In my experience, having been sensitized to it young, strategically deployed silence is one of the most effective and damaging expressions of rage out there.  It has the great virtues of ease and simplicity– plus the razor sharp double edged bonus of deniability.   Not all silence falls into this category, of course.  Much of it does not.  But those angry people who feel entitled to their rage can make excellent use of the simple device of saying nothing in return.  The real beauty part, it can be used again as a clever bludgeon if the party put to silence ever whines about it.  “Oh, Boo HOO!  Silence…. oh, dear….”

Here’s how it operates:  take an unbearable pain in your own life.  Maybe it was a mother who, from your earliest memories, regarded you with hatred and whipped you across the face.   Hard to recover from that one.  One will do one’s best not to repeat that in one’s own life, but the cards are stacked against you.  You will have to deal with some version of the following:

My son is brilliant, but he’s got a grievance against me, has been my accuser from the time he was born.   Now he wants my approval.  Let me do the math: not giving him the approval he wants versus being humiliated over and over by an insane and violent mother?   He has a lot to complain about, this pampered, angry boy.   I will say nothing, let him deal with a world as cruel as you like, but one ten times more merciful than the one I managed to survive.

One vice of heavy duty victims is comparing the pain of others to their own and always finding other people’s pain a pale and pathetic wannabe pain.  I was the victim of incest by a beloved family member, you want my sympathy because your boss called you a cunt?   Silence, I say, waiting with a slight smile for that delicious moment when you feebly accuse me of not caring just because I said nothing.

I never got a dime from my parents, nor even the respect of a thank you for the many services I did for both of them when they were dying.   You didn’t inherit enough from yours to make you independently wealthy?  Boo fucking hoo.  Get a job, loser, instead of dreaming you’re special enough to be the change you want to see in the world.

I am the most talented person I know, yet you don’t hear me whining about my lack of recognition.   I go to work, live in the world, do not whine about my creative efforts being unappreciated, myself being unlionized.  And, dude, I am much, much more talented than you.  So, yeah, sue me if I don’t have any comment on your wonderful hobby “art”.  Oh, boo hoo hoo.  Silence…. oh, my… pobrecito!

Etc.

It may seem a small thing to someone lost in a world of anger now, but I have seen my father’s regrets as he was dying.   It was a terrible thing to see a man with all the tools to have been a great friend, a loving father, bereft because he had been unable to separate himself from his pain enough to do either of those things.  Terrible for its own sake and in its timing, because all that was left for him was death, and he had become wise, and grasped the simplest and most beautiful of human truths, too late.  

He may have been putting on a play for me, trying to do me a final favor after decades of putting walls and heavy stones in my way, but I prefer to think his regrets were real.   He had defended himself against his pain as well as anyone could have, heroically, if tragically, since it came at the cost of true friendship and the warm, direct love of those closest to him.  He had deprived himself of the most important things in life, in order to cower behind a brittle sense of invulnerability.

I don’t judge the man.  It’s hard to imagine how anyone recovers from what he was subjected to in a childhood of unimaginable pain and humiliation.  I’m not comparing the pain of being whipped in the face daily with the pain of a father turning his face away at important moments.   I merely note that if you set out to hurt somebody who asks for your point of view, while maintaining that all important sense of superiority, silence is a beauty way to go.