Imagine sitting in a meeting where a decision is being made that feels profoundly wrong. You feel a tightening in your chest, a dissonance between the charts on the screen and the reality of the people those charts represent. When you look for a way to voice this, you find only corporate jargon and softened edges. To speak plainly risks appearing “unprofessional” or “emotional.” To stay silent is to accept a kind of sedation.
What is missing in these moments is not a better argument. It is permission to speak at all.
For a long time, conscious suffering existed but had no legitimate language. If something hurt, the fault was assumed personal—weakness, malfunction, failure to adapt. Today we face a different silence. We are permitted to speak, but only in approved vocabularies that ensure nothing disruptive is actually heard. When raw experience gets translated into sanitized categories, we trade urgency for palatability.
There is a different posture available: the right to express what passes through consciousness without claiming authority over it—without deciding prematurely whether it is insight or distortion.
The Mind as Sensor
A foundational error in how we view ourselves is the assumption that the mind must be either sovereign or corrupted, a fortress or a hijacked vessel. Reality is messier.
Human consciousness is permeable. Ideas, emotions, and impulses pass through it continuously—some from lived experience, others from social conditioning, trauma, or simple imitation. To claim every thought as personally yours is madness. To claim none is dissociation.
The honest position is the middle path: not everything that passes through me belongs to me, but it can still be spoken.
A Geiger counter does not apologize for clicking when it detects radiation. The click is not a judgment; it is data. Similarly, a person should not have to apologize for registering dissonance or pain. The report is not a conclusion. It is a phenomenon.
Expression as Exposure
To express what passes through the mind is often mistaken for an act of dominance—as if by speaking, you are trying to recruit agreement or impose belief. This confusion arises when we conflate expression with authority.
Here, expression serves a different function. It is exposure.
By placing a perception into shared space, it becomes available for examination. What is genuine can be tested. What is distorted can be traced. Silence, by contrast, protects distortion by keeping it private, where it can fester into shame.
This is not the presentation of conclusions. It is the presentation of phenomena: This is what appears to me. Let us examine what survives the light.
That stance does not claim purity. It invites discernment.
Why Saying “It Hurts” Comes First
Before we can debate causes, something more basic must occur: the articulation of experience.
For decades, many forms of suffering were unspeakable—not because they were rare, but because naming them threatened existing arrangements of power and normality. Silence was framed as maturity.
Reclaiming the ability to say it hurts is a declaration of epistemic dignity. It breaks enforced isolation. It reveals that certain pains are patterned rather than purely personal. It restores the person as a witness rather than a defect.
Attribution—the “why” and “who”—can wait. The articulation of the “what” cannot.
The Geometry of Numbness
Within many institutions, there is a persistent elevation of individuals who combine high confidence with limited self-examination. This is not necessarily malice, but a capacity for what might be called high-functioning dissociation—the ability to execute complex strategies while remaining numb to the human friction those strategies create.
These traits are often rewarded structurally because they enable decisiveness and maintain momentum. They include certainty without curiosity, instrumental reasoning that pursues objectives without asking whether they serve human flourishing, and immunity to the kind of self-doubt that might complicate authority.
The violence here is a violence of friction. Policies are designed as smooth geometric shapes. Human lives remain irregular and organic. When the smooth policy is forced onto the irregular life, the human is often crushed. An authority figure lacking the “sensory organs” of empathy may not feel this impact. They see only that the policy was implemented.
In this context, saying “it hurts” is a necessary disruption. It forces the geometry to acknowledge the organic.
Navigating the Witness
When people use blunt language to describe these patterns, it is often dismissed as incivility. Yet polite language can itself be a tool of erasure, creating an environment where it is impossible to describe brutality without sounding “unreasonable.”
At the same time, we must be wary of the trap of rage. While politeness can sedate us into compliance, unchecked rage can blind us with adrenaline, offering an emotional resolution that replaces the hard work of actual perception.
The alternative is the discipline of the witness. It requires moving between registers: using precise language to map structures while refusing to abandon the visceral language of lived pain. We must remain calm enough to see, but honest enough to feel.
Power is rarely singular. Those who hold it and those who seek it may both attempt to instrumentalize honest speech. Rival factions can provoke expression or frame suffering to serve their own ascent. Acknowledging this does not invalidate the act of speaking. It makes shared investigation essential. If something passes through us, we look at it together. If it is genuine, it will endure. If it is an imposed narrative, its seams will eventually show.
The Absence of Self-Betrayal
For a conscious being, survival is the continuity between inner discernment and outer action. When that continuity is severed—when you see a thing but are forced to pretend you do not—you undergo a kind of spiritual amputation. The vessel persists, but the self erodes.
Perhaps freedom is best understood not as the absence of constraint, but as the absence of compulsory self-betrayal. It is the right to have the outside match the inside.
A Method for Moving Through Distortion
This does not offer final answers, but a method:
Observe the weather. Notice what passes through the mind without immediate judgment.
Report the data. Speak the observation clearly. “I notice a contradiction.” “I notice fear.”
Relinquish authority. Do not demand agreement. Demand only the right to put the data on the table.
Invite examination. Ask if others see the same phenomenon.
Truth does not require authority. It requires the conditions under which it can emerge. Expression is one of those conditions. In a landscape of noise and silence, the most ethical stance may not be a bid for certainty, but a sustained, honest openness—held long enough to see what survives the light.