Leadership When Silence Isn’t Apathy — It’s a Direction

I have been sitting with a question that I suspect many of us are quietly holding.

Why are so many of today’s well-known thought leaders not speaking directly about what’s happening in the world right now?

War.
Crime.
Political theatre.
Moral confusion.
Rising fear.
Hard lines are being drawn everywhere.

People like Michael Singer, Eckhart Tolle, Richard Rohr, and Michael Neill, to name a few, voices that have shaped the inner lives of millions, are noticeably restrained when it comes to the daily headlines. No fiery denunciations. No constant commentary. No rallying cries.

At first glance, it can feel like an absence. Or avoidance. Or even indifference.

But the more I’ve sat with it, the more it’s become clear to me:
There may be a reason for the silence.

And it’s not disengagement.

Its direction.

Going upstream instead of shouting downstream

Most public discourse today happens downstream.

It reacts.
It amplifies.
It names villains.
It feeds outrage.
It rewards certainty.

Downstream thinking is loud, fast, and emotionally contagious. And while it feels productive, it rarely settles anything. In fact, it often hardens positions and deepens fragmentation.

There is evidence of this at every corner.

Many wisdom-based teachers choose not to live there.

Not because they don’t care — but because they’re pointing upstream, to where experience is actually being created.

Upstream is quieter.
Upstream is less dramatic.
Upstream doesn’t trend well on social media.

But upstream is where perception forms.
Where thought takes shape.
Where fear becomes conviction.
Where conscience either awakens — or gets buried under certainty.

That realization didn’t arrive for me all at once. It came as a slow turning, followed by a surprising discovery.

A different way of seeing the problem

I recently came across a TEDx talk by Tom Chi. I didn’t find it because I was looking for political commentary. I found it because I was looking for orientation.

What he points to stopped me in my tracks.

Not because it was flashy. Tom Chi is not flashy.
Not because it was ideological.
But because it was quietly radical, that always gets my attention.

One of his central insights is this:

“Knowing is the enemy of learning.”

At first, that sounds counterintuitive. We tend to associate knowing with intelligence, competence, and leadership. But Tom makes a simple and devastating distinction.

Knowledge is useful.
Knowing is a stance.

“Danger, Will Robinson!” ~ Robot, Lost in Space (1960’s)

When we are “knowing,” we are no longer curious. We are no longer open. We are no longer learning. We are applying what we already believe to what we see — and filtering out everything else.

And here’s the uncomfortable part:

A world full of people who know what’s going on is a world full of people who cannot learn their way forward.

When certainty replaces conscience

Tom Chi goes further. He describes how quickly we collapse reality into labels.

Republican.
Liberal.
Good.
Bad.
Victim.
Villain.

In a tenth of a second, we assign a noun — and we stop seeing the living process in front of us.

That habit doesn’t just limit understanding.
It erodes compassion.
It flattens conscience.
It makes moral complexity feel dangerous instead of necessary.

And this is where I think many thought leaders are deliberately stepping back.

Because once we are trapped in certainty, everything that follows feels justified.
Including outrage.
Including cruelty.
Including silence disguised as righteousness.

Reality, not abstraction

One of Tom Chi’s most helpful questions is this:

“Is this reality — or is this an abstraction?”

Reality is alive and not fixed.
It’s nuanced.
It’s unfolding and fluid.
It changes when we stay present with it.

Abstractions are fixed.
They’re portable.
They travel fast.
They feel safe because they don’t ask anything of us.

Much of today’s discourse is abstraction piled on abstraction, argued by people who have never slowed down long enough to ask whether they’re responding to life, or to a mental construct they inherited or worse, created.

And that’s where the upstream work lives.

Silence as a form of leadership

Seen through this lens, silence isn’t passivity.

It can be a restraint.
It can be discernment.
It can be a refusal to add noise to an already flooded channel.

Some leaders choose to tend to the conditions rather than argue about the conclusions.

They’re pointing us back to the ground beneath the argument.
Back to how minds settle.
Back to how learning resumes.
Back to how wisdom actually shows up, quietly, and often after certainty loosens its grip.

That doesn’t mean moral clarity disappears.

It means it arises from a steadier place.

Where this series is headed

This first reflection isn’t a conclusion. It’s an orientation.

In the next two parts, I hope to explore:

• Conscience in a world addicted to labels and abstractions.
• Courage that stays human by working directly in reality, not theory.

Not to bypass what’s happening.
Not to excuse harm.
But to see more clearly where meaningful leadership actually begins.

For now, I’ll leave you with a simple, unsettling question, one I am now asking myself daily:

Am I responding to what’s real… or to what I already “know”?

Part 2 coming soon.

Much Love,

Here is Tom Chi’s Tedx Talk: