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Arnold Kling on Michael Huemer on Thought Crime
It kind of goes without saying, but inherent in the notion of "thought crime" are both crime and punishment. If it doesn't deserve punishment, then it's not a crime.
Amen, brother. But is this just preaching to the choir? Consider: A whole lot of NPCs and talking heads sure ate up The Narrative. Propaganda is effective, to an extent, but beyond that extent it is deeply corrosive, particularly to any intellectual class, who become disillusioned and cynical. Thought crime is next.
Religions in general, and Christianity in particular, are all about thought crime. You have to take the salvation of Jesus into your heart or something, and if you don't, have fun with eternal damnation. I can accept Aquinas, Chesterton, C.S. Lewis. These are men who appealed to reason, writing to convince and persuade.
I imagine only atheists see the appeal of comparing woke (progressive, successor) ideology to a religion of sorts, likely filling some kind of primitive need for tribal loyalty, purity tests, and expensive signals (rabid adherence to nonsense). I'd love to hear Antonin Scalia's take though. Or L. Ron Hubbard's. Perhaps what we are seeing with successor ideology is not an individual need for such, but instead just the character of mass movements, the nature of power, its patterns of growth and movement and perpetuation. Are propaganda and thought crime inevitable?
Let's take it back to 1984. Orwell demonstrates the existential horror of a regime that can successfully deploy thought crime. Didn't he make it blindingly obvious for everyone? I'm pretty sure we were all nodding our heads in 8th grade English class about the evils of totalitarianism, only a few years after the USSR fell. I suspect this issue is particularly salient for me, as a libertarian.
Anyways, I'm not mad, just disappointed.
I think that in reality, people who persecute others for "thought-crime" tend to genuinely believe at least at the conscious level that the "thought crime" is demonstrably false, but also that the person being persecuted is too stupid and/or evil and/or brainwashed to have his mind changed by non-coercive persuasion. This applies both to Christians and to the woke.
Most true hardcore Christians - that is, the kind who would persecute others for disagreeing - seem to genuinely believe at least on the conscious level that not being a Christian is irrational. However, I do agree that on the subconscious level they may have doubts which partly explain their desire to persecute.
Likewise, most persecutory wokes seem to genuinely believe at least on the conscious level that, for example, racism is irrational and stupid.
There is also a second issue to consider: the notion of "thought-crime" encompasses both opinion-crime and preference-crime. Unlike opinions, preferences in principle cannot be argued against rationally, yet "thought-crime" inquisitors are nonetheless willing to persecute people for having "the wrong" preferences. For example, if they believe that it is wrong to dislike bananas, they will be just as happy to persecute a man for disliking bananas because he thinks they taste bad as to persecute him because he thinks that they have poor nutritious content.
Why is this? I think it is probably because persecutors tend to treat preferences to some extent as if they were opinions, and will try to argue people out of them as much as possible. To be fair, many people who get accused of "thought-crime" do the same thing, and tend to try to defend what are actually deeply emotional and personal preferences as if they were opinions.
But secondly, persecutors insist that even if your preference (or for that matter, your opinion) cannot be changed, you must nonetheless at least not just act but also speak as if it had been changed. And in this way yes, we do see one of the ways in which persecution of "thought-criminals" can indeed be a dominance move.
The desire to control others does not always and in every case emanate from the persecutor's deep-seated psychological desire to dominate. It could at least in theory also be emanating from disgust or some genuine desire to defend the community. For example, a man who demands that racists not just act as if they were not racists, but even speak as if they were not racists, even if their dislike of other races cannot be changed, is not necessarily demanding this out of a deep-seated desire to dominate others, although I would guess that in many cases such people actually are doing it out of a drive to dominate. I am just not convinced that it is all of them.
But in any case, clearly at least sometimes the desire to persecute others for "thought-crime" does emanate primarily from a desire to dominate.
In any case, I think that free speech can be defended, at least theoretically if not pragmatically, independently of considerations about what drives those who wish to restrict it to want to restrict it.
Lastly, some comments on Orwell. I think that the person you are quoting is using the concept of "thought crime" in a way that is a bit out of sync with Orwell's horrific vision.
Orwell's O'Brien does not care much whether the ideas that he tortures people into accepting are demonstrably true or false, actually he would probably prefer that they are false because for him the point is to have utter and complete power over others, and you have more power if you force someone to believe a thing that is demonstrably false than if you force him to accept something that is true. And to take it even further, O'Brien even claims that essentially, reality outside of what The Party claims is unimportant.
In real life, I think that other than a pretty small number of hardcore sadists and power-hungry sociopaths, most people who persecute others for "thought crime" are not like O'Brien. That is, unlike O'Brien, they have no desire, at least on the conscious level, to force anyone to accept things that are demonstrably false. When they try to force people to change their minds, they believe that they are trying to get them to change their minds to believe in something more true. And, no matter how much religious or woke jargon they might spew, they do believe that there exists an objective reality that matters.
I e always taken the thought that a good deal of the unacceptability of the thought deemed a crime was at least pushed by two things.
First, that the very idea itself is too dangerous to be publicly expressed. This goes back through religion and state power and other belief systems and basically the legitimacy of people who rule. In much of European history, publicly questioning major Christian dogma was, in modern terms, thought crime. Being openly non-trinitarian was treated as a terrible crime. But likewise, questioning the legitimacy of your king, suggesting that he’s not a legitimate heir to the throne is treasonous. These things call directly into question the legitimacy of the institution being questioned. If Charles III isn’t the son of Elizabeth II, he’s not a legitimate heir to the throne. This isn’t a big deal now (in fact royalty following Twitter has often claimed that both princes are the product of different affairs, without harassment) but saying the same thing in an era where the king has real power and others vying for his throne, and it’s not something the authorities are going to ignore. Democracy’s legitimacy hinges upon the idea that the will of the people should determine the leadership. Thus, the claims of election fraud are still treated as dangerous ideology.
The second I hung is that the claims have to be at least plausible, if not true. If I claimed that Biden was using black magic to cause fires in Hawaii, that’s not a thought crime, because nobody really takes claims of black magic seriously. Likewise, claims like flat earth, faked moon landings, alien autopsy videos, or cryptids are not thought crimes. At best people laugh at the idea of the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot. Make other claims like two genders, Hunter’s laptop, HBD, biological differences between the sexes, or lab leak theory, and it’s a serious thought crime.
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