On Silence, and the Necessary Noisiness of Digesting Complex Compounds
Such as suicide, war, moral injury, duty, and other cultural norms
I have been thinking regularly about the death-by-suicide of Senior Airman Aaron Bushnell which occurred on February 25th of this year. The day after he died from self-induced injuries, having set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in DC, I read that Bushnell had belonged to the 70th ISR Wing, an organization within which I have spent a majority of my career. At this point I ask myself if this is going to be one of those posts where I make someone else's tragedy about me, a type of social-media offering which I tend to find slightly repulsive and then usually understandable. I guess the answer is… partially. Such is the nature of tragedy and consequence within a big, entangled, complex social system, within which we are far more than merely observers. I didn’t know him, but I am certainly attached to the same great reverberating plate as he was, and his violent departure sent sharp waves shuddering outward; many of us felt it… and now, almost two months later, the resonance is only somewhat diminished, the memory of its particular frequency still hums in my bones.
Bushnell livestreamed his self-immolation as an act of protest of civilian deaths in Gaza. His last words for the public were shouts of "Free Palestine". I didn't watch the video, having learned long ago to resist such urges, but I had friends who did. I read commentary, threads, and articles on the subject. I talked it through a little bit with friends and Air Force colleagues, and most of our conversations revolved around not what had happened, but were almost like we were trying to untangle something confounding, happening within us as a result. I always wonder if such an impact means the act of protest was ultimately successful, like acts of terrorism often are, at least insofar as we are shaken to our core for a period afterwards. I assume that was what he wanted, but we should be open to the possibility that mostly what he wanted was to die.
I tried on a few different feelings and perspectives and, as should be expected with these kinds of things—all of the feelings and perspectives that I tried on feel at least somewhat wrong... they feel at least grossly insufficient. For that period of time within which the event still resonates, we have many conflicting feelings twisting through us. Pulling even lightly on any one of them builds tension in its entangled counterparts. Untangling and pulling apart stacked knots is tricky precisely because every act of loosening at this juncture is a tightening at that one.
Lacking a strong, definitive thing to say about any of this—it leads most of us to say nothing at all. Saying actual things feels risky. All of our words are sure to miss the mark. We might offend. We might even get in trouble somehow.
At times like these, Myopic Assholes have the floor. While the nuance-sensitive silently turn inward, go to work internally on stubborn knots of paradox, those for whom the world is simple appear to demonstrate those qualities that we might foolishly associate with wisdom and leadership: attributes like clarity, purpose, values… The clear-headed stomp on soapboxes and declare loudly their definitive, simple truths, if not hateful at least hate-infused; while those for whom the situation seems complex, nuanced, paradoxical, irreducible—we stay silent, because silence is the only way to not be found wrong in some way. If we can’t be right, we would like at the very least to not be wrong in some way.
And this is a problem, because silence doesn't serve us well much of the time. We might be better off stepping bravely into noise, discordant though it may be.
Social Silence
I think a lot about the concept of "Social Silence" which I learned about through Gillian Tett's wonderful book "Anthro-Vision". In an interview, she described it this way:
What anthropology does is train you to look at the world in a holistic, joined-up way and to pay attention not just to what people talk about but also what they don’t talk about. As an anthropologist, you don’t just listen to the noise. You also listen to silence. You ask yourself the whole time, what are people not talking about?
Tett borrowed the concept from one of my favorite sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu, who described how power structures are shaped by both explicitly stated norms and beliefs (orthodoxy) and norms and beliefs which are very real and consequential but are never openly discussed (doxa).
The underlying concept here, that information hidden or avoided might be the most important information to inform action, is part of why I have continued to pursue facilitative sense-making practices, the kinds that create conditions for the unspoken to be made explicit and therefore something we can confront, reflect on, and deal with. Social silence is like the bending of light and gravity around a black hole. It is the clear absence of signal with a distinct shape that should tell us we need to pay closer attention.
Facilitation teacher and author Daniel Stillman says that "resistance is information". I can think of few things more indicative of resistance than silence. When I run a workshop trying to surface negative information and the participants give me nothing, I never think oh good everything is great here. I think well damn, I guess we have a safety problem.
Silence is such a powerful driver and enabler of dysfunction (institutional and individual) and disruption (of belonging, sensemaking, thriving...). Until we overcome silence, we have no opportunity to make sense of or attend to the experiences and challenges facing individuals, and therefore affecting their efforts and the systems within which they are embedded. Confronting realities entangled with feelings feels dangerous, it is dangerous, but silence can be so very much worse. Silence is quite famously the space within which suicides occur. Our most potent countermeasure against suicidal potentiation is the stirring up of interaction, the starting of conversations—the creation of conditions for a person to feel safe enough to express just where and how they are so we know what to respond to…
“Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence.”
― James P Carse
It feels relevant to add that perhaps no therapeutic approaches to internal or interpersonal dysfunction are fully silent (in the sense of being unexpressed or unexpressive). Step one for most approaches is expression: The noticing of things and the naming of them. The attempt to give them shape which then offers the opportunity to examine what shape you’ve given them so you can reflect on it. This is the nature of practices like therapeutic journaling or art therapy. Talk therapy does much of the same, often lambasted with the characterization that a therapists primary response could simply be “and how does that make you feel?”. My experience with therapy has been that mostly all they’re doing is urging expression. Step one is always a type of noticing followed by the expression of what is noticed, followed by noticing within what was expressed, reflecting, etc. Sensemaking methods like visual thinking and collaborative mapping (all of them really) follow similar patterns. A necessary condition is the attempted expression of things that you might likely express incorrectly…
In the ensuing weeks, I have continued to see social silence among Air Force leaders and peers—in a distinct shape around the conditions and causes of Bushnell’s death, and I think we can learn a lot by listening closely to that silence.
Life In Complexity (and as complexity)
At least part of what Bushnell appeared to be experiencing, part of what led to his tragic death by suicide is something called moral injury--the psychological damage that can come from proximity or institutional affiliation with a perceived atrocity. It is a common malady within the military. But though it affects many, you usually don't hear people talking about it unless they are late in their career (likely related to sense of safety or precariousness) or if the subject is within their particular field or project. I do not believe most servicemembers are discussing it in their workplace, because it reveals complexities where we would as a culture very much prefer simplicity. Simple stories like the one about how there are good guys and bad guys, and if you're a good guy it feels good to kill bad guys because they’re bad seem to be the operant paradigm for many.
When I joined the Air Force we were regularly exposed to highlight reels of ordnance being dropped on bad guys, usually accompanied by a heavy-metal soundtrack. I got the sense this was supposed to get us like… super pumped up about all the violent killing we were a part of. This was the height of surge operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and… this shit gave me a panic attack. It made me feel sick, because in my operant paradigm, informed very much by the people who raised me, war is always bad, and killing is never to be celebrated. It is bad for everyone. It injures us (psychologically or spiritually) just to participate in it. I mean… maybe the intent was to actually weed out sensitive, wispy Californians like me to ensure our forces consist only of moral absolutists. I guess they could have done a better job.
When I deployed to Afghanistan, over the course of 7 months, I grew somewhat accustomed to the sound of incoming and detonating mortar fire. I was told that the people lobbing mortars over the walls of Bagram Airbase onto the airfield were likely local civilians trying to feed their families, being paid a wage per aircraft that they managed to destroy. I imagined that as non-ideologues, they must be hoping they didn't kill anyone as they did this, and wondered sincerely whether I would do the same in their situation. I have long thought that the appropriate response to questions like these is “of course I would”, in large part because I would be them instead of me, and the ethical stances I currently take about the actions of the desperate might simply be a luxury afforded by my privilege and positionality. To assume that I would retain moralistic judgments without my background and the safety of my position feels… illogical if I’m being honest.
Consider the fact that a significant portion of the U.S. Military (at least our enlisted force) joined the military for reasons of economic precarity, rather than on some ethical or patriotic basis… I’m not saying their ethics aren’t aligned with their context. I’m saying quite the opposite, in fact… that our ethics are almost always coincidentally aligned with our positionality. This may have been more eloquently stated as:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
-Upton Sinclair
Opening this can of worms feels dangerous, especially within American and U.S. military culture. Dangerous, because the narratives underpinning a sense of our inherent rightness seems to hinge on a mythology, one that positions us within cosmic battles between good and evil, between the forces of light and righteousness and democracy, and those who would bring about a dark and oppressive world.
And we regularly see servicemembers struggle to navigate the “are we the baddies?” crisis, a crisis faced as they inevitably encounter what are in fact far more complex, ambiguous, and irreducible realities than we had previously been presented with. The mortars aren’t being fired by twisted villains in black hats, hell-bent on undermining the prosperity and happiness of blue-eyed American children. They might be coming from family men, hell bent on nothing more than feeding their own children, the very same logic that brought me to this role, this career, this occupation within this foreign country.
I coincidentally encountered
’s post yesterday in — “On Kahneman and Complexity”. Gardner opens with a remarkable story from Daniel Kahneman about experiencing human connection and kindness in an encounter from an SS officer as a 7-year-old Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Paris. Of course this felt relevant to what I’ve been trying to say here, about the multi-dimensional nature of a world we so like to flatten.I think a common crisis experienced by people like Bushnell comes down to expecting anyone to navigate a three dimensional world in but a two dimensional vehicle.
I argue that the mythological framing is ultimately reductive, attempting to bring our adversaries’ “infinite game to an end in unheard silence” by reducing their entire identities and complex experiences within this greater social system to simplistic and two-dimensional “roles” within our fabricated narrative—cartoonish archetypes; and then when individuals are met with the messy, ambiguous, paradoxical, multifaceted, and ultimately irreducible and category-defiant reality that had been left out of their worldview, which had until then gone fully unexpressed and unexplored, hidden as it was under the shroud of social silence… well then the world ceases to make sense.
This could be a significant danger posed by those who see everything through preconceived abstractions, something I explored a bit in my essay “Re-Enchantment, Hierarchy, Jung, and The Sacred”:
This feels to me like a recipe for crisis, a crisis like that experienced by Aaron Bushnell. And it seems that often what people flee to in these moments of crisis isn’t a more nuanced, non-reductive, more complexity-coherent view. In Bushnell’s case it was what many have been calling a type of extremism. Based on what I have seen some report, his social media patterns depict what might be framed as simply trading out one set of reductive abstractions for another one.
If it isn’t already clear to you… I should be transparent that at this point I’m well into conjecture, but it seems fair to posit that it is always far easier to simply trade out the characters within an operant paradigm than it is to abandon the paradigm entirely. Rather than abandoning the whole good-versus-evil construct one simply slaps these same abstractions onto different characters. America the bastion of exceptionalism and righteousness becomes America the capitalist dystopia and evil oppressor. In reality neither of these are true, and then both are. See with your own eyes reality shift by simply repositioning yourself within the landscape. Across this great, roiling reality, supporting evidence for all kinds of positions abounds…
...the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
As a military member, I have at times asked myself whether we are all supposed to be firmly and unwaveringly aligned to everything this institution and this country does.
On this point—there is strong precedent supporting the idea that values-driven intervention, even principled dissent against the institution and its actions, can be justified and even institutionally rewarded at a later time. For maybe the least controversial example, see the story of Hugh Thompson Jr. and his crew directly confronting and impeding the U.S soldiers who engaged in the mass murder of civilians at the My Lai Massacre. Of course I should note that it took several decades for Thompson and his crew to be recognized as the principled, moral actors that they were. In this and other examples we might find evidence that “rightness” from an institution or an individual might often amount to no more than a judgment formed of retrospective coherence.
I’d posit that we are ultimately better off concerning ourselves with engaging in the right process of deciding than with whether our every decision turns out to be right—for the simple reason that in complexity, right practice will still result in wrong outcomes, and there is no method which would ensure otherwise.
I recall wrestling with the question of guilt by affiliation and the potential for moral injury when I was considering joining the Air Force as an 18-year-old kid experiencing an extreme degree of economic precarity. I do not believe in everything the lumbering behemoth of the military institution or our country or political system does. I think it takes a great deal of self-contortion to remain fully ideologically aligned to every single decision made for and on behalf of the military, especially as postures and priorities occasionally shift from administration to administration. Humans, in all their agility and capacity for in-the-moment sensemaking, make constant mistakes. Add in the problems of scale, information lag and confounding influences from biases and interests, and the fact that institutional lenses hide far too much information from those with decision-making power…
Perhaps we do ourselves a disservice by embracing only the notion that we “operate in” a VUCA environment… language like this might lead some to miss the fact that we ourselves, us and our institutions, are an integrated part of that volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (and it is a part of us). A military is also a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous thing. So is a country. So is a human being. It is not as though we’re this stable, coherent, reducible thing operating in a complex environment. We are complex as well, as both individuals (containing multitudes), and as collectives of collectives...
What the choice to join the Air Force came down to for me is that I do ultimately believe in our democracy, the system which informs the actions of our military. I believe this system is the least bad one yet... and, perhaps most crucially, I believe that our principled and imperfect presence and participation in it are what make it likely to pursue coherent and ethical paths into the future—paths which are more likely to follow that long arc which Martin Luther King Jr. said “bends toward justice” when we engage with candor and vulnerability... I think that we are sometimes, often even, wrong in our approaches and strategies, but honestly... the majority of the time it is impossible to tell whether a tactic or approach is, will be, or was “right” or “wrong”, because the outcomes are complex, paradoxical, and multi-faceted. Look at it three ways and you will receive six answers.
I feel the need to note that this basis of support and the logic behind my presence and participation does not amount to what I critiqued above as appeal to potentially flattening cosmic abstractions. What I’m describing here is presence and participation on the basis of a praxis (democracy) being complexity-coherent, in that it is ever seeking perspectives, and opening to new possibilities. There is important distinction between this and an ideological basis for support.
I believe I explored systemic adherence and belief in a sense-making system as opposed to ideology in this piece:
And this segues nicely into what I see as the way forward…
The Way Forward
On a recommendation from someone on LinkedIn recently, I bought Nick Sousanis’ graphic novel “Unflattening”. More elegantly than most, Sousanis makes a wonderful case for taking a “parallax view” in order to give depth to what from a singular perspective appears to be a two-dimensional world (which I argue above is “flattened” in part by cosmic abstractions.) Here’s an excerpt:
The solution, I suggest, lies in adopting and engaging with systems and approaches that are themselves internally complex. As I mentioned before, I believe the problem demonstrated by Bushnell’s tragic end and our lack of response to it, is expecting people to navigate a three dimensional world in but a two dimensional vehicle. So what we need are vehicles… sensemaking approaches… that can navigate within paradoxical, ambiguous, complex, multi-dimensional realities. One attribute of such a vehicle is that it does not attempt to bring competing or confounding perspectives to an end in unheard silence.
For examples of equipping people to navigate complex topics within a military context I often remember the responses we saw from senior Air Force leaders after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. In particular, I appreciated Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Kaleth Wright’s public post on the subject, the conversation he held in a video with the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and the video from PACAF Commander General C.Q. Brown Jr., now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What all of these accomplished was a public demonstration of the strange and awkward act that is processing a complex thing without attempting to reduce or resolve its complexity. Its most prominent feature is the holding of space for the sharing of individual experience.
I recall that in subsequent months after George Floyd’s murder, the institution of the Air Force urged local leaders to engage in their own collective reflection processes. As one might expect, that occurred with varying degrees of success. In my own unit, I recall clearly how uncomfortable and haphazard some of those interactions were, but I walked away with the sense that something important had happened—the solicitation, hearing, accepting, and integrating of many personal perspectives, experiences, and feelings in the same space without attempt at flattening them into any singular, “objective” reality... I remember that people were offended by things that were said, and they shared those feelings, and it was heard. And people who said offensive things shared their own candid and very real feelings about the fear of being rejected for holding the beliefs that they did. And their fear was heard and acknowledged, and they were still invited to speak their truths.
It was one of the first and only times I have seen the Air Force really engage directly at scale with one of those dark, silent shapes that loom perpetually over us, which denote an area of social silence. I was early in my own journey exploring methods of collective reflection and sense-making at the time this occurred but it was apparent to me that what was happening was important. The only other instances of this that I have seen have been triggered by collective trauma within a unit—usually a suicide or death—and it makes a lot of sense that that is one of the few areas where we might encounter actual professionals in practices for processing complex and irreducible things.
It reminded me a lot of how those professionals tell us to process feelings of grief. Getting through grief is an act of reflection and radical acceptance, of yourself, your reactions, the reactions of others, which are often “illogical” and most certainly aren’t based in the deconstruction and analysis of objective facts… things aren’t supposed to ultimately “make sense” in the end (whatever “the end” means here…). So yeah… grieving offers us an interesting example of what this can look like.
I didn't start writing this because I thought you should see my opinions about the death of Aaron Bushnell, and whether his actions were right or wrong. I have lots of conflicting and confused things to say about the terrible things happening in Gaza (even saying that publicly feels risky...). I started writing this because I thought it was important to consider the social silence that pervades and hangs oppressively over topics like this, like suicide, like moral injury, like patriotism, like principled dissent…
To address the risk posed within and around social silence, I strongly believe that leadership should be facilitative, driving difficult conversations at the team level, and demonstrating as our senior leaders did in 2020 just how awkward and strange and foreign these practices look in real life... but they’re so necessary, especially in moments when people might be having paradoxical, painful, impossible-to-digest feelings, or feelings which feel socially unsafe. Lots of people are hurting. They might have already been following a similar ideological path that SrA Bushnell was (many people feel the feelings that he did), and this could be the catalyst for them to fall headlong into what at least I perceive as Bushnell's terrible, tragic mistake.
I think there's a lot we wouldn't know to do as leaders unless we knew how to get those in our charge to feel safe enough to talk, and I worry that we’re not investing as much as we should in imbuing leaders with these competencies.’
As a final caveat, however... please do not convince anyone that they are safe to be candid unless that is something you can actually assure.
These are my own views and do not represent the views of the Air Force, DoD, or any other entity.