Silence creates a void in the mind. Into such a vessel—one with holes, even bottomless—every piece of the world’s garbage can be poured. While it is only in silence that one can hear the voice of God (as St. Augustine wrote in Confessions: “Truth dwells in the depths of the soul,” pointing to silence as the path to God), the act of withholding truth distances us greatly from Him. It is such an insidious sin that we may not even realize when we cross the boundary beyond which there is no return. St. Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 109, calls silence in the face of truth a sin of omission if it stems from fear.
Silence allows us to discern truth from falsehood, but what good is that if spiritual silence in the face of lies is pure evil? For example, John Chrysostom, in his homilies, condemned silence toward injustice as a betrayal of truth. Yet in today’s world, lies have so seamlessly blended into the “gray area” that they’ve become imperceptible. Withholding truth blocks it, pretends it doesn’t exist, and denies it the chance to reach broader waters (Noelle-Neumann’s 1974 “spiral of silence” studies show how fear of being in the minority suppresses truth).
In reality, silence is the greatest censor. All mechanisms can be circumvented, but not silence. It is a quiet and highly effective killer of truth. The world has taught people short reactions to short external stimuli (a 2017 Royal Society for Public Health report confirms that social media weakens concentration). One might even notice—perhaps as a mathematical rule—that the dumber the message or social media video, the more reactions it gets (Vosoughi et al., 2018, Science, prove that falsehood spreads faster than truth). Stupidity loves to support stupidity—it’s an undeniable fact. And behind it hides a mass of people wearing masks of wisdom but with the souls of clowns.
Addiction to social media has become a fanaticism born of the fear of losing access to it (neurobiologist Kotlewska, 2023, compares this to the dopamine mechanism of gambling). Paradoxically, we live in an era of unprecedented access to information, yet our intelligence is declining—and this decline is directly proportional to the flood of information reaching us (Eppler and Mengis, 2004, confirm that information overload leads to cognitive stress). No system can censor everything, but our fear aids it—the fear that leads us to withhold the truth we sometimes manage to glimpse (Ecker, 2022, notes that fear of social pressure fosters self-censorship).
Just a few years ago, news that an article, film, or book had been “top-down” blocked sparked a surge of interest. Now, however, fear of the system’s reaction has led to convenient silence. People think they’re neutral, but they’re mistaken—both morally and socially. This is nothing less than being trained to wade through shades of blackness, which is evil. As for the Church, Pope Pius X’s 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis also warns that silence in the face of error is a betrayal of faith.
When you remain silent about the truth you know, a conflict arises in your mind between what you know and what you do (or fail to do). Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory (1957) states that such a state causes psychological tension. Avoiding truth—e.g., through silence—may be an attempt to reduce this discomfort, but it comes at the cost of suppressing your conscience. You might start rationalizing your silence (“It won’t change anything,” “It’s not worth sticking my neck out”), leading to an erosion of psychological integrity. As I wrote earlier, silence is a “bottomless vessel”—psychology might liken it to an emotional void that forms when you avoid confronting what you know.
By avoiding truth and staying silent, you effectively tolerate evil, which has consequences. The mechanism of repression—pushing uncomfortable thoughts or feelings into the subconscious—has long been known in psychology. In our case, the truth “is in your head,” but silence acts as a filter, letting you pretend it’s not there. Studies on moral stress (Litz et al., 2009) show that such suppression leads to guilt, shame, and lowered self-esteem, even if you’re unaware of it. This is the “insidious sin”—the habit of silence becomes automatic, but your psyche pays the price.
Silence in the face of evil you recognize can lead to chronic stress. Research on witnesses to injustice (the bystander effect, Darley and Latané, 1968) shows that failing to react to evil despite seeing it heightens feelings of helplessness and alienation. In the context of social media, this effect intensifies—people see evil (e.g., lies, injustice) but fear of the system’s reaction keeps them silent. Jamieson and Capella’s work (2015) demonstrates that chronic avoidance of confronting reality correlates with depressive and anxious symptoms.
Fear is the engine of silence. From a social psychology perspective (e.g., Asch’s conformity studies, 1951), fear of social rejection or punishment leads to self-censorship. It’s an adaptive mechanism, but a costly one—studies on psychological stress (Baumeister, 1997) show that constantly suppressing your beliefs raises cortisol levels, the stress hormone, negatively affecting memory, concentration, and emotional balance. “Silence is black”—not a neutral gray, but a destructive process.
The world teaches short reactions, and classical thought becomes incomprehensible. Cognitive psychology (e.g., Kahneman’s 2011 Thinking, Fast and Slow) distinguishes between fast thinking (System 1) and slow, reflective thinking (System 2). Social media trains us in the former, weakening our capacity for deeper analysis. Studies from 2023 (University of Munich) confirm that short video formats reduce prospective memory and the ability to solve complex problems. True, classical, timeless thought is: too difficult, too simple, too complicated. Too difficult because it demands focus; too simple because what’s obvious is no longer obvious in shades of gray; and too complicated because it may carry a context no one notices anymore. St. Bonaventure, in Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, wrote that wisdom requires mental asceticism, which today’s noise contradicts. People can no longer afford complex thoughts. Silence toward truth may be a side effect here—a mind accustomed to superficiality lacks the strength or motivation to defend it.
Silence robs you of influence over reality, leading to learned helplessness (Seligman, 1972). You have information in your head, but not voicing it makes you feel passive, lowering your self-esteem.
Carl Rogers (1961), in his personality theory, says that a lack of congruence between what you feel (truth in your head) and what you express (silence) leads to a breakdown of authenticity. This is the “bottomless vessel”—your psyche loses its footing.
Moral injury: A term from clinical psychology (Litz et al., 2009) describes the trauma when your actions (or inaction) clash with your values. Tolerating evil through silence can cause such an injury, leading to long-term psychological suffering.
Psychology confirms that silence toward truth isn’t just avoiding external conflict—it’s a process that destroys you from within. The information “is in your head,” but failing to process or voice it turns into a burden—an emptiness. Fear becomes the key factor here: it paralyzes but also addicts, because silence feels easier than action. In effect, you tolerate evil, which, in psychological terms, isn’t neutral—it’s an active choice that reverberates in your psyche with stress, guilt, and a loss of meaning.
Silencing truth has nothing to do with the silence your soul craves—it’s rather the scream of a tormented conscience, full of pain, struggling to keep a person alive but battling a fear that, like cancer, consumes the entire soul. Fear of rejection by the majority. Fear that demands you hide the truth—first in big, important matters, then in smaller ones, down to the tiniest daily trifles. A fear that slowly but effectively kills—first your conscience and soul, and later, increasingly through depression, your body too.
You might also fall into thoughtlessness, as I described earlier—but can you then say you’re truly alive? Or are you just trash on the world’s landfill? A thoughtless, empty container into which media and propaganda dump whatever they want, because you won’t react anyway—unless they allow or order you to. Like the leftist fanatics who, just recently, loved electric cars but got the memo “Musk is bad,” so now they burn and destroy them. Soulless, mindless machines incapable of independent thought.
So ask yourself: Who are you? Try to break free from this closed circle of evil. The mirror of your soul will tell you the truth—only stop silencing it and look into that mirror.
Small steps—first read, listen, and think. Small steps. Then, slowly, everything will come naturally; a pure soul will guide you. Fight!
ARKADIUSZ NIEWOLSKI
Catholic during the Great Apostasy 
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