Power, Silence, and the Everyday Person

A Collaborative Reflection

This piece was born from a conversation about how silence weaves through everyday life—not just as a personal choice, but as something shaped by culture, history, and systems of power.

Sae Abiola

reflected on how silence is taught, expected, and sometimes necessary for survival.

IS IT PROPAGANDA?®

expanded the lens to examine how political and institutional structures reinforce silence on a larger scale.

Together, we asked:

When does silence protect us, and when does it cost us our voice?

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Dear Readers and Subscribers,

Part 1: The Sacred and The Survival

Photo by Alexandre Chambon on Unsplash

Silence is often mistaken for peace. But not all silence is born from calm.

Sometimes, it’s shaped by fear, exhaustion, or centuries of being told, “You don’t matter enough to be heard.”

Where I come from, silence is often praised as strength.

You’re expected to stay quiet to show respect, to avoid shame, to protect the family name.

You don’t challenge elders. You don’t question authority, even when your spirit knows something is off.

I’ve seen people shrink their voices in rooms where they had truth to offer, especially when speaking up felt like a risk to their safety, image, or belonging.

I once sat beside my aunt as she stayed quiet while someone else told a story she knew wasn’t true.

She lowered her gaze, smiled politely, and said nothing, because in our culture, correcting someone older or in a position of authority, even gently, can be seen as prideful or shameful.

Speaking up, for her, would have meant stepping outside the box that had always defined what it meant to be “well-behaved.”

I’ve seen voices dismissed, not because they were wrong, but because of who they came from.

Sometimes youth. Sometimes, class. Sometimes just being seen as too different to matter.

Sometimes silence isn’t peace. It’s survival. It becomes the quiet strategy of those the system refuses to hear.

But silence isn’t always surrender.

Sometimes, silence is sacred.

It’s the choice to protect your peace in a world that feeds on reaction.

It’s knowing your worth without needing to prove it.

It’s spiritual. A refusal to cast your pearls before those who only want to trample them.

Still, I ask myself often:

When does silence become complicity?

When does protecting our peace start to cost our power?

Silence can also be a weapon.

It’s used to erase, to control the story, to make people doubt their own memory.

I think of the quiet workers in systems built to silence them.

The friend who hides their pain because being vulnerable feels unsafe.

The person who forgives too quickly just to avoid the weight of confrontation.

The people who carry wounds, histories, and names that were never fully allowed to speak.

There’s a thin line between silence as wisdom and silence as erasure.

And navigating that line, especially in a noisy and power-driven world, is a daily act of discernment.

Maybe power and silence are not enemies.

Maybe they are mirrors, always showing us what we fear, what we value, and what we’re still learning to say out loud.

Part 2: When Silence Becomes a Sentence

Photo by Silvestre Leon on Unsplash

If silence can be sacred, political silencing is its perversion.

Where you speak of the quiet that grows in homes, families, and personal memory, I look outward, toward the vast architecture of power that codifies silence, enforces it, and calls it order.

In modern democracies, we’re told we are free. Free to speak, to vote, to organize. But freedom of speech means little when the loudest microphone belongs to those who decide which voices are legitimate and which are disruptive.

Political silencing doesn’t always look like censorship. More often, it’s polite. Procedural. Hidden behind committee doors, editorial algorithms, or the quiet withdrawal of funding. It whispers through zoning laws, redistricting (gerrymandering) maps, donor lists, or even visa denials. It disguises itself as “neutrality.”

It doesn’t shout you down, but it simply ensures you won’t be heard.

In such a world, complexity becomes a weapon.

The more complicated the system, the easier it is to make exclusion look like oversight. Bureaucracy doesn’t need to say “no”, it just needs to say, “submit this form in three exemplars,” and know most people will never make it to the front of the line.

The everyday person—voter, tenant, whistleblower, witness—is drowned in paperwork, protocol, and plausible deniability. Entire lives get caught in the fine print. And the state, or the market, or the media, shrugs and says:

“You had your chance to speak. You just didn’t follow the proper channels.”

Power doesn’t always need a conspiracy. It only needs complexity and the indifference of those who benefit from it.

But like you wrote, I know silence isn’t always passive.

Sometimes silence is the only way to survive an intolerable noise: the spin of press conferences, the white noise of punditry, the hypocrisy of politicians speaking in slogans while acting in shadows. In such a world, the refusal to engage, to vote, to speak, or to perform one's role in the civic theater can itself be a rebellion. Not out of apathy, but disillusionment. Not weakness, but weariness.

Still, the danger remains.

When silence becomes systemic, it hardens.

Voices disappear from the archive as well as from the air.

Through omission, entire histories are rewritten.

Consider the native populations whose treaties were lost due to silence.

Political dissidents vanished without a word.

Of communities whose hardships are hidden because they don't fit the narrative, don't translate, or don't trend.

Silence, institutionalized, becomes a kind of amnesia. And amnesia is politically useful. It allows a nation to forget its sins, and in forgetting, to repeat them.

And here is the paradox:

In this great dance between power and silence, the most dangerous thing may not be when the people cannot speak, but when they no longer want to.

That is when democracy becomes a ritual, not a reality.

That is when complexity becomes camouflage.

That is when silence stops being sacred and becomes a sentence.

So we return to the central question:

When does silence begin to cost us our power?

To that, I’d say:

When does silence cease to be our choice at all?

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Conclusion:

In all its forms, silence is neither one-dimensional nor neutral. It can serve as a haven or a warning, a sentence or a kind of wisdom. It can be taught as grace in the home and enforced as policy in the state. Silence conveys important information about who is in charge, who is supposed to give way, and who is left out of the narrative, whether it is uttered in deference or enforced on purpose.

Sae Abiola

serves as a reminder that, like armor handed down through the generations, silence can be inherited.

IS IT PROPAGANDA?®

demonstrates how that same silence can be made law through process, complexity, and plausible deniability rather than by decree.

However, both voices agree on one point: At what point does silence cease to be protective and begin to erase?

Understanding the origins, meanings, and costs of silence becomes a form of resistance in a society that feeds on noise, indignation, and the appearance of involvement.

If these reflections speak to you—if you, too, navigate the blurred lines between voice and quiet, memory and forgetting—we invite you to continue the conversation.

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Sae Abiola

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