The Structure of Powerlessness: When Good People Remain Silent

"Knowledge is power" is one of those comforting phrases we toss around, the kind that fits nicely on a bumper sticker or a classroom poster. It implies that simply knowing something—having facts, understanding history, accumulating truths—automatically grants you influence. But here’s the hard reality: knowledge alone isn’t power. Not by a long shot. If it were, the world would look vastly different. The problem is that knowledge can sit inert, like a perfectly balanced chemical equation that never reacts, never produces change. The truth is, when good people fail to assert the truth they know, when they fail to engage, to speak out, to act—the void they leave is quickly filled by the weak, the unqualified, and the unscrupulous. And these people, emboldened by that void, press on toward failure, dragging everyone along with them.

The history of human progress is not a neat succession of victories where logic and ethics calmly triumph over chaos. No, it’s a turbulent series of collisions, paradigm shifts, and revolutions—each born out of the wreckage of a destabilized truth. Consider James Baldwin’s words to his nephew, written in a time when the structures of American society were systematically built against people of color. He did not say that knowing racism existed was enough; he urged his nephew to understand it, to bear witness to it, and then, to act. Because understanding without action is acquiescence. And acquiescence, Baldwin knew, leaves room for the unqualified to seize control of the narrative and wield it like a weapon.

Martin Luther King Jr., writing from his Birmingham jail cell, echoed this sentiment. He decried not just the Klan members or the politicians actively blocking civil rights, but the moderates—those who knew what was right but failed to stand up for it. Those who preferred a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice. Knowledge without action, King knew, allows injustice to fester. It hands power to those who lack both the courage and the moral compass to wield it properly. As he wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” It is not enough to know this. One must fight for it.

The same pattern plays out not just in social revolutions but in scientific ones. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, describes how scientific progress lurches forward not in gradual, linear steps but in disruptive leaps. A stable paradigm—a well-established structure of knowledge and assumptions—only shifts when anomalies arise that the existing system cannot explain or contain. It’s not enough for these anomalies to be known or even documented. They must be argued, defended, fought for. Scientists must not merely observe; they must advocate for the truth they see, often against entrenched resistance. The history of science, then, is not a story of detached, purely rational discovery but one of rhetorical battle and ethical persuasion—“the art of ethical persuasion,” as Aristotle called it.

But what happens when those anomalies—those flashes of insight—go unspoken? The answer is, nothing. And therein lies the danger. The unspoken truths wither in silence, and a flawed status quo continues its reign. This is where Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, in The Collapse of Western Civilization, offer a harrowing vision of what happens when those who know better choose inaction: “What is today called the collapse of Western civilization might better be called the result of a second Dark Age, in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on free markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy.”

So what do we do? How do we move forward when knowledge alone is not enough?

The answer is embedded in the very idea of a structure. A structure is not simply what stands; it’s the pattern by which something is organized. A structure shapes flow, determines strength, and directs force. When the pattern fails, when the structure no longer serves, it must be replaced. In science, this is a paradigm shift—a complete overhaul of the framework of understanding. In society, this is a revolution—a pivot around a new ethical center, a new axis of truth. And in rhetoric, the goal is not just to inform, but to move—to make people act in accordance with what they know to be true.

Yet we live in an age where rhetoric itself has become suspect. The very act of persuasion, once the tool of philosophers and statesmen, has been twisted into the arsenal of charlatans and demagogues. Oreskes and Conway, in Merchants of Doubt, illustrate how strategically deployed rhetoric—wielded with malice—can be used to delay action and sow confusion. But they also show how rhetoric can serve the cause of truth—if we are willing to wield it, to shape it, and to use it to pierce through the veil of habit and assumption. It’s a reminder that if good people abdicate the responsibility of persuasion, others—less ethical, less qualified—will step in to fill the void.

This abdication is not a new phenomenon. It’s echoed throughout history. Consider Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s account, Fifty Years After the Birmingham Children's Crusade. She describes how, in the 1960s, it wasn’t adults but children who stepped forward to challenge the establishment. “The children saw what the adults were afraid to admit: that knowing injustice was present was not enough to end it. You had to call it out, face it down, force change.” Children, who lacked the experience and knowledge of their elders, nonetheless stepped in where the well-informed refused. The lesson? When good people—adults, experts, those who should act—remain silent, it’s left to those less qualified to confront the forces of wrong. And even when they prevail, it’s at great cost.

This brings us to the heart of the matter: those who understand the truth, who know it, bear the heaviest burden. They are the ones best equipped to guide, to challenge, and to reshape the failing structures of our time. But only if they engage. Only if they embrace their responsibility to speak and act. In his Letter to My Nephew, Baldwin warns, “The crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, is that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” Knowing isn’t enough. You have to want to know the truth, and then act upon it.

So, what do we do? We must engage with courage, with clarity, with unwavering resolve. The cost of doing nothing, of allowing knowledge to sit idle, is too great. For, as King said, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” Silence is acquiescence. Inaction is complicity. And we cannot afford either.

We move forward intentionally, anchored by ethics, with logic as our guide and truth as our weapon. We speak when others do not. We assert what is right even when others falter. Because if we don’t, then those who lack both the strength and the wisdom to lead will press forward into failure, taking us all with them.

It is not enough to know the truth. Knowledge must be made manifest in the material world. Because in the end, language is not just a tool for expression—it is a material force, a source of influence and dexterity capable of shaping the world, bending reality, and making of life what we will.