We Don't Silence Flat Earthers
Flat earthers are welcome to do their experiments and post them to youtube. Nobody silences them. Their experiments prove the roundness of the earth.
This is how the self-assured view dissent. There's no reaction necessary. The dissent can thrive to be mocked. The self-assured give a chuckle and dismiss baseless dissent on sight.
The self-assured are busy with a life they've confidently chosen for themselves.
The insecure obsess themselves with silencing dissent. The insecure fear what the dissidents may reveal, because they fear their own position. The insecure thrive on spreading their fear—their only courage is in being the least-afraid one. The blowback of their silencing, the fear and outrage it inspires, contributes to their aims.
The self-assured, in light of this, are busy with a life they've confidently chosen for themselves.
The self-assured are rarely dissidents—even if they set themselves counter to a normative phenomenon, it is most often to prove something in particular, rather than to DIS-prove a harmful norm.
Fear is a tone; allowing it to rule my actions or consciousness or self-concept means I live in a scary world.
If I take a position, I'm bound to feel insecure in it now and then.
If I fear a position I see in the world and seek to disprove it, I move in a tone of fear, in a scary world.
Freeze is my favorite fear response, for how easy it is to convert to stillness.
To live is to take up positions, to lose them, to win ground. When this feels scary, I come to stillness rather than acting. My actions are about the positions I take, NOT about my fear about what happens if I don't, who is against me, or how I might be getting it wrong.
Fear is guaranteed to arise. I allow it to move me to stillness, and from there take up the position of valuing my fear. This is the way love enrobes fear, returning fear to its place as an emotion, meeting it from the tone of love.
Love alienates NOTHING, not even fear.
Love silences nothing; love listens longer and curiouser.
