Silence is golden

It’s a bit ironic and well embarrassing to post about not posting. I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts in the dark of night a year ago. I did it this way to avoid the risk of signaling virtue for my own sake more than any other grand cause. I had a stranger who I’d met tell me that in my quest for virtue, I lacked one thing: humility.

The Lord used that conversation to sit a millstone on my chest over the course of a year. At around 35 years old, I got the chance to become a CEO and a father, and for the first time, I took myself seriously. Perhaps too seriously, minus the “perhaps.” But the desire to be what I thought I could be did take me down a path God has used for my further redemption. In 2020 I hit the end of a road of progressivism fueled by my desire to protect the underdog fed by a vision of myself as an underdog. Beware the seeds of arrogance, envy, resentment, and victimization that lay inside such a vision.

The trappings of the media narrative in 2020 had me defending positions I did not understand and using my gifts to tear down the traditions and structures that had actually been working to propel me forward my entire life. Like the prodigal, I was selling my inheritance at an unimaginable rate and at the precipice of consuming ideas required double down on the logical conclusion of articulated claims. I had the bowl of soup in my hands and thank the Lord that He halted me before my full inheritance could be traded for the ideologies in other’s hands.

I took up the TedX and this site in the ideals of thought leadership. There is some truth in that. I also took it up out of arrogance and pain. While doing so, I immersed myself in ancient and classical literature and philosophy. I read the complete works of Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Reading them, I could see I was not fighting for virtue as much as I was working out pain within my soul. In many ways, I had been burying the shame I’d carried from childhood. Shame can drive us to self-improvement, or it can drive us to self-deception. I’m not sure at what moments which of these motivations was driving which parts of me, but I know both motivations were at work and at conflict within.

I realized at some point that projecting ideas into the ether, yet eternal ether, of the internet, was a risk to my need to self-correct. Once something is in writing on the internet, it exists forever. I needed to stop projecting my thoughts and opinions at the moment because I was witnessing the redressing of those thoughts and opinions in rapid succession through the immense reading and reflection I was doing. I was reading 75 classics a year, and they were redressing me at breakneck speed.

Adam Smith, F. Hayek, von Mises, Aristotle, Freidman, and Bauer matched my lived experience in economics with words. My words had drifted from my experience up until then.

The piety and life of Socrates brought St. Paul back to life within me.

I saw within myself the arrogance of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and the tension within the three Brothers Karamazov. Who would I be?

I was both Ahab and Ismael in Mellville, who would I be?

At the same time, I was leading an organization and team.

At first, I was vocal and outspoken about the changes. I met resistance for many reasons, but one among them was that while ideas change quickly, character lags.

I have been silent and will remain rather quiet for a while longer, as it’s just now that I’m seeing the fruit of the Lord’s work within me to change that which I could not change through the stoic disciplines I’d adopted: the inner man.

The pinnacle of self-actualization is a far flight from the paradise of sanctified man. I am glad for the heights at which allowed me to see with clarity how impossibly far away the person of Christ is from the features I could craft as a man. I became strong; I practiced virtues with great sincerity and purpose. But that inner longing, the sound of the waterfall in the distant wood that called me to exploration, those moments of awe that remained as landmarks within were yet far, far away.

Humility and submission require an unworking to enable a working within that provides a strength that can only come from God. And my experience that such a work comes from periods of great silence. To let the ego go and for God to fill the painful void with peace, to allow what’s thought to be unsaid, to trust in utterances of the Spirit, to trust in His plan.

I’m not sure this page will exist for much longer or my presence on LinkedIn. It turns out what I needed was not novelty but tradition. I did not need to lead in thought but to clarify my own through that which was tested by time and that which had uplifted the greater part of man.

I don’t want to disrupt with light; I want to be taken into and transformed by light. I don’t want to end anything, I want to create something, to generate something good in this world.