A quiet parrot in Empresses In The Palace says more about power than any elaborate plot. Its silence, enforced by fear of punishment, becomes a live diagram of information control, showing how loyalty inside a hierarchy is measured less by truth than by an ability to withhold it.
The bird functions as a behavioral experiment running in plain sight. Under constant surveillance and arbitrary sanctions, the safest survival strategy is not to repeat what it knows. That learned muteness resembles a drop in psychological safety: the perceived risk of speaking rises, the expected marginal utility of sharing drops. Just as entropy increases in a closed thermodynamic system, the usable information inside the palace decays as more actors copy the parrot, censoring themselves before any censor arrives.
The result is an information ecosystem where what matters is not accuracy but plausible deniability. Courtiers refine schemes; the parrot refines silence. That contrast maps neatly onto modern workplaces, where employees track informal sanctions more than formal policy, adjusting their verbal output like a basal metabolic rate under stress. The quieter the bird becomes, the clearer the signal that the real struggle is not over secrets themselves, but over who feels safe enough to let reality be heard.
