I've written about freedom of speech extensively in all manner of forums, but the one thing that has become clear to me lately, is that people are genuinely uninterested in the philosophical underpinnings of freedom of speech. Today they would rather quote an XKCD comic, than John Stuart Mill's seminar work On Liberty.
Because of this, I've decided to try to reframe the original notion of freedom of speech, into a term I coined: Open Ideas.
Open Ideas is nothing more than what freedom of speech has always been historically: a philosophical declaration that the open contestation of ideas is the engine of progress that keeps moving society forward.
Today the tyranny of the majority believes freedom of speech is anything but that. They believe that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", despite the fact that such term came from nowhere, has no author, and in addition all great free speech thinkers argued precisely the opposite. The great thinkers argued that if people are afraid of expressing unpopular opinions, that is functionally the same as government censorship: ideas are suppressed, society stagnates, and progress is halted.
So far I have not yet heard any sound refutation of any of these ideas. All people do is repeat the aforementioned dogmatic slogan with zero philosophical foundation, or mention First Amendment details, which obviously is not equal to freedom of speech.
How is anything I've stated in any way an inaccurate assessment of what is happening?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Freedom of speech is a mistake theory idea. You won't get conflict theorists to accept it, because it doesn't' advance their goals. The only way to convert people to mistake theorists and get them to adopt freedom of speech as a shared principle with you is to get together with them on the same team against a larger common enemy. As long as they consider you a rival/threat/enemy, they'll treat your words as enemy soldiers.
This is what I don't understand. If I'm a cynical conflict theorist who wants nothing more than to utterly crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and hear the lamentations of their women, then I have a great motivation to become as strong as possible. In order to become as strong as possible, I need to train myself against adversity - true adversity, not a strawman adversity that just sits there while I pepper it with punches and my buddies all slap me on the back for what a badass I'm being. For that, I need both challenges to my ideas and criticism of my arguments. True challenges, true criticism, the sort that is motivated by a genuine desire to crush me and my ideas and the sort that actually has a real chance of changing my mind (this, of course, requires me to keep an open mind - so as to better improve myself to better crush my enemies and erase them from history).
I don't see how one accomplishes this without free speech. Without critics feeling free to yell their most malicious criticisms towards me without a single fear of consequence, I can't trust that my ideas or I have been properly tested, and so I have less confidence in my ability to crush my enemies, and I'm more vulnerable to being crushed by my enemies instead. I don't want that. So I want free speech.
Broadly, the anti-free-speech perspective is that ‘having an advantage in the realm of ideas’ != ‘having an advantage in the realm of propagating ideas’.
Indeed, your ideas bring true can (from this perspective) be a significant disadvantage because you cannot dress them up as prettily or make them as appealing as someone whose ideas are all lies.
Indeed, and the immediate obvious question this raises is, "Did this idea propagate to me because it has an advantage in the realm of ideas, or because it has an advantage in the realm of propagating ideas?" I could embrace hubris, declare that I'm the one who won't get zombified if bit, the one where when I complain that the umpire's strike zone is too big when my favorite baseball team is on offense, it's because the ump's zone really is too big, the one that can truly reliably judge this idea as "better," not merely "better at propagating itself." In which case, I suppose just shutting down all opposing opinions and enforcing it with an iron fist seems like a pretty attractive solution. Of course, there's the issue that the idea that this is a viable solution could have propagated to me because it's good at propagating itself, even if it isn't actually good. And if I'm wrong on that, then my attempts to crush my enemies could be disastrous. So I'm cynically motivated to open up this idea to criticism, so as to tear away its weaknesses, harden its strengths, and make it more capable of crushing my enemies when implemented.
But also, if I decide that it matters to me that the ideas that I propagate are actually ideas that are better, not merely ones that were better at convincing me, then I should open up these ideas to quite a lot of criticism, certainly at least within the ballpark of what I would judge as "too much," because the fact that I already believe these ideas means that I can't be relied on not to underestimate how much criticism is warranted.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link