Authored by Josh Stylman via Substack,
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.
Another
person told me they agreed with me but wished they were "more
successful like me" so they could afford to speak out. They had "too
much to lose." The preposterousness of this is staggering. Everyone who
spoke out during COVID sacrificed—financially, reputationally, socially. I sacrificed plenty myself.
But
I'm no victim. Far from it. Since I was a young man, I've never
measured achievement by finance or status—my benchmark for being a
so-called successful person was owning my own time. Ironically, getting
myself canceled was actually a springboard to that. For the first time
in my life, I felt I'd achieved time ownership. Whatever I’ve achieved
came from being raised by loving parents, working hard, and having the
spine to follow convictions rationally. Those attributes, coupled with
some great fortune, are the reason for whatever success I've had—they're
not the reason I can speak now. Maybe this person should do some inward
searching about why they're not more established. Maybe it's not about
status at all. Maybe it's about integrity.
This is the
adult world we've built—one where courage is so rare that people mistake
it for privilege, where speaking your mind is seen as a luxury only the
privileged can afford, rather than a fundamental requirement for
actually becoming established.
And this is the world we're handing to our children.
We Built the Surveillance State for Them
I
remember twenty years ago, my best friend's wife (who's also a dear
friend) was about to hire someone when she decided to check the
candidate's Facebook first. The woman had posted: “Meeting the whores at
[company name]”—referring to my friend and her coworkers. My friend
immediately withdrew the offer. I remember thinking this was absolutely
terrible judgment on the candidate's part, however it was dangerous
territory we were entering: the notion of living completely in public,
where every casual comment becomes permanent evidence.
Now that danger has metastasized into something unrecognizable. We've
created a world where every stupid thing a fifteen-year-old says gets
archived forever. Not just on their own phones, but screenshot and saved
by peers who don't understand they're building permanent files on each
other—even on platforms like Snapchat that promise everything
disappears. We've eliminated the possibility of a private
adolescence—and adolescence is supposed to be private, messy,
experimental. It's the laboratory where you figure out who you are by
trying on terrible ideas and throwing them away.
But
laboratories require the freedom to fail safely. What we've built
instead is a system where every failed experiment becomes evidence in
some future trial.
Think about the dumbest thing you believed at sixteen.
The most embarrassing thing you said at thirteen. Now imagine that
moment preserved in high definition, timestamped, and searchable.
Imagine it surfacing when you're thirty-five and running for school
board, or just trying to move past who you used to be.
If there was a record of everything I did when I was sixteen, I would have been unemployable.
Come to think of it, I'm way older than that now and I'm unemployable
anyway—but the truth still stands. My generation might have been the
last to fully enjoy an analog existence as children. We got to be stupid
privately, to experiment with ideas without permanent consequences, to
grow up without every mistake being archived for future use against us.
I
remember teachers threatening us with our "permanent record." We
laughed—some mysterious file that would follow us forever? Turns out
they were just early. Now we've built those records and handed the
recording devices to children. Companies like Palantir have turned this surveillance into a sophisticated business model.
We're
asking children to have adult judgment about consequences they can't
possibly understand. A thirteen-year-old posting something stupid isn't
thinking about college applications or future careers. They're thinking
about right now, today, this moment—which is exactly how
thirteen-year-olds are supposed to think. But we've built systems that
treat childhood immaturity as a prosecutable offense.
The psychological toll is staggering.
Imagine being fourteen and knowing that anything you say might be used
against you by people you haven't met yet, for reasons you can't
anticipate, at some unknown point in the future. That's not
adolescence—that's a police state built out of smartphones and social
media.
The result
is a generation that's either paralyzed by self-consciousness or
completely reckless because they figure they're already screwed. Some
retreat into careful blandness, crafting personas so sanitized they
might as well be corporate spokespeople for their own lives. Others go
scorched earth—if everything's recorded anyway, why hold back? As my friend Mark likes
to say, there's Andrew Tate and then there's a bunch of incels—meaning
the young men either become performatively brash and ridiculous, or they
retreat entirely. The young women seem to either drift toward fearful
conformity or embrace monetized exposure on platforms like OnlyFans.
We’ve managed to channel an entire generation’s rebellion into the very
systems designed to exploit them.
The COVID Conformity Test
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.
We saw this
machinery in full operation during COVID. Remember how quickly "two
weeks to flatten the curve" became orthodoxy? How questioning lockdowns,
mask mandates, or vaccine efficacy wasn't just wrong—it was dangerous?
How saying "maybe we should consider the trade-offs of closing schools"
could get you labeled a grandma-killer? The speed at which dissent
became heresy was breathtaking.
History has shown us governments
can be terrible to citizens. The hardest pill to swallow was the
horizontal policing. Your neighbors, coworkers, friends, and family
members became the enforcement mechanism. People didn't just comply;
they competed—virtue-signaling their way into a collective delusion
where asking basic questions about cost-benefit analysis became evidence
of moral deficiency. Neighbors called police on neighbors for having
too many people over. People photographed "violations" and posted them
online for mass judgment.
And the most insidious part? The people
doing the policing genuinely believed they were the good guys. They
thought they were protecting society from dangerous misinformation, not
realizing they had become the misinformation—that they were actively
suppressing the kind of open inquiry that's supposed to be the
foundation of both science and democracy.
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.
The beautiful thing about this system is that
it's self-sustaining. Once you've participated in the mob mentality,
once you've policed your neighbors and canceled your friends and stayed
silent when you should have spoken up, you become invested in
maintaining the fiction that you were right all along. Admitting you
were wrong isn't just embarrassing—it's an admission that you
participated in something monstrous. So instead, you double down. You
disappear when confronted with inconvenient facts.
Raising Prisoners
And
this brings us back to the children. They're watching all of this. But
more than that—they're growing up inside this surveillance
infrastructure from birth. The Stasi's victims at least had some years
of normal psychological development before the surveillance state kicked
in. These kids never get that. They're born into a world where every
thought might be public, every mistake permanent, every unpopular
opinion potentially life-destroying.
The psychological impact is
devastating. Research shows that children who grow up under constant
surveillance—even well-meaning parental surveillance—show higher rates
of anxiety, depression, and what psychologists call "learned helplessness." They
never develop internal locus of control because they never get to make
real choices with real consequences. But this goes far deeper than
helicopter parenting.
The ability to hold unpopular opinions, to
think through problems independently, to risk being wrong—these aren't
just nice-to-haves. They're core to psychological maturity. When you
eliminate those possibilities, you don't just get more compliant people;
you get people who literally can't think for themselves anymore. They
outsource their judgment to the crowd because they never developed their
own.
We're creating a generation of psychological cripples—people
who are practiced at reading social cues and adjusting their thoughts
accordingly, but who have never learned to form independent judgments.
People who mistake consensus for truth and popularity for virtue. People
who have been so thoroughly trained to avoid wrong-think that they've
either lost—or never developed—the capacity for original thought
entirely.
But here's what's most disturbing: the kids are learning
this behavior from us. They're watching adults who whisper their real
thoughts, who agree privately but stay silent publicly, who confuse
strategic silence with wisdom. They're learning that authenticity is
dangerous, that having real convictions is a luxury they can't afford.
They're learning that truth is negotiable, that principles are
disposable, and that the most important skill in life is reading the
room and adjusting your thoughts accordingly.
The feedback loop is
complete: adults model cowardice, children learn that genuine
expression is risky, and everyone becomes practiced at self-censorship
rather than self-examination. We've created a society where the Overton
window isn't just narrow—it's actively policed by people who are
terrified of stepping outside it, even when they privately disagree with
its boundaries.
This is the architecture of soft totalitarianism. Just
the constant, gnawing fear that saying the wrong thing—or even thinking
it too loudly—will result in social death. The beauty of this system is
that it makes everyone complicit. Everyone has something to lose, so
everyone stays quiet. Everyone remembers what happened to the last
person who spoke up, so nobody wants to be next.
The technology
doesn't just enable this tyranny; it makes it psychologically
inevitable. When the infrastructure punishes independent thinking before
it can fully form, you get psychological arrested development on a mass
scale.
It’s already baked into education and employment through DEI and ESG. Wait till it's baked into the monetary system. Maybe they're just connecting us to the Borg anyway?
We're
passing this pathology down to our children like a genetic disorder.
Except this disorder isn't inherited—it's enforced. And unlike genetic
disorders, this one serves a purpose: it creates a population that's
easy to control, easy to manipulate, easy to lead around by the nose as
long as you control the social rewards and punishments.
The Price of Truth
I
don't share my opinions because I "get away with it"—I don't get away
with anything. I've paid socially, professionally, and even financially.
But I do it anyway because the alternative is spiritual death. The
alternative is becoming someone who messages critics privately but never
takes a public stand, someone who's perpetually annoyed by others'
courage but never exercises their own.
The difference isn't ability or privilege. It's willingness.
I'm open-minded and open-hearted. I can be convinced of anything—but
show me, don't tell me. I'm willing to be wrong, willing to change my
mind when new information comes to light or I gain a different
perspective on an idea, willing to defend ideas I believe in even when
it's uncomfortable.
There are a lot of us right now realizing
something isn't right—that we've been lied to about everything. We're
trying to make sense of what we're seeing, asking uncomfortable
questions, connecting dots that don't want to be connected. When we call
that out, the last thing we need is people who haven't done the work
standing in our way, carrying water for the establishment forces that
are manipulating them.
Most people could do the same thing
if they chose to—they just don't choose to because they've been trained
to see conviction as dangerous and conformity as safe.
A 2020 Cato Institute survey found
that 62% of Americans say the political climate prevents them from
sharing their political beliefs because others might find them
offensive. Majorities of Democrats (52%), independents (59%), and
Republicans (77%) all agree they have political opinions they are afraid
to share.
When adults who lived through COVID saw what happens
when groupthink becomes gospel—how quickly independent thought gets
labeled dangerous, how thoroughly dissent gets suppressed—many responded
not by becoming more committed to free expression, but by becoming more
careful about what they express. They learned the wrong lesson.
What
we're creating is a society where authenticity has become a radical
act, where courage is so rare it looks like privilege. We're raising
children who learn that being yourself is dangerous, that having real
opinions carries unlimited downside risk. They're not just careful about
what they say—they're careful about what they think.
This doesn't
create better people. It creates more fearful people. People who
mistake surveillance for safety, conformity for virtue, and silence for
wisdom. People who've forgotten that the point of having thoughts is
sometimes to share them, that the point of having convictions is
sometimes to defend them.
The solution isn't to abandon technology
or retreat into digital monasteries. But we need to create
spaces—legal, social, psychological—where both kids and adults can fail
safely. Where mistakes don't become permanent tattoos. Where changing
your mind is seen as growth rather than hypocrisy. Where having
convictions is valued over having clean records.
Most importantly,
we need adults who are willing to model courage instead of strategic
silence—who understand that the price of speaking up is usually less
than the price of staying quiet. In a world where everyone's afraid to
say what they think, the honest voice doesn't just stand out—it stands
up.
Because right now, we're not just living in fear—we're
teaching our children that fear is the price of participation in
society. And a society built on fear isn't a society at all. It's just a
more comfortable prison, one where the guards are ourselves and the
keys are our own convictions, which we've learned to keep safely locked
away.
Whether it's experimental medicine or the masters of war lying again to drag us into what might become World War III—it's PSYOP season—it's
never been more important that people find their conviction, use their
voice, and become a force for good. If you're still scared to push back
against war propaganda, still getting swept up in manufactured outrage
cycles, still choosing your principles based on which team is in
power—then you may have learned absolutely nothing from the last few
years.
These days, friends are starting to confide in me that maybe I was right about
the mRNA vaccines not working. I don't gloat—in fact, I appreciate the
openness. But my standard reply is that they're four years late to the
story. They'll know they've caught up when they realize the world is run
by a bunch of satanic pedophiles. And yeah, I used to think that sounded crazy too.
