What are you too afraid to say?

It's time to put cowardice in its place and make some noise in our culture of silence.

What are you too afraid to say?

I’ll go first.

Here are some of the things I believe but often feel too afraid to say:

I believe that, if you do it right, life is hard.

I believe the human race is in a very precarious place.

I believe every person who complied with the COVID narrative, even while resisting it in their hearts, contributed to the harms of the last 4 years.

I believe the true effects of masking and lockdowns on our children will be felt by generations to come.

I believe the war in the Middle East is complicated and that saying so doesn’t make me a bigot or a genocide denier.

I believe RFK Jr. is the best of the U.S. presidential candidates, though supporting him might secure the wrong victory.

I believe there are two, and only two, genders.

I believe we are only starting to understand how Big Pharma is breaking our children, and that ADHD and spectrum disorders like autism are quite likely manmade.

I believe modern ‘preventative’ medicine does more harm than good.

I know the current public education system does more harm than good.

I believe that the climate movement is manufactured ideology but also that we are polluting our waters and destroying our lands.

I don’t believe Justin Trudeau is “the problem,” though he certainly is a problem.

I don’t believe Pierre Poilievre will save us.

I don’t believe that asking questions makes you a conspiracy theorist.

With all its benefits, I believe humanity is worse off for the invention of the internet.

I believe hate speech legislation is fundamentally wrong.

I believe personal choice matters more than public health.

I believe children should sing and get muddy and poke about in forests with sticks and be allowed to fall down sometimes.

I want to drink fresh water and real milk, and I don’t want my meat to come from “concentrated animal feeding operations.”

I believe truth is objective but not always clear.

I believe anger can be destructive but that it is sometimes necessary and useful.

I believe it is better to live well than to live long.

I believe most of us are stronger than we allow ourselves to be.

I believe courage matters.

These are some of the things I believe. They explain the choices I make. They are my strengths and, sometimes, my weaknesses.

You have your own unique set of beliefs, some that came from much reflection and revision, and others that befell you in less intentional ways; some that are like old friends, and others that feel a little foreign and beg your acquaintance.

Many of my beliefs cast me as a conservative, ‘right-wing’ type in the academic universe I used to orbit. I got used to tamping down these beliefs during graduate seminars, department meetings, and salon-style social gatherings. This was a universe that expressed itself in generally ‘progressive,’ deconstructionist terms, terms that downplayed the importance of history and the individual, and up-played the politicization of science…and just about everything else.

In this world, I gradually built the moral muscles needed to speak out when I disagreed. And I earned the callouses that principled objection often creates.

And then something unexpected happened.

When my belief in individual choice over collectivism shifted me out of this world, some of my other beliefs made me a foreigner in a new world.

I now find myself at odds with many in the freedom community who want to wallow in ridicule or move forward with an unrealistic Pollyannaism or place all their eggs in the basket of the next political hero expected to come down from Mt. Olympus to save us.

All of this leaves me realizing that I can move from one world to another and that cultural ideologies can micro-shift, but there will likely never be an environment so perfectly unobjectionable that I can safely shelve the courage needed to sometimes say “I disagree.”

“To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men,” wrote the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox in her 1914 anthem against silence. You can listen to Amanda Palmer’s haunting reading of the poem here:

A good litmus test for how well a society is doing is to consider what it takes courage for the citizens of that society to say publicly.

What does it take courage for you to say right now?

Does it take courage to say women should be able to vote?

No, because once upon a time proponents of the suffrage movement mustered the courage to say “I disagree.”

Does it take courage to say human beings should not be bought and used as chattel?

Not in our culture because a choir of human voices rolling through our troubled history of racialized social control bothered to say “I disagree.”

Does it take courage to say that individuals should not be sacrificed for the sake of the dominant ideology?

Right now, it does.

This one caught me off guard. I thought history had taught us why we shouldn’t sacrifice individuals like savage beasts who devour their ‘differents.’ It hasn’t, it seems. But one day, if we do the right things now, we won’t need the courage to say even this.

How long is the list of things you are currently too afraid to say in public? How long is the list of questions you are too afraid to ask?

If there is even one item on that list, then it is too long.

Though I know many of you won’t want to hear this, silence is not a ‘no-harm, no-foul’ life strategy. To remain silent when the truth is begging to come out is to get something very wrong about what it means to be human. It is to commit a lie if you know that what you are being silent about needs to be said. And lies fester and grow and betray and corrupt.

Lies to ourselves create a dissonance that will ultimately destroy us. By making us constantly filter and self-censor, we are forced to split ourselves in two, into the person we really are ‘in our hearts’ and the image we project to the world. Eventually, we need to choose which person to honour, to identify with, to stand by when times get tough. And if we consistently choose the image over the reality, we’ll eventually lose our true self altogether.

So I ask you to consider for a moment, what is your silence costing you? What is it costing all of us?

In 1982, in the middle of the Texas countryside at the conference Facing Evil, Maya Angelou called out the consequences of our propensity for silence:

Throughout our nervous history, we have constructed pyramidic towers of evil, ofttimes in the name of good…. Our shoulders sag at the thoughts of African slaves lying spoon-­fashion in the filthy hatches of slave-ships, and the subsequent auction blocks upon which were built great fortunes in our country. We turn our heads in bitter shame at the remembrance of Dachau and the other gas ovens, where millions of ourselves were murdered by millions of ourselves. As soon as we are reminded of our actions, more often than not we spend incredible energy trying to forget what we’ve just been reminded of.

If we were to psychoanalyze humans as a group, I fear we would find that destroying each other is our Achilles’ heel and amnesia our convenient crutch.

Silence is not innocent.

It creates revisionism and collective forgetfulness and, quite often, repeat offending. We somehow think our silence will protect us; if I just remain silent, then I can’t be seen, and if I am unseen, then I can’t be hurt (or do the hurting). Quite possibly, for a moment anyway. But what harms can I do while stealthily moving through the world?

And, if I am silent and unseen, am I even real?

I’ll end with a few thoughts on courage.

The culture we inhabit constitutes certain facts of our experience. And many of these facts are beyond our control. But they don’t need to dictate our response.

There are few true have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too situations in life and I’m pretty sure this isn’t one of them. It takes courage to make noise in a culture of silence and doing so has its costs. It means becoming conspicuous, setting yourself adrift in the wilderness with an open wound and no pack to protect you.

But I’ll share with you a little secret about courage.

There is nothing supernatural or even superhuman about it. It isn’t a gift bestowed on some and not others. And cowardice is not a permanent condition. You can adopt what Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset”; you can change your cowardice with your effort. You can learn to speak even when you are afraid to do so.

Courage is the ultimate existential power. It helps us to become fully human. And it helps us not only in the big moments of our lives but in the little things that make us everyday, as men and women; as parents, friends, and citizens; as Jews, Christians and Muslims; as thinking, nurturing, flawed, complex human beings.

In fact, the courage to speak out can be the thing that makes you. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes,

Let this darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.

What batters you becomes your strength. What a raw and beautiful affirmation.

This isn’t a time for retreat. But it might be a time for sacrifice. Making those sacrifices might put you out on a limb for a while, dangling precariously while others find their grip.

Is this what you ultimately fear? That on some primal level you will be forced out of the tribe to “go it on your own”? If it is, dig into that fear for a moment. What do you find? Is the apparent comfort of conformity really worth the costs?

From my own experience, I can say that, while life over the last few years has not been easy or people always kind, I have never regretted speaking out. Doing so made me feel powerful as an individual, an act of treachery in today’s culture. More importantly, it made me feel real.

The open question now is whether there will one day be enough space in our culture for someone to offer a thoughtful, well-reasoned idea — whatever it is — and then for someone else to feel free enough to say “I disagree.”

We aren’t there yet.

And we aren’t going to get there by digging into our victimhood or by hanging on the hope that someone else will make the first move. It’s up to each of us in this moment. It depends on what we have the courage to say online, at work, to our spouses or best friends, or even what you have the courage to say to me in the comments here.

Courage isn’t as elusive as we are led to believe. It comes down to an act of the will. And will is about power: the power to be who you are not just in private but in public spaces too. The power to say what you believe to be true and what is needed right now.

Do you want to exit this world without exercising that power? Will silence and compliance matter in the end as the ship of your days sails over the horizon?

I’ll ask again:

What are you too afraid to say?

What might it cost you if you say it?

What will it cost us all if you don’t?

—Julie