Everyone's Afraid to Speak
Someone our family has known forever recently told my sister that they've been reading my Substack and that if they wrote the things I write, people would call them crazy. I got a kick out of that—not because it's untrue, but because it reveals something darker about where we've ended up as a society. Most people are terrified of being themselves in public.
My sister’s response made me laugh: "People do call him crazy. He simply doesn't care.” The funniest part is that I don't even write the craziest stuff I research—just the stuff I can back up with sources and/or my own personal observations. I always try to stay rooted in logic, reason and facts though—I'm clear when I'm speculating and when I'm not.
This same guy has sent me dozens of private messages over the last 4 or 5 years challenging me on stuff I share online. I'll respond with source material or common sense, and then—crickets. He disappears. If I say something he doesn’t want to hear, he vanishes like a child covering his ears. Over the last few years, I’ve been proven right about most of what we’ve argued about, and he’s been wrong. But it doesn’t matter—he’s got the memory of a gnat and the pattern never changes.
But he'd never make that challenge publicly, never risk being seen engaging with my arguments where others might witness the conversation. This kind of private curiosity paired with public silence is everywhere—people will engage with dangerous ideas in private but never risk being associated with them publicly. It's part of that reflexive "that can't be true" mindset that shuts down inquiry before it can even begin.
But he's not alone. We've created a culture where wrongthink is policed so aggressively that even successful, powerful people whisper their doubts like they're confessing crimes.
I was on a hike last year with a very prominent tech VC. He was telling me about his son's football team—how their practices kept getting disrupted because their usual field on Randall's Island was now being used to house migrants. He leaned in, almost whispering: "You know, I'm a liberal, but maybe the people complaining about immigration have a point." Here's a guy who invests mountains of money into companies that shape the world we live in, and he's afraid to voice a mild concern about policy in broad daylight. Afraid of his own thoughts.
After I spoke out against vaccine mandates, a coworker told me he totally agreed with my position—but he was angry that I'd said it. When the company didn't want to take a stand, I told them I would speak as an individual—on my own time, as a private citizen. He was pissed anyway. In fact, he was scolding me about the repercussions to the company. What's maddening is that this same person had enthusiastically supported the business taking public stands on other, more politically fashionable causes over the years. Apparently, using your corporate voice was noble when it was fashionable. Speaking as a private citizen became dangerous when it wasn’t.
This is how totalitarian thinking takes root—not through jackbooted thugs, but through a million small acts of self-censorship. When a venture capitalist whispers his concerns about immigration policy like he's confessing to a thought crime. When successful professionals agree with dissenting views privately but would never defend them publicly. When speaking obvious truths becomes an act of courage rather than basic citizenship.
Orwell understood this perfectly. In 1984, the Party's greatest achievement wasn't forcing people to say things they didn't believe—it was making them afraid to believe things they weren't supposed to say. "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake," O'Brien explains to Winston. "We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power." But the real genius was making citizens complicit in their own oppression, turning everyone into both prisoner and guard.
History shows us how this works in practice. The Stasi in East Germany didn't just rely on secret police—they turned ordinary citizens into informants. By some estimates, one in seven East Germans was reporting on their neighbors, friends, even family members. The state didn't need to watch everyone; they got people to watch each other. But the Stasi had limitations: they could recruit informants, but they couldn't monitor everyone simultaneously, and they couldn't instantly broadcast transgressions to entire communities for real-time judgment.
Social media solved both problems. Now we have total surveillance capability—every comment, photo, like, and share automatically recorded and searchable. We have instant mass distribution—one screenshot reaching thousands in minutes. We have volunteer enforcement—people eagerly participating in calling out "wrongthink" because it feels righteous. And we have permanent records—unlike Stasi files locked in archives, digital mistakes follow you forever.
The psychological impact is exponentially worse because Stasi informants at least had to make a conscious choice to report someone. Now the reporting happens automatically—the infrastructure is always listening, always recording, always ready to be weaponized by anyone with a grudge or a cause.
The Ministry of Truth didn't need to rewrite history in real time. Facebook and Twitter did it for them, memory-holing inconvenient posts and banning users who dared to share pre-approved scientific studies that happened to reach unapproved conclusions. The Party didn't need to control the past—they just needed to control what you were allowed to remember about it.
This wasn't an accident or an overreaction. This was a stress test of how quickly a free society could be transformed into something unrecognizable, and we failed spectacularly. Anyone who actually followed the science understood the only pandemic was one of cowardice. Worse, most people didn't even notice we were being tested. They thought they were just "following the science"—never mind that the data kept changing to match the politics, or that questioning anything had somehow become heretical.
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