That’s not my story, but I won’t tell you what is: silent resistance.

That’s not my story, but I won’t tell you what is: silent resistance.
I’ve touched on some of the ways we invest in beliefs that may cost us dearly in the long run. Often, however, we reject the beliefs imposed upon us. In favorable circumstances we can do this openly and loudly. When the boss holds too much power over us our rejection may have to be covert, and that’s what I want to explore here.

“Silence implies assent.” That’s what They want you to believe, anyhow. Silence implies, first of all, no room for dissent. It may mask reservations or resistance. Sometimes, in the face of seemingly unchallengeable power, it may represent a strategy to evade rather than confront authority.

In my GED class, one of the biggest challenges was to get learners to write about their own experience. To pass the GED essay test, you not only have to express your ideas well, you have to back them up with facts and personal observations. These learners missed most of high school and the “facts” at their command run to unexamined slogans about the evils of drugs, taxes, and Big Government-- more than a little ironic for the drug-abusers among them, the welfare moms, or the young guys who fantasize a life in the military.

What I found much more disturbing was their reluctance to describe their own lives. It was hard for them to describe their friends, their kids, or their daily routines. They seemed not to notice the infrastructure around them, the schools, day care centers, cell phone towers, gas stations, medical insurance-- how these came into being, why they decay. They had trouble making the connection between their own job prospects and what they saw of war and immigration and technology change. Often they couldn’t tell me why they liked a movie, or compare it to another.

To some extent this wordlessness is natural. After all, I don’t often reflect on the air I breathe. In part it’s learned from parents who likewise didn’t say much or reflect the world to their children. The “I like this but I don’t like this” conversation form may be peculiar to middle-class households or something we mostly learn in school. Young people who have lived in one place all their lives may have little to compare it to. Young people who’ve been moved from home to home and institution to institution may have given up trying to hold on to the ever-changing particulars. They may see my demands for detail as pointless.

Beneath the surface there’s also a powerful current of fear, shame and distrust. The experiences some of these folks have had were so destructive, it comes as no surprise when they choose not to share them with the gringo teacher.

So they wrote their slogans for the assignments I give them -- the sanctity of marriage, the wonders of technology, the perils of cyberporn -- they could really shovel it -- while seeing none of it in their own lives. Perhaps they preferred slogans, which seem to offer a coherence and sense of security that their actual experience did not. If there was some cognitive dissonance between what they believed and what they saw, it may have been easier to ditch the latter. Some guys could easily lay down a poem or sketch a cartoon about gangstas but couldn’t describe their families or lovers or the places they lived. I knew a woman who would talk forever about politics or the books she read or anything at all, really, yaketty yak, breathless, lest in a moment of silence there should intrude some small rustle or cry as her husband raped her kids.

I finally got one teen to write. Every morning for a week he’d come in and type an endlessly repetitive, ultimamente boring narrative about blowing up zombies, lifted from some video game. I tried to get him to beef up the characters, invent some conflict, tell the story from the zombies’ point of view. I think he understood what I was asking, but it was just too much of a stretch. He didn’t have the raw materials for such a construction. So much of the world had escaped his observation, no wonder he couldn’t talk about it.

For many silent people there’s also a certain degree of shuckin and jivin. The zombie killer had spent a lot of time in lock up, but didn’t want to say anything about it. I could tell, though, that he’d mastered the arts of evasion long before he went to jail:

They didn’t push me hard because I didn’t let them. They wanted to put me in Resource. I acted dumb. They were basically saying I was dumb, because I didn’t understand a couple things. I basically don’t care about anything. I just saw the opportunity to get through school easily.

Throughout his years under the thumb of one authority or another, the message he broadcasts with remarkable consistency and perseverance has been, “I don’t know. I’m stupid. I can’t do it. It’s not my fault. Don’t expect anything of me. LEAVE ME ALONE.” He’d been told he had a learning disability, and used it to play dumb. He figured his best bet was to lie low and hope no one noticed. He was quiet and well-behaved and when he didn’t want to do something he made no fuss, he just took a nap. Underneath the eerie tranquilizer placidness he’s very angry, too, at being labelled this way and believes that by playing the fool he’s also playing his teachers for fools.

I imagined that he recognized no authority but his own, and it heartened me. Hobsbawm wrote, "The refusal to understand is a form of class struggle” (Scott 1990 p. 133). Sometimes silence is the opposite of assent, a refusal to commit to the boss’ program. Knowledge carries obligations, explanations entail taking a stand, and by their display of ignorance these folks reject all such imposed demands.

Even when we accept others’ authority, as did many of Belenky’s subjects, we may minimize our commitment.

While some of the women we interviewed most certainly saw authorities as the source of the ‘right answers’ and ‘truth’, they did not align themselves with authorities to the extent [William] Perry described occurring among men. This world of ‘Authority-right-we’ was quite alien to many women. The women in our sample seemed to say ‘Authority-right-they.’ They were as awed but identified less with authorities than did Perry’s men (1986 p. 42).

The problem is, silent people rarely develop their own programs because they can’t express their understandings and goals. Deprived of words, their experience devalued, they don’t even talk to each other --not the truth, anyway-- so they can’t help each other. Several times I’ve asked the people in my class what they thought of the latest war. “It’s boring”, many tell me; “I don’t want to think about it.” Freire talks of a culture of silence, which, by smothering collective understanding, often leaves folks with nothing to latch onto but the Seig Heil of the corporation state. I wrote above that we strive to reduce this complicated world to a few manageable variables. Silence is the ultimate reduction.

But wordlessness is devastating even for the folks who don’t buy into the death regime. They carry on their silent resistance, perhaps to the ends of their lives, at very great cost --the video gamer hadn’t learned to read, for instance-- and in the end they don’t make a dent in the machine. A girl destroys her animal drawings because she distrusts the praise her mom gives. Men and women go undercover for a host of forbidden ideas, veritable chameleons taking on the colors of their corporate surroundings so they can pass unnoticed and unmolested one more day. I see them as first cousins to anorexics: they find the world so ugly, they spend their lives underground, digging frantically to escape-- and so often do, forever.

Meanwhile, silence on the part of the powerful implies the ability to express one’s will through a glance, a wave of the hand, a shrug of the shoulders. The master expects his servants to anticipate his every wish and carry them out without question. Clinchy and her colleagues have a segment entitled “ the Wordless Authorities”; in describing many women’s experience they write, “authorities seldom tell you what they want you to do; they apparently expect you to know in advance. If authorities do tell you what is right, they never tell you why it is right. Authorities bellow but do not explain. They are unpredictable” (1986 p. 28). I’ve heard that this kind of wordless mastery was common among Japanese households at one time.

You’d think it would make more sense for the boss just to tell us what he wants, so that he doesn’t end up with a hot bath and a toe rub when all he wants is a couple aspirin. But aside from the sheer thrill of making people scramble to meet his needs, there are two great advantages to this minimally worded maximum control: we servants get all the blame. Any mistakes are ours; our Halliburton doesn’t have to explain anything. The world itself becomes an unfathomable place in which we have permission to exist only insofar as we can please the master. Moreover, the more we know our hometown Halliburton, his every little mood and quirk, the less room there is to know ourselves. We end up loving the boss instead of ourselves.