Hiding Your Power Level

Every man who has thought carefully about the world eventually faces the same moment. He is in a room — a workplace meeting, a university seminar, a dinner table — where he holds a view he knows will cost him something to express. He has three options: announce it and take the hit, go silent and feel complicit, or hold it with intention and say nothing. Most men only know the first two. The third is what few teach.

The phrase "hiding your power level" comes from Dragon Ball Z, adopted by online communities to mean concealing your true views in environments that would punish them. Nick Fuentes, the controversial online groyper, uses it often, and some of his positions merit the controversy. But the concept is older and more serious than its internet origins suggest, and it deserves a more serious treatment than its packaging implies.

Christ sent his disciples out as sheep among wolves and told them to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Wise as serpents means knowing that the room is rarely neutral, and that the moment you choose to speak shapes what your words can do. Christian tradition has never read that passage as a licence for cowardice. It has always read it as a demand for prudence.

Political philosopher Leo Strauss wrote extensively about what he called esoteric writing: the practice by which serious thinkers throughout history concealed their most dangerous conclusions in plain sight, writing carefully enough that a hostile reader would miss the point while a careful one would not. Persecution, Strauss argued, produces a particular kind of writer: one who has learned that survival and integrity are not always served by the same sentence, and whose craft consists precisely in knowing the difference. Thomas More understood this. He navigated Henry VIII's court for years through precise, deliberate silence, speaking only when silence itself would have been the lie. When that moment came, he spoke. It cost him everything but secured everything.

The medieval tradition named this virtue prudentia, and it is worth recovering. Prudence is not timidity dressed up in respectable language. It is the capacity to judge rightly about when and how to act — including when to speak, when to hold, and what the difference costs. Without prudence a man just makes noise. He calls it conviction because the alternative — that he spoke too soon, in the wrong place, for his own satisfaction — is harder to live with.

There is a bad-faith version of all this. Hiding your power level in the wrong hands becomes a manipulation tactic: concealing what you actually believe in order to deceive people into trusting you, then using that trust to spread ideas they would have rejected if you had been honest from the start. There is also a subtler danger for the sincere man — that discretion, practised too long, becomes a habit of fear, and he loses the capacity to speak at all. The test cuts through both risks: are you being discreet about a true self, or are you being dishonest about a false one? Prudence protects something real. Deception and fear both hollow it out, by different routes.

Silence in the right moment is a form of strength most young men have not been taught to recognise. The culture rewards performance — the confident hot take, the room-silencing declaration, the X post that tells the world where you stand. What it does not reward, and rarely models, is the man who has read the books, formed the views, done the inner work, and does not need an audience to confirm it is real.

Speak when silence would be complicity or when the moment requires you to stand regardless of consequence. Hold when speaking serves only your ego or hands a weapon to those whose interest is not truth but your destruction. Learning to read the difference between those two situations is part of what formation means.

The power level worth hiding is not your opinions. It is the work underneath them — the reading, the discipline, the prayer, the slow accumulation of a self that does not depend on being seen. A man who needs to announce what he is has not yet become it.

ForgeHub (theforge-hub.com) serves as my writing platform for men seeking practical wisdom, developing authentic skills, and reflecting on how to live purposefully in a complex world. I write about family formation and cultural analysis at Happy Family Better World. My new family advisory site is at richardmorrissey.org. My political writing can be found at Medium.