.
Before logic, before reason, every object or person in the world emits a scent that says, “friend or foe.”
Enemies are everywhere. And friends too.
Nixon took this to its logical conclusion, and paranoia about perceived “enemies” destroyed him.
Enemies should be seen by the True Believer as potential converts to the faith.
They’re not. They’re seen as enemies.
Saul persecuted Stephen and the disciples. Saul became Paul on the road to Damascus. Amazingly, vengeance isn’t taken on Paul. Paul, a former enemy, converts enemies to the new faith.
But some of us are not believers. We are not looking to spread any faith.
7.
In a way, the Nixon campaign (1968) anticipated Noelle-Neumann’s theory (1974) with the “Silent Majority” strategy—becoming a vessel for all the people who were privately seething, but were too polite and afraid of speaking up. So what they did was quietly sublimate themselves into Nixon. He would speak for them.
The same could also be said for Reagan and Trump and Bernie Sanders and many others who have pried open silent majorities and expanded the bounds of what might be considered “acceptable public opinion.”
8.
As Jonathan Haidt noted on a recent podcast with Andrew Sullivan, the “Spiral of Silence” seems kind of quaint and outdated in this nightmarish decade of social media dominance.
It still holds up, in a way, but the “Silent Majority” has turned into everyone narcissistically speaking their mind, all the time, the more extreme and polarizing, the more eyeballs and money you get.
The set of Unacceptable Views leading to isolation and ostracization has expanded.
At the same time, there are very large rewards and incentives for “contrarian” voices who constantly float “unacceptable” opinions—which are of course, becoming more acceptable—but there remain huge downsides as well.
A new Silent Majority is growing again now. It’s almost to full blossom.
9.
Like everyone, I like when someone comes out and says something I think is worth saying but has remained hidden and unsaid, I find the speakers courageous and admire them for being brave. Generally. Depending.
At the same time, in this new world it is hard for me to understand why these people are the way they are, how they live in this way.
I don’t understand the so-called “lived experience” of the constantly outspoken. Take someone like say, just as an example, Michael Tracey or Jesse Singal, voicing themselves and their beliefs, contrary and not, 24/7 all the time.
First just a practical level, the time, the effort, but also on a psychological level.
Human beings aren’t meant to endure it day in and day out—maybe they lack normal sensitivities, but I don’t see the how and why when you’re just in the battle constantly, getting unhinged death threats and hostility.
At the same time, the more hate, the more money. Money from the good people who hate-those-that-hate-you.
Everyone understands this now.
Still, the cortisol levels must be insane.
I can only start to think of these people as either almost-autistically predisposed to speaking their minds all the time, or they have remarkably stable family and friend structures that let them know they’re not socially isolated, or they’ve just learned how the game works and play it, or they’re on heavy-duty meds to deal with the stress and anxiety, or some combination of the above.
10.
I used to be some kind of writer and editor, but I’ve shut myself up good and proper. I still write a lot, I write fast, but have become a compulsive self-censorer.
I don’t say things that I want to say that might provoke or upset or cause controversy, or cause me problem, or alienate some distant friend or acquaintance.
Why would I want that kind of trouble in my life?
Why stir the pot?
Why put myself out there to get criticized and harassed, get goblin vomit all over me?
I am a quiet person with a quiet life.
11.
My life has become like a rusty old barn, gathering cobwebs and spiders. The truth is, I have become silent. Have shut myself up and told myself to put up a dignified front.
This silence has been building up and weighing on me and I feel unexpressed and heavy. As Dostoevsky’s Underground Man put it, “I carried this hole in the floor of my heart. I was terribly afraid of being seen and recognized.”
When they put their knees into the small of my back and said You have the RIGHT to remain silent, I took it literally. You know who THEY are—not the actual police, but the royal THEY, who make it really really clear that Anything you say can and will be used against you.
They broke a few of my ribs. I took it hard. I growled and slunk away to nurse my wounds, like a sick dog.
For a while, most people—being decent—have been quiet and respectful and yielded way to them.
Yeah. People are patient and kind. To a point.
But people are starting to get really sick of it now.
12.
I hate public speaking. I do not like the sound of my own voice. I am aware of being a man, and all that implies. I am a firm believer in egalitarian group dynamics, and of keeping a “good ambiance.” I like to be around loud, cheery, self-assured people. Sometimes the best way for making room for others is just not to say anything at all, but to silently sit back and be a passive observer.
Maybe at times a silent judgemental or critic.
I hate when some charismatic person takes up all the space in the room—unless I already like or love that person. Then it is wonderful to just sit back and watch them light up a room.
Sometimes people who are the most vocal have some of the dumbest things to say.
Maybe you have dumb ideas but everyone is too polite to tell you to your face.
WE are all too polite to tell you (me) to your (my) face, so we (you) let you (me) go on and on and on.
I shrink from direct interpersonal conflict.
So I watch everything, share my thoughts on the backchannel like everyone else, and then watch some more.
I have watched all these past years from the sidelines.
Opinions, art, culture, takes, history, production, its a dime a dozen now.
There’s just too much. It can’t last and it won’t last. Silence is golden.
13.
At the same time, it’s easy to delay for years, for decades for your whole life. To delay what needs to be done, what you feel deep in your heart, because you feel like it’s your fault, that it’s all your fault that you’re not equipped to live in this society, and that you should focus on relentless self-improvement to better fit into this society. So you try and you try and you fail to succeed in the way others do in this society because you’re not built for it. And nothing feels right. And you go home at night and you feel empty working day after day in this insect world surrounded by jackals, selling your life so you can be comfortable—but when you settle in at the end of the night in the comfort of the thing you’ve built, you don’t feel really comfortable, you just feel the raw foghorn of dread.
Your gut tells you, this is just temporary shelter from the storm, this won’t last, this isn’t real, but you wait and wait and wait for the call from God that will never come.
14.
But now I would like to silence the part of myself that told me to remain silent.
To renew myself, I must speak myself. I have been mute for far too long—I guess I’ve just been waiting for everyone to die.
I just can’t do it anymore.