The Silence of Speech
Sometimes the hardest thing isn’t knowing what I believe — it’s deciding whether I dare to say it.
People around me freely share their political opinions, assuming I agree. I usually stay quiet. My views lean conservative, and I know that if I voiced them, they’d likely be met with hostility, not curiosity. The word “conservative” itself has become less a description than a trigger.
My solution, for now, has been silence. But silence sits hard with me. My father and husband both served in the military to protect and defend the Constitution, which guarantees, among other things, freedom of speech. Not just speech that’s popular or fashionable, but speech for everyone. And yet here I am, censoring myself in the very country they served to defend.
The irony is that I’m not close-minded. I love to read, debate, and learn from people who view the world from different perspectives. But too often, difference now feels dangerous. Words that, to me, sound like common sense are, to others, evidence of hate. And once that assumption is made, dialogue ends before it even begins.
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt write about this in The Coddling of the American Mind. They call it one of the “Great Untruths”: the idea that life is a battle between good people and evil people. Once that mindset takes hold, disagreement itself becomes proof of wickedness. A different perspective isn’t just wrong, it’s immoral. And when we start to believe that, words lose their power to persuade. They become weapons, and every conversation becomes war.
Some will say the reason I hesitate to speak is because I know my views are hateful. But that’s not true. What I feel isn’t hate, it’s conviction, shaped by my upbringing, my values, and my concern for fairness. I believe disagreement should sharpen us, not destroy us. Yet today, disagreement is often rebranded as cruelty. That’s why so many of us stay quiet: not because we’re ashamed, but because we’re tired of being told that every difference of opinion must come from a place of malice. It doesn’t. Sometimes it comes from a different reading of the same problem, or a different hope for what society could be.
But silence has a cost. If enough of us decide it’s safer to say nothing, the public square empties. Our democracy becomes less about persuasion and more about dominance. Dialogue, the very process that allows free people to grow together despite their differences, disappears.
And maybe that’s the most dangerous silence of all.
The downfall of humanity will not come because we disagreed. It will come if we decide that disagreement itself is hate, and leave the conversation altogether.