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?
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Notes -
I think there’s a very big problem in people not understanding the difference between sharing an opinion and being an asshole about said opinion. I don’t object to free expression of ideas even in contentious situations on controversial topics. You think abortion is baby murder, you are perfectly free to say that. But I think the very concept of politeness and tact and decorum is pretty lost at this point. It’s just devolved from “I don’t agree with you” to “I don’t agree with you and you are subhuman for even entertaining a different idea, and in fact should not be allowed to speak.” And now we have people celebrating a murder with TikTok dances.
I keep thinking back to reading old etiquette books. There was a sense that you really should strive to think of the other person, or others around you as at least as important if not more than you. A society that frowned on being late to a show because walking in late would inconvenience other theater goers would absolutely have something very politely negative to say about the absolute shit show of political and social discourse— even if they do agree that all opinions are protected by free speech. There are lines of decency that just have to be protected and we just can’t seem to separate the idea of an opinion from the expression of that opinion.
That is true. On topics where there is a live social controversy (most of the Culture War), this is probably ideal.
At the same time, I think this can be weaponized to by people that want to express ideas that are beyond the pale and who want to reap the social approval of having people accept their views because of "etiquette". One particular example that comes to mind is the voluminous academic (at least in the sense of "coming from the academy") literature rehabilitating the "Minor Attracted Person" and wanting us to take this idea seriously. It's a demand for social acceptance of something that society ought not accept.
Of course, the inverse kind of weaponization happens as well -- cancel culture as an entire phenomenon is predicated on wielding this against views for which there is no social consensus. The fact that some views are outside the window of acceptable discourse is temptation enough to realize that one can try to put one's opponents views in that bucket.
[ And of course, this is all inside the bounds of free speech. But then again agitating someone's employer to get them fire for asserting there are 2 genders is also free speech. That doesn't solve much. ]
Being polite doesn’t mean accepting every idea that comes along. It simply means that you express your disagreement in ways that, to paraphrase the rules of this place “give light rather than heat.” That’s entirely possible even in cases like pedophilia where the acceptance of such a bad idea would be a disaster. Saying there are only two genders is perfectly within the bounds of free expression and I don’t think you should be harassed or fired for that. Saying something like “there are only two genders and those who disagree should be considered dangerous to society,” that is over the line. Saying “Trump should not be sending the National Guard to American cities” is fine, saying “Trump is doing an authoritarian power grab by sending the National Guard to American cities” is too far because words like authoritarian, fascist, Nazi, and related are incendiary and dangerously lead to the acceptance of violence against anyone smeared with those terms.
How do you deal with the Euphemism treadmill problem within this logic? "Nigger Rigged" isn't polite and can get a guy in trouble, so construction workers start calling it "Afro Engineered" but we all figure out what that means so they just start calling it "Ghetto," in polite company calling something or someone Ghetto has obvious uncomfortable racial implications, a lot of black lawyers are going to bristle at a white person calling something of theirs Ghetto, even if they themselves would use the term disparagingly in another context. The implication remains the same, and over time the new euphemism becomes rude as well. Moron becomes an insult so we get Retarded which becomes a slur so we get Special Needs and kids start calling each other shortbus.
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I think I didn't communicate it clearly. People that profess pedophilia should be ridiculed and shunned. It's not a matter of accepting the idea, it's the very fact of openly brandishing that constitutes the harm to the social fabric.
The rules of The Motte are not applicable to society at large, any more than the rules of the Oxford Debate Club or the Japanese Parliament.
I’m talking about mostly civilian discussions of political issues, especially over the Internet. It does no good to tear apart communities and create the conditions for political radicalism and political violence. In fact that’s the worst thing that could happen. Societies that radicalized and created the conditions for political violence are generally shit-holes, places with zero social trust, weak economies and crumbling infrastructure. Much of Latin America is like this, parts of the Middle East, and some parts of Southeast Asia. Nobody really wants to live there anymore because of the poor conditions caused by the political chaos.
Right, and I think when there is a real division in the community, we do have a higher obligation than when fringe elements try to pass off their ideas.
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It seems obvious to me that the thing producing this slide is a slide in core values between the tribes. As median tribal values diverge, as the gap between the median positions widens, the basis for mutual toleration disappears as well. We tolerate and cooperate with people because doing so is seen as an obvious net-positive. Lots of people on the right celebrated OBL's death at the hands of US forces. Lots of people on the right celebrate the idea of killing pedophiles.
It likewise seems obvious to me that we are not short on manners or etiquette. Progressivism invented entire new fields of manners and etiquette. The problem, again, is that no amount of manners and etiquette is going to cover fundamental incompatibility of values.
Human cooperation is based on shared values. Without the shared values, "cooperation" becomes incoherent. Cooperating for what purpose, to what end? If we can't agree that the ends are good, then cooperation with evil is an act of insanity.
You can’t even get to the place of agreeing on values if you’re constantly telling yourself and your allies that those other guys are to be destroyed and kept away from power at all costs. I think in the case of the USA the red and blue tribes share quite a lot, but having that conversation is difficult because of the filter bubbles and the attention economy made worse by the rhetoric that the other tribe wants to destroy the country.
I think we're overcomplicating things (not refering to you, but to society). All preferences align as you approach the source from which they originate. For instance, if the left says "Trump is violent" and the right says "Left-wing activists are violent", then both sides agree that "violence is undesirable". Of course, you see a lot of left-wingers advocate for violence, and a lot of right-wingers indirectly doing the same: "The tree of liberty...". Here, the agreement is "Violence might be necessary in self-defense" and "Violence is an acceptable means against tyranny".
The actual conflict is whether or not Trump is tyrannical, and whether or not Charlie Kirk's rhetoric is dangerous (an attack which should be defended against). Another comment of yours mention pedophilia, but the real disgreements are things like "Is teaching children about anal sex education, or is it grooming?" and "Is a 20-year-old male dating a 17-year-old woman natural and innocent, or is it predatory?", for we agree that grooming and predation are immoral.
I offer this perspective because it keeps me clearsighted (prevents me from drowning in complexity) and because any conclusions generalize to all similar issues.
On the contrary, lots of things are dangerous., A foreign policy that increases the chance of nuclear war is dangerous. Not putting up a stop sign at a busy intersection is dangerous. It just is not true that "danger" means "should be defended against with violence".
Blurring together "is dangerous" and "should be met with violence" is exactly the issue.
That's a good point. "Dangerous" is meaningless unless it's a strong and direct effect. Perhaps "calls for something which is against my human rights". This has to actually be true, it's not enough to argue "It's an attack of my person that you don't give me special rights which suit my uniqueness".
How people interpret dangers is strongly influenced by propaganda, so if you convince group X that group Y is out to get them, group X will start attacking group Y in perceived (but non-existent) self-defense. I feel that this second part, the interpretation, is where most conflict happen. Actual value disagreements seem minor. Perhaps the value hierarchy (order of priority) is different, though.
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Indeed. I think the points of agreement are so broad and deep that they almost vanish into the background. We take them for granted and so the only things that are salient are the outliers.
We can't agree on what constitutes murder, or child abuse. We can't agree on what Rule of Law means. We can't agree on what the Constitution means, or what laws require generally. We can't agree on how to run a Justice system. We can't agree on what is valuable, honorable, decent or depraved. We can't agree on who should be protected or venerated, or who should be disgraced or shunned. The disagreements and others like them cut deep through every facet of our culture, and that culture is visibly coming apart at the seams as a result.
For what it's worth, the cultural divide between red and blue America is still far lesser than the divide between the two great bay colonies that would eventually unite against the crown, even if current levels of general contempt for the other are about the same.
The polities live similar lives, eat similar foods, consume similar mass media, display similar politics on issues primarily determined by age (social security, medicare), enjoy similar past times, have similar incomes, etc. The median red and blue voter are both very identifiably American when mixed into a global pool of people.
Its easy to pick out salacious examples of this not being the case, but how much of this is driven by:
a) The various outrage optimization engines, and b) One's own human tendency to remember the remarkable and aggregate exceptions, ie to over pattern match
How is that a far lesser divide? These things are completely superficial.
People spend the majority of their waking lives largely doing these things, they are important regardless of superficiality. Most people's impact on the world is primarily what they do, not what they think. And even in terms of ideology, MeanRedMan and MeanBlueGuy are most critically, promoters of the American cultural hegemony and distributors of various propaganda.
I'm pretty sure "important" and "superficial" are antonyms. I'm not saying it's impossible for, say, food to be the focus of an irreconcilable difference of values (see: "I will not eat the bugs"), but whether one person eats Itallian and the other Chinese won't affect their ability to cooperate, so declaring there's a smaller gap because people eat the same just sounds bonkers to me.
"American" here only means "originating on roughly the same continent", and it's not even clear how many people of either tribe even want to be cultural hegemons of the world.
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The thing that gets me about this is that, as a leftist/progressive/blue tribe child deep in the blue tribe bubble in the 90s/00s, I was taught that tolerating people with whom we share no core values was an obvious net-positive, because it's only by tolerating such people that we learn the errors in our own values that we are inevitably and necessarily blind to.
Of course, I eventually figured out that the people who taught me this were simply liars who wanted to use this as a tool to force people with very different core values than ours to tolerate and even cooperate with us, without any desire to reciprocate. "When you are powerful, I ask for mercy, etc." and all that. Yet the argument remains just as valid as ever, and so I still insist on being tolerant of values that are are foreign to mine and especially tolerant of values that are hostile to mine.
It does seem like there's something in the human brain that makes crab-bucketing your own tribe to the top by crushing everyone else far more seductive than uplifting your own tribe to the top by improving itself, and I'm not sure if there's a way around that. The one thing I'd say is that I'm highly skeptical of enforcing tolerance through the oppression of an iron fist, because, as someone who wants tolerance, of course I'd believe that it's okay to achieve it by crushing people who disagree with me; I'm biased towards discounting their suffering and stretching logic to justify why they deserve to suffer, and as such, my judgment that "the cost of the suffering of those who were crushed is worth it for the gain in tolerance" isn't credible.
Define "tolerant".
I don't want to eliminate values I consider hostile to mine. I just don't want to live near them, as that is just going to result in lots of conflict. If "tolerance" means sharing power mechanisms and living space, my argument is quite simple:
This is not me trying to generate an argument for why purging anyone who is different is a good idea. Not all or even most values-coordinates are mutually incompatible. There's a wide range of compatibility. Values-incompatibility is not an "I win" button or a tribal superweapon, it is net-loss for everyone involved, we should not be seeking to maximize it. We need to cooperate, because that's where all our good things come from. But if we can't recognize where the cooperation breaks down or isn't possible, we burn value for no purpose and open ourselves up to disaster.
If toleration isn't possible, the alternative isn't annihilation, it's separation. People who can't get along should endeavor to leave each other alone; that's strongly preferable than attempting to exterminate each other. There are values-modification mechanisms other than one group stomping on another; humans observe outcomes and modify, ideological structures that adopt bad values adapt toward better ones over time, even without hard outside pressure, and then maybe in the future reproachment is possible.
But right now, we're at a place in the culture where weaponizing the legal system and organizing lawless violence against the outgroup are on the table. That is, to me, past the point of no return. There is no credible way to un-tolerate these things, to re-establish a taboo, at least not one that I can see.
I find this hard to believe; it is expected that one might want to eliminate threats to oneself.
Separating oneself from the threat might be an acceptable substitute in a vacuum, but again I doubt that it will be a lasting solution; Europeans in particular have a habit of attempting to eliminate values that pose no threat to them but they consider repugnant. Consider the British Raj banning the practice of sati, or USAID funding feminist theater in Central America. Do you think your enemies' values are more like those of the Protestants or those of the Aztec?
There's a bunch of Islamic extremists on the other side of the world. So long as they stay on the other side of the world, why should this be a problem to me? They are far away, they do not rule me, I have nothing particular to gain from ruling them. Why not just leave each other alone?
They should recognize that this is a bad idea and stop doing it. No one has a strong enough claim to moral clarity to impose their morality over the whole world, and if this is a thing people think needs to happen, I agree if and only if it's my morality being imposed. The flaws with this idea should be obvious enough that we can coordinate an end to the practice, even with a considerable amount of values-incoherence.
For one, they seem very interested in ruling you. While the progress they have made towards this end has been entirely thanks to sympathetic elements in your midst, before they were allowed to advance their agenda inside accepted bounds they quite infamously attempted to advance it outside accepted bounds.
It is true that you have little to gain from ruling them. However, you have plenty to gain from the $72.25 trillion in oil they possess (total value of Middle Eastern oil reserves, per ChatGPT), or any of the other resources they control, or simply the land they inhabit. You talk about how progress is a myth and how there is nothing new under the sun; why would you ignore the eternal appeal of conquest?
A lot of black men would not be in prison right now had they simply realized that crime is a bad idea and they should stop doing it.
Europeans have not needed to coordinate with anyone other than themselves to impose morality for at least 500 years, and modulo China they still don't. To the extent that your enemies' values are a proxy for the values of non-Europeans/East Asians, the threat they pose is a paper tiger.
"Interested in ruling me" would imply they take actions likely to make this happen. They mostly are interested in doing their own thing on the other side of the world.
We are not as rich as we once were, but we are not so poor as to require banditry, and we certainly are not in need of additional desert.
Sure, and there will likely be serious consequences for Europe for the mistakes they're making. I, however, am not a European.
...My enemies are a threat because of their values, not because their values are a proxy for those of non-europeans/east asians. I am not worried about Africa or the middle east. I am worried about people who live in my country and don't want me to keep living in it.
None of these arguments are persuasive on why attempting to rule the world is a good idea. Leaving other people to do as they wish elsewhere is simpler and both morally and physically safer.
What did you think jihad meant?
I meant "Europeans" as in whites. It is my observation that a critical mass of whites are congenitally inclined to believe that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere; the missionaries, the activists, the reformers, the revolutionaries. These impulses can and will be directed towards whatever ideological end is fashionable.
Your enemies don't want you to keep living in your country because of the threat your values pose to the intersectional coalition, whose most powerful demographic are non-whites/asians. They believe that the things you believe are lower-order avatars of the same egregore whose purer incarnations included colonialism, patriarchy, homophobia, etc.; I think that they're more correct than you'd give them credit for.
You are correct. However, as I have established, I don't think that whites will be able to resist the allure of the Burden even if your side wins. To the extent that I wish they would take it up, it will likely be for misaimed motives and ineffective means, but a man can dream.
The only alternative is too horrible to detail.
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In the context of free speech, it would be something like, "Impose no consequences on someone else on the basis of whatever opinions they might express" - e.g. in an alternate universe, if that person hadn't expressed that opinion, you would have treated that person indistinguishably to the real universe where they had.
1st bullet point seems obviously true to me. I'm not sure why that second bullet point would be the case. Why would it trade off directly with the things that make cooperation valuable? Cooperation can offer value in a lot of ways, but one is that when you're cooperating, one potential thing you're substituting is murdering each other (or imposing a pinprick's worth of pain, or anything in between). If we share living space and power mechanisms with people whose values are incompatible with ours, as long as the power struggles between groups with mutually incompatible values stay limited to the agreed upon power mechanisms, we're at least able to keep the living space a living space instead of a killing field, which seems valuable.
Because we cooperate to gain value, and if our definitions of "value" is mutually incompatible, then when the cooperation is aimed at one of these spaces, it's at best burning value for nothing for the side whose values aren't being aimed for, and at worst burning value to lose value.
Bolded for the crucial bit. Power struggles cannot be so limited. People are always going to want more good things and fewer bad things. They are never going to want to perpetuate or multiply bad things at the expense of good things. Once the values get far enough apart, they are always going to recognize that if the bad things can be eliminated, the value that went to producing the bad things can instead produce more good things, and then try to make that happen.
America tried detente between slave states and free states. Slave states wanted more slave states, free states wanted more free states. Slave states wanted to perpetuate and spread Slavery; Free states wanted to abolish it. The result was spiraling escalations as both sides realized that amassing and wielding power was instrumental to maximizing goodness and minimizing badness on their own terms. Laws and norms could not contain the pressure, and failed in sequence until large-scale fratricide broke out.
Non-Communist populations could not figure out how to cooperate with dedicated Communist populations, resulting in numerous rebellions, revolutions and wars. Eventually a cohesive territory of Communist states formed, with a hard border to the non-communist states outside, and this mostly kept the peace until Communist ideology collapsed from its own contradictions. Borders worked.
If this sort of spiral is to be prevented, you have to exert energy to maintain values-coherence, which involves policing the fringes and forcing them back to the center, which is not itself tolerant. Absent such enforced coherence, values drift apart, and the further apart they get the less value cooperation can deliver relative to defection or coordinated meanness.
Having mutually incompatible values doesn't mean that we disagree about the value quality of literally every single thing. Multiple groups with mutually incompatible values can all gain value from a cease-fire. And also from abundance.
Perhaps, but this just looks like a restatement of the supposition "tolerance can't work due to human nature." Perhaps tolerance really is like Communism in that way? It's not out of the question. But, indeed, people want more good things and fewer bad things - that's exactly why one would be motivated to tolerate others who have incompatible values with oneself and limit power struggles to mutually agreed-upon places; it's bad to live in a warzone or to expend resources and blood to crush one's enemies sufficiently to make it peaceful, and it's good to live peacefully. Depending on the specifics, which one's better than the other can change, since the blood lost in crushing one's enemies could be worth it and having to live around people whose values you disagree with could be sufficiently soul crushing to be not worth peace. I just don't think that's always the case, and I also don't think that's the case today in most of the West, or at least America. I do think we have many people actively trying to encourage others to suffer from observing the lack of suffering of [people they disagree with sufficiently], so I could see the argument that it will tip soon or has already tipped, though.
I agree, at the edges, this obviously breaks down, so some shared set of values is needed. If a significant portion of the country considers things like "governance," "democracy," "peace," "stability," "survival," as having negative value, tolerating them becomes quite difficult in a democratic republic like the US. This is why the left's crusade against free speech or just generally tolerating honest discussions is so concerning. That said, I'd still insist on tolerating them, as long as they stay within the bounds of agreed upon mechanisms of power struggle. It's when they break that that it becomes justifiable to not tolerate them. But if they just want to write essays and films about how awesome it would be if we just committed civilizational murder-suicide, in an active effort to recruit more people to their cause, then, well, live and let die. Just don't let them kill.
True. I'm focusing on the marginal cases. To the extent that our values are mutually incompatible, cooperation is harder, especially in pursuing those values. To the extent that the gaps in values are small and isolated, only small amounts of separation are needed to avoid significant value loss or conflict; maybe the normal separation we have between people, families, social groups, churches and so on is sufficient. The larger the gaps, the more separation is needed, until it's more separation than our society can reasonably accommodate in its current configuration; people start moving to different areas they perceive as lacking the gap, change jobs or careers maybe. As the gaps get bigger and available separation can't keep up, fighting over power becomes increasingly attractive.
Rather, "Tolerance is not a general solution to human nature." It works great over a very wide range, but there are edge cases where it stops working. If you can't cooperate on a few things, maybe you can cooperate on other things, and the value is still net-positive. But there's obviously a point where cooperation just costs too much value on net and it's not worth it any more. Further, we can see these points coming, and act in advance of their arrival, and we can respond to others doing likewise, with the usual caveats about the dangers of acting on predictions.
Things like this seem over the line to me. Also things like this. ...I'd prefer not to do a large-type airing of grievances, but there have been a lot of things Blue Tribe attempted or executed over the last ten years that seem to me to amount to irreconcilable differences. It doesn't matter if some of the things didn't work, or others were reversed when cooler heads prevailed; the knowledge these incidents generated about what Blue Tribe is willing to commit to means that it does not seem to me to be a good idea to trust them to have power over me ever again. Maybe that's partisanship talking. Maybe it's really not all that bad. Maybe nothing ever happens.
...I think there will be a backlash to the things my side is doing now. While that backlash is predictable, it does not seem wise to refrain from doing those things to forestall it, and it will almost certainly be a good idea to generate a backlash of our own when theirs arrives. It is hard to imagine the point at which I will conclude that there's been enough conflict, we should make peace instead. Objectively, it is hard to imagine the other side reaching that point either. We will each perceive what the other has done as reason to double down, and our own actions as justified. The difference, of course, is that I perceive my side to be correct, and their side to be insane. And sure, I would, wouldn't I? This is how tribalism works, we can always retreat into abstractions until there's no difference between right and wrong, good and evil, cue the Dril tweet.
Here in the real world, there's not much of an off-ramp I see. When we cannot agree on the definitions of basic terms like murder, child abuse, rule of law, treason... it seems wiser to me to admit that the problem is beyond us, and pack it in before we really hurt each other.
If I convince you that I intend to coordinate unsurvivable meanness against you, your willingness to abide by the bounds of agreed-upon mechanisms of power struggle are likely to decline precipitously, especially when those bounds are nebulous and poorly defined, and playing border games puts me in a progressively-stronger position for clearly violating them to get what I want without paying the consequences.
All these systems are fragile. That doesn't mean they don't or can't work, it means they work when used properly and don't work when misused.
Do you expect them to respect this principle the other way? When it's my side saying that the soap, ballot and jury boxes have been expended and it's time for the ammo box, are they going to agree in principle that only the people who actually act on it are culpable, and not those of us encouraging it? There are principles I'm invested in enough to uphold even alone. If free speech worked the way I was taught it did, if it worked the way I used to believe, it would still be one of them. But after what I've seen this past decade, I'm much more skeptical on the value of the principle, and even the sheer possibility of getting net-good out of it at all under even slightly adverse conditions. Again, this does not make me a censorship enthusiast, just a pessimist on what we're paying and what we'll get in return.
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I’m not sure if I should be pleasantly surprised or deeply alarmed that I’m fully in agreement with you on this.
Recognizing the nature of the problem is the first step to finding a solution.
Reply above is filtered, btw.
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