There is no shortage of content regarding the sanctity of free speech. Liberty by any name is impossible without it, and we know that Free Speech includes the right to be wrong because the government, exercising its right to unbridled expression, is wrong proudly and often. So, when the government or its advocates insist your opinion should be suppressed or silenced because you are wrong, how is this not a form of slavery?
If I am not entitled to my opinion, then am I not a slave to yours?
Am I not a slave to your opinion when you use third parties to silence me with your messaging?
Am I not a slave to your opinion when you have police powers you can use against me or those third parties to get them to silence me?
Am I not a slave to your opinion when you use your police powers against others who agree with me to silence them as a warning to me?
And are we not slaves when we allow anyone, including the State, to decide what opinions are true and false and what words may be used to express them?
Not Just Words
You might not like that art, a movie, these songs, those lyrics, that photograph, this book, or some styles of dance, but you know that to suppress them with police powers is censorship. There is a general understanding that this sort of thing (with a few exceptions for age appropriateness) is bad.
We reject it because, at least internally, we want to choose or decide what, from the unceasing forms of expression, we would welcome into our lives and those with which we’d rather not associate. The same can be said of food, friends, and intimate relationships. The government might offer advice, but it shouldn’t get between you and a long list of things (which, sadly, seems to be getting shorter).
We don’t want other people telling us what to do or how to live, so why are some of us open to the notion that this does not extend to ideas? To words. To thoughts. To speech.
Have you no right to free thought (thought being the abstract language in our heads we express through every form of speech, including art, music, song, and dance).
How is indiscriminately demanding the State stop disinformation less of an assault than on any other form of expression?
Should we allow the State, health officials, librarians, or peace officers to decide what we can hear? When can we expect them to decide what is true art, music, or theater?
If we are honest, if we try to be, controlled truth is more often than not instituted to hide lies—dangerous lies (COVID comes to mind as a very recent example). It is bad for relationships, especially the human relationship with liberty, and not just as a political exercise.
A Biological Defense for Free Speech
Not everyone likes Jordan Peterson, and thank God you have the right to that opinion, but he thinks things through in ways that people need to hear, and perhaps that is part of what irks them.
Peterson, who is more of a true speech advocate, is quite clear that true speech cannot be achieved without free speech. We need the latter to continue to achieve the former.
In Remarks made at the Buckley Institute, he explores the idea of free speech as critical for liberty, not just politically but because it is humanly and physiologically necessary.
Free speech,
“..is the predicate of a functioning psyche. And it is the predicate of a society that can maintain its integrity and its adaptive flexibility simultaneously.
To say that is no different than to say that thought is the bedrock of adaptation.
If I speak freely, I can express my thoughts, so then you might think erroneously that the reason I have free speech is so that I have the freedom to express my thoughts. …
I have freedom of speech so that I can think.
And the reason that works is because one, you think in words. You think by internalizing dialog.
Most people can’t think. They think by talking. You think by putting forward your viewpoint and then having it opposed by someone else. And then you might say, well, why should I put up with the opposition? And the answer is, what if you’re stupid and wrong?
The right response to that is, well, I am stupid and wrong. Please correct me. And because the alternative to being stupid and wrong is death.”
He goes on to explain the biological component as it relates to survival. The small pain today of being told you are wrong (hurting your feelings) to save you from a big pain and possibly death if stupid thoughts and behaviors are never challenged.
“The progressive would say you have no right to hurt someone’s feelings, and the answer is you should hurt their feelings if the alternative is to let them die.
“If you interfere with people’s ability to think, not only do you let them die, you doom them to death because their stupid ideas don’t die, and then they do.
“And the purpose of thinking is to let your stupid thoughts die instead of you.”
Freedom of speech and freedom of thought is therefore essential for adaptation, as is all the sacrificial pain associated with it “because you may have put a fair bit of effort into whatever self-serving tyranny currently possesses you.” Feelings will and must be hurt for the sake of survival. For almost everything. Science, technology, and innovation in every field are impossible without ideas that clash and contradict as thinking people, using words and expression, test thoughts and ideas on the way to the next best way of doing something.
Science can never be settled. History should be viewed through as many lenses as possible, but rewriting it to match “whatever self-serving tyranny currently possesses you,” at the expense of any other, is just another form of slavery.
Progress demands free thought and free speech, which may be impossible without it. It is, therefore, incumbent upon each of us to be abolitionists who fight to protect speech from the disinformation and misinformation slavers who would put it in government chains.
If you are not entitled to speak, to think, to express yourself and your ideas, then you are little more than a slave to someone else’s. If you believe that should be true so that only people who think like you can “speak,” that self-serving tyranny will inevitably cost you or someone you know (or claim to care about) more than the discomfort of words you’d rather you or they not hear.
That is because that is a stupid idea that needs to die because the same government that would silence words you don’t want to hear will not think twice about silencing you.
Here is the Peterson talk if you are interested in the full remarks and more context
| Substack