Silence functions as consent in the arithmetic of power. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) shows how ordinary people helped sustain atrocities not through sadism but through unthinking compliance—the “banality of evil.” When injustices meet only shrugs, they harden into policy and custom, acquiring a false aura of inevitability. Even well-intentioned neutrality can, in effect, grease the gears of oppression.
Moreover, fear multiplies in the gaps between voices. Each person waits for another to speak first, reinforcing a “spiral of silence.” Thus, the absence of dissent becomes self-fulfilling: people mistake enforced quiet for consensus. To break this cycle, history suggests that one clear voice can make silence audible—and therefore breakable. [...]
