WHEN POWER MISTAKES SILENCE FOR CONSENT
Power is easily impressed, especially by itself. Give it a microphone, a motorcade, and a room full of people too tired or too afraid to speak, and it will swear it has earned a standing ovation. Silence, to power, is not awkward; it is flattering. It hears no objections and concludes, quite proudly, that it must be doing something right.
Ortom Not Involved in Suswam’s Arrest, Detention
Silence, however, is not consent. It is often survival.
Power has always suffered from this dangerous illusion: that the absence of resistance is evidence of approval. History is crowded with rulers who mistook fear for loyalty, exhaustion for agreement, and intimidation for peace. In unequal societies, silence is rarely a vote of confidence; it is the language of those calculating the cost of speaking. A boot on the neck does not produce applause; it produces careful breathing. Power, drunk on its own echo, calls this “stability.”
There is a special arrogance in authority that assumes every quiet citizen is a satisfied one. It never imagines that people might be observing, counting, remembering. That silence can be a ledger, not a surrender. A strategic pause, not a permanent truce.
When power mistakes silence for consent, it grows reckless. It stops persuading and starts commanding. It insults intelligence, tramples decency, and governs as though permission has been eternally granted. Laws become moods. Institutions become stage props. Critics become “enemies of progress.” Questions are no longer asked, because in power’s delusion, silence has already answered them.
But silence has a long memory. It archives every insult, every broken promise, every lie delivered with a straight face. And one day, without announcement, silence resigns. It speaks. Sometimes through the ballot box. Sometimes with placards. Sometimes through the cold and unforgiving judgment of history.
Power should fear silence more than noise. Noise can be contained, spun, or crushed. Silence cannot. Silence means people are thinking. And thinking citizens are the most dangerous threat to arrogant authority.
Those who rule would do well to remember this: consent is expressed, negotiated, and renewed. Silence is none of these. It is not a “yes.” It is not even a “maybe.”
Very often, it is a warning. And when that warning is ignored, power learns, too late, that the quiet it celebrated was never loyalty at all, but patience.
