The Spiral of Silence

Have you ever heard someone say something you disagreed with and kept your opinions to yourself? You, my friend, just fell into the spiral of silence.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you wasn't it Stuff to Blow
your Mind? My name is Robert Lamb. Hey, my name
is Julie Douglas. Julie, have you ever gone on a
silent retreat? Now? It's one of those things I really
really want to do and I really really don't want

(00:23):
to do. They can explain what this is for people
who are who are unfamiliar with the term. Um. It's
usually you'll you'll find it kind of like a Buddhist
retreat in which you go and it's usually like a
woodsy environment and you and your other retreaters sit in
absolute silence, usually in meditation. But the point is is

(00:44):
whether or not you're eating, walking, meditating, silence prevails. Okay,
so it for like ten days, why not just go
by yourself on a trip somewhere and then you can
have as much silence as you want, because apparently the
deafening silence is so maddening that a lot of people
struggle with it the first couple of days, and that

(01:07):
even in that contained environment. So can you imagine just
trying to do this on your own and you're like, hey,
I'll just go to San Francisco and have my own
silent retreat. You're going to break out of that. You're
gonna belly up to the bar and be like, I can't,
I gotta talk to someone. So you need the communal
support to remain silent, to drown out the maddening thoughts.
You know, this reminds me of The Leftovers. I don't

(01:29):
know if you've been watching this or read the book
upon which was based, but there's not ready there's there's
a cult in the in the in the book, and
in the and in the TV show, and they remain silent.
They also wear white and they smoke all the time.
I'm not finished with the first season, so I don't
know what their deal is yet completely, but but it's
but certainly it's something to keep in mind as we

(01:50):
go through this episode. That'd be something, you know, a
smoking Buddhist silent retreat. Yeah, I mean, certainly you have monasteries.
There's a long tradition of of nks taking a vow
of silence in the Western tradition, So so you have
the idea that there is something to be found, something
holy about silence, something therapeutic about silence. Is a is

(02:11):
a very old concept but also something very uncomfortable about silence.
And we all have had that before. We have experienced
that awkward moment and conversation. And apparently this is actually
like a thing that people have tried to fit into
a phenomenon, right, this idea that if you are in
a group, that a hush will fall over the room

(02:32):
after about twenty minutes or so, yeah, twenty minutes after
the hour. Even is is this specific version of this
which was news to me, the idea that you're hanging
out with a bunch of people, it's going to suddenly
be uh, you know, one twenty and everyone's going to
go silent. And there's some crazy ideas for why this
crazy thing could possibly be happening. And you know, this

(02:55):
interesting thing about that is I bet that everybody listening
has experienced that. You know, you've been in a group situation,
everybody's talking, chatting, and then then that hush falls over.
But you probably have never set yourself, ah, it's twenty
minutes after the hour. It must be because one of
two crazy superstitions. Yes, now that the first one is
the one that I'm I'm more into, And that's the

(03:16):
idea that. Okay, first of all, buy into the idea
that there are angels in the world, Okay, supernatural beings
that do God's will, or perhaps don't do God's will
because they fall from grace and live in hell. Now
it depends on which version of the story you go with,
but there are angels. Maybe we can't see them, maybe
we can. And they like to sing. And when they sing,

(03:37):
their otherworldly voices are so beautiful, even if we're only
hearing them with the with the the subconscious mind, it
just forces us to be silent. It just it just
chills us to silence. What I love about this is
that apparently they start their heavenly do wopping like twenty
minutes after the hour, and that's why we would instinctively
falls silence that we could hear. Are the clocks in

(03:58):
heaven like twenty men? It's slower than they're singing at
the top of the hour, or do they they They're
they're being patient, you know, waiting for us to be
quiet so they can sing, and then they give up
and they're like, all right, let's just start the show, right.
Is there a heavenly course of angels for each time zone?
How is this working. Yeah, and I never I don't
know when I think of the angels, I mean, when
do they have time to sing? They have a lot
of death instruction to lay out on mankind. It seems

(04:20):
like it's a pretty busy work schedule. Why are there
enough angels just to stand around in sting. I like
to imagine it's the cherubic um, like fat baby angels
that are doing this. Oh well, okay, I can imagine
that that the bones that are in stein Mart. You know,
they're like a wooden cut out with their hands underneath
their their chins because the original cherubs and uh and

(04:43):
when you really go back into the mythology, they're terrifying.
They're they're beastual human hybrids that that are there to
lay waste. So and but who's to say they don't
have a nice singing voice. I'm talking about the cute
version here. Now, another superstition here is that because Abraham
Lincoln was killed at seven twenty pm, that we again,

(05:09):
somehow instinctively will commemorate the death of Lincoln at twenty
past the hour, which this one has all sorts of
wholely logic in it. And if you if I had
not heard this yesterday. If I had not read about
this online yesterday, I would think you were making this
up right now, because this is even crazier to me

(05:30):
than the angel idea. Because for the angel idea to work, Okay,
I have to I have to accept that there are angels.
I have to buy into the supernatural and admit that
their supernatural beings out there that are singing and causing
people to go silent, and they're beying some sort of
crazy schedule. Okay, I can buy into that on some level.
I can buy into that. But to say that Abraham

(05:51):
Lincoln's death resonated so strongly in human culture that it
causes everyone to fall silent twenty minutes after the hour
every hour apparently, And and then you have to ask questions, well,
then does it is it only in the in the
United States? What happens if you were pro slavery? You
know what happens if you're just you just don't have

(06:13):
a good understanding of history. Or is it something so
powerful that it moves forward and backward in time. Well,
that that was the thing I was going to say.
In a linear way like that also supposes that before
Lincoln died there was no group hush, right, Like there
was just a continuum of conversation and no one ever paused.

(06:35):
But we were coming up with a different theory here earlier,
and I guess you could call it the theory, yes,
because that's another twenty minute after um trope that comes up, right,
is the time to to consume cannabis? Right, And so
the idea there maybe is that after the consumption, it

(06:56):
takes about twenty minutes for the wall of stone ery
to set in, in which the group hush becomes apparent.
So people are actually lighting up at four as opposed
to four. They lit up at four, and at four
twenty is when the crushing silence of stonerism set in. Okay,
all right, I could see that that possibly being so

(07:17):
as you think it could be the cause of the phenomenon,
because another read would be that it stems from the phenomenon,
like suddenly everybody's quiet, and so out of that social
anxiety they light up. You know, these are just amusing,
These are mid morning musings over coffee. Probably the better
explanation is that it's just a natural arc to our narratives,

(07:40):
and maybe twenty minutes into a conversation we've kind of
plumb the depths of a joke or a topic. Um.
There is another explanation, however, that is called the protection postulate. Yeah,
and this one is pretty good. This one is significantly
less crazy though also, uh, you know, not completely proven out,
but this is the idea that you know, again, take

(08:01):
who're going to travel back in time to primordial age.
We're out there around the fire, around the fire, yeah,
and we're talking about our day at work, killing animals
and foraging for food and uh, and then a hush
falls over us because we have to stop and listen
to for the the sound of approaching predators coming to
eat us at our fire, or the the or approaching

(08:24):
rival tribes people coming to slay us in the night.
You know what, I think there may be something to that.
I have to say. I think there's something to an
arc of a conversation. And I think there's something to
a group falling silent as a sort of instinctive measure
to gauge what's going on outside that environment, because because
you know, we've all had those conversations that are so good,

(08:45):
you're just completely wrapped up in it, and you're gonna
kind of reach the height where you have to fall
down again. You have to realize that I'm just I'm
standing here in the room and who's kind of awkward
actually because they don't really know this person and I
was just really drilling into them with my whole diet
tribe of about the Ring movies or something. Yeah, and
now they're crouched in a corner and the silence has
fallen over the room. I love that though. I love

(09:07):
when the silence falls and everybody's kind of like nervously
titters and there's that one person who's like, whoa ye,
gotten quiet, and then they call off the awkward silence.
In any case, all the silence leaves us, uh with
something that feels, you know, very intimate, but sometimes very isolating.
It's like this bubble that surrounds us. And so we're

(09:27):
going to talk about this today, this idea that within
silence there's a merit to it and then there's also
kind of, um, a demerit I guess you could say
to it. Yeah. It kind of calls back to our
episode A Splendid Isolation that we did back in the day,
where we talked about how a little isolation is great,
a lot of isolation not so great, you can have

(09:49):
the same as the and we encounter a similar situation
with silence. So let's start off by discussing the merits
of silence, the benefits of silence, blissful silence. Well, and
we see this a lot in terms of education, people
exploring the idea of silence and reflection um as tools
in the classroom. And if you look at Helen E.

(10:11):
Lee's work, she's a research fellow in educational theory at
University of Stirling. She posits that classrooms silence really helps
college students to consider, retain, and reflect on her lectures.
And she actually brings an egg timer into the classroom
with her and sets it for three minute intervals twice

(10:32):
during the class. And I thought about that. I was like,
you know, that is actually, I think a very helpful
concept because anyone who's ever been in a lecture, any
sort of situation, well there's a ton of information coming
at them. You can't help your but you know, listen
to your brain, try to react to that information, draw
conclusions and connections. But if you're just trying to keep

(10:53):
up with the material itself, it's hard to really let
all of that coalesce. And indeed, I mean just thinking
back to say, some of the World Science Festival panels
that that we've attended. You know that you're you're being
hit with so many great concepts in different ways of
looking at history or the scientific world, and you just
need to stop and digest it. But instead you're moving on,

(11:15):
You're rolling under the next come and you just like,
I really hope that I got my notes down on
that one and I can check all this later. Yeah,
Philip our Golden, he's a researcher. He says, parents and
teachers tell kids a hundred times a day to pay attention,
but we never teach them how. And so what some
of these schools have been doing is they've been drawing
on the work of John cabot Zen, who is a

(11:36):
molecular biologist who pioneered the secular use of mindfulness at
the University of Massachusetts UH, initially to help medical patients
cope with chronic pain and anxiety and depression. So what
you see is his mindfulness work beginning to be used
in K through twelve schools here in the United States.

(11:57):
And the idea is that those kids have a little
bit of time um to focus on what they call
a design element, which is solitude and reflection. And even
my kid in kindergarten does this in her classroom. But
you'll see it at different levels as you go up
through the grades. The degree to which some of these

(12:18):
kids will actually engage in mindfulness. Now, it's worth noting
when we look at mindfulness and meditation some of the
core health benefits that have been proven out in studies
to the lowest blood pressure and it lessons agitation, which
which even though that those are concepts that definitely have
a role in the treatment of ailments, they also have
a key role in education and reaching students, particularly students

(12:42):
who may be themselves agitated. Yeah, and um, this is
we've kind of touched on this before, that students aren't
getting educated in how to live their lives per se.
That's largely left up to guardians and parents. Um, so
you can't really treat a kid's depression, but you can't
give them a couple of tools to work through that anxiety,

(13:04):
say in school, and be able to focus themselves better
on schoolwork. There's something called the Mindful Life Projects, a
nonprofit that's based out of Richmond, California, and it teaches
mindfulness in yoga and therapeutic art and hip hop performing
arts to elementary students in underserved schools and communities, and

(13:24):
all the schools have seen drops in detention and referrals.
But in one school, eighteen kids eighteen accounted for eighty
two per cent of the suspensions, and at the beginning
of their mindfulness training, those kids were suspended sixty two
times in the first trimester. Now after three trimesters of
this mindful practice, that rate had dropped to twenty. Which

(13:49):
think about these kids, Um, they obviously are acting out,
they're they're exhibiting certain behaviors because they are agitated, because
there are some root problems going on. To know that
exty two times down to twenty was the drop and
just having these moments of silence and reflection is really
powerful stuff. And that's just this really tiny corner of

(14:10):
this pocket of the educational world. Yeah, I mean, certainly
when you start thinking about I mean really all all
ages of children, but especially middle school, high school, there's
so much angst. You know, there's so much to to
distract yourself with in the in the even when you're
in the classroom. That being able to just stop everything

(14:30):
and still everything and then kind of teach in the aftermath,
in the wake of that silence, that that would be
incredibly beneficial. Yeah, and we've talked about how behavior has
this kind of group contagion quality to it. So if
if that's the sort of thing that you're doing in
the classroom, that and everybody is stilling themselves, then you

(14:51):
began to see that positive ripple effect. Now here's another
study that that consent to the use of silence in
the classroom and fronment. And this just comes down to, uh,
not so much the noise inside the mind mind, but
the noise outside the head and even outside the school. UH.
Two thousand five study from the University of London aimed

(15:13):
to understand the psychological impact that noise might have, and
in this experiment, researcher studied children in eighty nine schools. Now,
some of these schools were located next to airports, while
others were not. Chill. They found that children exposed to
high levels of aircraft noise had much poorer reading skills
than children in quieter neighborhoods. UH and the researchers use
the term cognitive fatigue to describe why reading skills might

(15:36):
suffer in children living in noisy environments. So in these conditions,
their long term memory is interrupted and they simply stopped
paying attention. So we see the importance again not only
the of some inner silence, some inner peace, so you
can actually digest the information coming at you can actually
shut out some of the angst and take it in.
But also, you know, we're we're organisms that exists in

(16:00):
a world of sensory bombardment. And if you can cut
out some of that bombardment, if you can cut out
some of the environmental noise coming at you from trains
and planes and whatever, then then that can have an effect.
You can take just a little bit off of the
cognitive load so that you can handle some more of
the concepts. And that's kind of interesting because you can
then apply that to what Felicity Miller, who is a

(16:23):
senior lecturer in Science, Communication and Imperial College, says when
it comes to people in the sciences and their intellectual progress,
Because what she's saying is that there is a big
initiative to enforce interaction. Yes, and we've talked about this too,
and open office spaces trend all over really yeah, and

(16:44):
you're just gonna spark and you're just gonna collaborate all
the time, and the genius will arrive. It comes from
a good place because we thought we've also talked about
the importance of interaction, the importance of collaboration. How the
coffee houses of old were, you know, a place that
sparked innovation because for drinking coffee and sharing ideas together.
But you can't take that to the extreme and say,

(17:04):
all right, we're gonna do that everywhere. Every office is
going to be a coffee house of ideas, every classroom,
every laboratory. You know, you just can't it. One size
is not fit all. Yeah, And that's what Mailer is saying,
especially in the academic setting. And she says, hey, you
have to have some sort of silence and solitude to
really make all of those ideas coalesced into something meaningful.

(17:28):
And to make her point, she says, hey, look at
Sir Isaac Newton. She said that he was a proponent
of isolated working, shutting himself away in his rooms, publishing reluctantly,
and restricting his audience to only those he thought capable
of appreciating his work. You know, he also had cat
doors so the cats could come in and out without
this disrupting him will flaps another reason why he was

(17:51):
a genius. And uh. She says that you know, if
you look at physicists today, they don't quite have that
level of solid two in silence, and that they do
best by striking a balance between silence and communication. And
she gives a couple of other examples. Wrener Heisenberg, she says,
retreated to the island of legal Land to escape hay

(18:12):
fever and the constant chatter of his colleague and mentor,
Neils Boor, who knew that that the quantum theorist with
such chatter box. And she's not to be confused with
Lego Land, of course, the horrible place to go and
try and work. Yes, Heligo Land isn't not Lego Land. Um.
She says that it was here that Heisenberg was able
to reflect on these discussions that he had with bar

(18:35):
and laid down the basic foundation of quantum mechanics. And
another great example, Peter Higgs has claimed that he would
not have been able to complete his Noble prize winning
work in this current research environment. Uh. You know, he
insists that the peace and quiet that he had in
the sixties, Uh, in order to to actually tackle his

(18:58):
work he just would not be able to have today.
So that's interesting to think of as well. And so
the idea is that if all we're doing is engaging
and engaging and engaging, which is really easy for us
to do in this day and age, particularly with social media, um,
then we're missing a key part of reflecting on our
experiences and then the formation of new ideas with those

(19:18):
novel associations. That we have to have that silence in
that time. And you could argue that, hey, you can,
My brain doesn't when I sleep. Yeah, but as we
have talked about before, we're like probably less efficient at
sleep now in this day and age and we ever
have been before. Yeah. Yeah, if you're falling back on
sleep alone for your information processing, then you're really welking

(19:40):
a fine line. You're gonna fall. All right, we're back.
We're talking about silence and the role of silence blaze
in our lives in our world. So far, we've talked
about the importance of silence when it comes to u
quieting inner turmoil, quieting outer turmoil, its effects on our

(20:04):
ability to learn in school, our ability to get things
done at work, to tackle new concepts, and turn them
around and and ultimately work on an inventive new concepts.
But there's a different kind of silence that people experience,
and and it's more in a social situation, but it
can actually color um our experiences and cultural experiences. In fact,

(20:28):
it can color history. And what I'm talking about is
the spiral of silence. This is an interesting theory that
comes to us from German political science. Elizabeth Noel Newman
UH developus in nineteen seventy four, and basically the idea
here is that people have the tendency to remain silent
when they feel that their views are in opposition to

(20:49):
the majority of view on a subject. And it's very interesting,
of course that this comes out of Germany in nineteen
seventy four, you know, definitely coming in in the wake
of the Second World War, in the wake of the
rise and fall of the Nazis, in the wake of
the Holocaust, where you have you know, individuals inside and
outside of of of the German people asking the question, know,

(21:11):
how how could this have happened? How does how does
this extreme UH take on global affairs, and how does
this become the norm? How does all of this rise
to power? Right and and so this is in a
way an attempt to look at that, you know, just
to to say, well, you know, why why didn't people
speak out when when there were these extreme opinions in

(21:35):
their midst Why did they remain silent instead of saying,
you know, that's actually a really dangerous idea. Yeah, and
the the the extreme actions that in sued in This
is what Newman was predicating her model on. And the
model is based on three premises. One that people have
a quasi statistical organ a kind of sixth cents or
the ability, I could say, the ability to read the

(21:55):
room to figure out what the prevailing in public opinion is.
Two that people have a fear of isolation and they
know what behaviors will increase their likelihood of being socially isolated.
And three, people are reticent to express their minority views
because of that fear of isolation. And she says that
the spiral is created or reinforced when someone in the

(22:18):
perceived opinion majority speaks out really confidently in support of
the majority opinion, and then of course those in the
minority kind of recede to the shadows. What I love
about this the theory is that we can pretty much
everybody can plug their own experiences into this, unless you're
one of those individuals that I can scarcely imagine who

(22:39):
is always in the majority. Uh you know who is
who's who has never had an opinion that differs from
those around you. Um, for instance, you're you're hanging around
some people you don't really know, and uh, they're talking
about a movie that you really like, except they hate it.
You may not feel comfortable saying, hey, actually I really
like that movie because of X, Y and Z, because

(23:00):
as you are, you're already uh um outnumbered by those
who dislike it. Yeah, And I'm sure everybody has been
in a social situation situation before in which your minority
view is how old and you don't necessarily want to
speak out to the majority, even if you feel like
what the those opinions that they're expressing are terrible, you know,

(23:22):
because again there is this idea that the majority is there.
You might be socially ostracized and you see this like
from say, you know, just your cultural taste to something
as terrible as the Holocaust. As Newman was trying to
figure out, like how do these what sort of models
in place here to to keep people under wraps. And

(23:43):
so I think that's why this idea or theory is
so powerful, because it sure does show how people tend
to express themselves or not express themselves. And one of
the perceived weaknesses of this theory is that you have
minority views that are expressed like super exceedingly expressed by

(24:05):
some members of the group, which I guess you could
say would then become known to the group and then
that minority view would be expressed and cancel out this
idea of the spiral of silence. So that's that's one
idea here that kind of goes against the model. Another
idea is that the Internet, the Great Internet, is leveling

(24:27):
the playing field. There's all these different pockets of um
opinions out there, and therefore they should all be expressed equally, right,
But no, that is not the case. So that is
sort of an outmoded idea of one of the criticisms
leveled at the spiral of silence, because it turns out

(24:50):
that the Internet is actually, at least in one study,
mimicking the model for the spiral of silence. You know,
before we get into that, I also have to add
it in my own experience when I find myself in
a group that's you know, among people that are not
my group. You know, Um, I'm often don't engage with them,

(25:10):
like first, I feel like some other reasons as well,
like and a lot of it comes down to, you know,
me versus other. So it's like, I know that that
you guys have a different opinion on things than me,
and I am not going to try and convince you
because you are the other and why would I. You know,
I know that I cannot convince you, and I don't
want to convince you because you're basically a different species

(25:31):
than me. You know. It's kind of it's like if
I hear some people talking about how great football is.
I don't particularly like football, but why am I going
to even chime in on that conversation? What's what's my
possible agenda and contributing and creating some sort of artificial
argument over that. This is why common ground is so
incredibly important, this ability for for each of us to
find that common ground. So you like wrestling, Yeah, And

(25:54):
this is another example, like that's something that I often
don't bring up. I generally don't think it up because
we are going to look down on me and it's
a it's a it's a long uh. I have a
hard time understanding myself why I like it so well,
But I guess my point is is that I think
in these conversations and the coming common ground, there there's
some crossover, and so there's these opportunities for humans to

(26:17):
understand one another, which is largely what we try to do,
is to find that common ground. But when we don't, again,
it's this idea that we're going to be socially ostracized.
And a lot of us don't think much about that. Okay,
whatever many socially ostracized, but really think about I mean,
the ability of the human species to have existed for
as long as it has has largely been because of cooperation,

(26:40):
all right. In cooperation means finding that common ground, but
also gauging what the group thinks and choosing your battles,
you know, and and sometimes sometimes it is just a
matter of choosing your battles and saying, why would I
possibly bring up something at the dinner table that I'm
going to fight with my in laws about, you know
why that that would be silly? But then also they're
getting examples. Why would I bring it up if it

(27:03):
could get me ostracized or killed, you know, and certainly
there have been countless examples of that throughout history, when
someone has a differing religious opinion, differing sexual orientation or
gender orientation, etcetera. And that's currently at work in our
modern world as well. Right, that's not just the stuff
of days gone by. All Right, Let's look at this

(27:24):
Pew Research Center study. They wanted to see how hot
button topics were being expressed on the Internet, specifically in
social media. So they selected the topic of Edward Snowden
revealing mass surveillance by the n s A to look
at how opinions are being parsed. And the reports author said, quote,
we selected the issue because other surveys at the same

(27:45):
time we're fielding this poll that we're fielding. This poll
showed that Americans were divided over whether the n s
A contractors leaks about surveillance were justified and whether the
surveillance policy itself was a good or bad idea. And
so the Pew Research Foundation found that one sort of
a percent of people said that the release of classified

(28:06):
information harmed public interests, by said it served public interests.
So you have a topic basically here that everybody has
an opinion on So the Research Center's Internet Project found
that not only were the one thousand, eight hundred one
respondent's less willing to discuss the Snowden n s a
story in social media than they were in person, face

(28:28):
to face, but they also determined that average Facebook or
Twitter users were especially less likely to voice their concerns
during real life interactions if they felt that their friends
or their followers would not support their viewpoint. So, again,
this is just one study and it's relatively small, it's

(28:49):
one topic. It would be really interesting to see this
in other areas like gun control or abortion or and
many other topics that are lightning around topics um. But
you do, at least in this instance, see that model
at play where people do not want to be socially
ostracized even though they have an opinion on this. Yeah,
and then the media plays a huge ro on it.

(29:11):
There was another Pew study that looked at Gulf War
and US support for that war, and they found that
those who watched television and perceived that the public supported
the war were more likely to support the war thenselves, um,
which which again plays into this idea that that if
you know even if we don't agree with something ourselves,

(29:33):
if we feel like the majority is directed that way,
then that cons the way our opinion as well. Now Snowdon,
I mean the thing about snow Snowdon, though, is that
I feel like it at the heart of that, you
do have a a difficult figure to get behind, you know,
and you have these you have these different polls, like
this whole topic is is is is made more complicated

(29:53):
to just because you have such a such a polarizing
figure at the center of it. I mean, you have
the personality of the individual thrown in there, you have
elements of of alleged treason, you have you have you
have you know, criticisms of how he handled it, and
then but then you still have lots of damning evidence

(30:14):
about the use of domestic surveillance and another repelations. Yes,
Snowdon is a polarizing figure. And I'm not going to
say like Snowdon and Julian Massage or apples apples because
they are not. But here you have another person who is,
you know, essentially leaking secrets of governments, who is a
very enigmatic character and not polarizing, but polarizing in a

(30:36):
more of like a hero anti hero way as opposed
to Snowdon is more a little bit like people aren't
quite sure I think about his character, and so, um,
I think maybe you bring that up because that could
certainly color the results of how or why people want
to express themselves about the topic. Right, Yeah, and in
the labels we end up putting on those individuals. I mean,

(30:58):
we could go on and on just player comparing those
two figures that are both problematic in their own right.
But but what to do with all of this information? Well,
I think it's just to consider again the nature of
silence and what it's doing for us as human beings.
And um, I think that Susan Santag has a great

(31:21):
thought about it. Um. This is from her nineteen sixty
nine essay The Aesthetics of Silence. She's rights, silence remains
inescapably a form of speech. So it's sort of one
of those things that, yeah, sometimes we feel like and
not expressing our opinion that we're removing ourselves from the situation. However,

(31:44):
it just means that we're allowing one voice to dampen another.
And as Newman tried to explore the ways in which
actions spiral out of the spiral of silence. Indeed, and
you know, I wanna advise everyone day to keep this
thick in mind when you listen in to our next
um episode of Stuff to Build Your Mind, which we'll

(32:04):
get into the area of Nasty Stereo, where again we're
dealing with how we behave within a community, how we
think within a community, and uh, it's like all things human,
it gets so so complex and strange. Indeed it does,
especially with yes, yeah, all right. You can find us

(32:26):
in a bunch of places, mainly Stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That's right, that's the mother ship. That's
where you will find every podcast episode. Occasionally we get
an email or a Facebook message where someone says, hey,
I was looking for this episode or uh, you know,
and it doesn't seem to be on iTunes. Well, all
the episodes are at the website. So if you've ever
heard us mentioned of an old an old episode you're
just curious what we've covered over the years, that's where

(32:48):
you will find all of them. And you also find videos,
you'll find blog posts, and you'll find links out to
our various social media accounts. And if you have some
thoughts about a spiral of silence or even the arrats
of silence. You can send those thoughts via email to
blow the mind at how stuff works dot com. For

(33:10):
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com.