Speech is the most continuous and least examined form of action. The age floods the man with talk that costs nothing and commits to nothing. Opinions are exchanged as currency. Complaint and self-display fill the available space. The differentiated individual cannot participate in that current without cost. Every word he allows to leave him either reinforces the interior order or weakens it.
The practical demand is restraint and precision. Speak when the statement is required by the situation or by the higher measure. Refuse the habit of continuous commentary on every event that passes. Refuse the casual betrayal of private judgments for the sake of belonging or of momentary effect. The man who cannot govern his speech has already demonstrated that the interior hierarchy is incomplete. The age will interpret silence as emptiness or as fear. The higher type accepts the misreading. He does not adjust his speech to correct the impression of those who measure by quantity of words.
This application collides directly with the habits young men are formed in. Social environments reward fluency, quick response, the performance of opinions. The man who holds back is often treated as lacking force. The opposite is true. Force in speech is the capacity to make the word land with the weight of a decision already taken. That capacity is destroyed by the continuous emission of unexamined talk. The differentiated individual practices a form of verbal economy that the surrounding culture finds unnatural. The unnatural character is the point. The age is the disorder. The speech of the higher type is an island of order inside it.
Examine the speech of a single day. Note how much of it served nothing higher than the relief of tension or the securing of a temporary place in the conversation. Then begin to withhold what does not meet the measure. The change will be noticed. The pressure to return to the old pattern will be continuous. The refusal is the application.