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Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech. This lecture from Academy of Ideas applies that warning to the present day. It argues that outlawing ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate speech’ does the opposite of protecting freedom: it hands rulers the power to decide what truth is. Drawing on Mill, Douglass, and Orwell, it shows how a state truth-arbiter becomes a Ministry of Truth. The endpoint is thought crime — and once you can punish wrong words, you can re-educate wrong thoughts.
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In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything else his own.
Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
Freedom of speech was once one of the West’s most cherished rights,
but in the modern day governments are attempting to strip us of this right.
In almost all Western nations, legislation is being introduced to thwart our ability to speak freely.
Politicians and bureaucrats justify this anti-free speech stance in the name of the greater good.
They claim that with more control over what people say, fewer people will be led astray by misinformation and disinformation,
and fewer people will be harmed by the criticism and insults of hate speech.
In this video, we make the case that censoring and criminalizing the expression of misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech
is an existential threat to a free and prosperous society.
To suppress free speech is a double wrong, wrote the American philosopher Frederick Douglass.
It violates the right of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.
It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.
In the West, there have long been limits on what can and cannot be said.
Property rights create one such limit.
A property owner can assert the authority of my house, my rules,
and expel any individual from his or her premises who says something the property owner wishes not to hear.
The principles of common law, which are foundational to many Western legal systems,
also recognize speech which threatens the person or property of another,
conspires toward the committing of a crime, or incites others to violence, as requiring legal sanction.
Laws against defamation and false advertising place additional limits on speech.
The purpose of this video is not to argue against the value of these basic limits on our speech.
Rather, our concern is solely with the dangers that arise if governments censor and criminalize
what they consider to be misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech.
The opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true,
wrote John Stuart Mill.
Those who desire to suppress it, of course, deny its truth.
But they are not infallible.
They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind
and exclude every other person from the means of judging.
Disinformation is typically defined as false or inaccurate information that is spread with the intent to deceive,
while misinformation is defined as false or inaccurate information that is spread without the intent to deceive.
To accuse someone of spreading false ideas, a judgment must be made as to what is true.
Government censorship of misinformation and disinformation, therefore, requires the creation
of a regulatory body tasked with distinguishing between truth and deception. Few people are naive
enough to believe that politicians and bureaucrats are mentally equipped to be the ultimate arbiters
of truth. But many believe that governments can rely on the opinion of experts to determine if
something is misinformation or disinformation. There are several reasons why experts are ill-suited
to play this role. Firstly, there are relatively few ideas which all experts agree on. Politicians,
therefore, can influence what will be classified as misinformation or disinformation through the
selection of the experts authorized to distinguish between truth and error. Secondly, experts,
like all of us, are corruptible by money and power. If granted the authority to determine
truth for a society, it is very likely that most experts will fall prey to the same corrupting
influences that turn politicians into forces of social destruction. But even if an expert’s
motives remain pure, they are still not suited to play the role of ultimate arbiter of truth.
For experts tend to be hyper-specialized in a specific field of study which creates a myopia
in their vision. They may have a strong grasp on the current knowledge base of their domain,
and they may be the best person to ask what is considered true right now, but it does not follow
that the expert will always be attuned to the truth, especially if the truth is new and
groundbreaking. Years of specializing in a single field of study often leaves the experts entrenched
in their views and unwilling to consider competing points of view. For this reason, it is often the
outsider who discovers the truths that revolutionize our understanding of the world.
and the outsider is the very individual who risks censorship by the so-called expert.
Or as Ian McGilchrist writes,
There is a prejudice against outsiders who have the advantage of not starting with the same preconceptions.
Hermann von Helmholtz’s crucially important discoveries in physics were dismissed
because he was a medical doctor and philosopher by training.
Equally, Louis Pasteur’s and Francois Magendie’s medical discoveries were dismissed
because they were not physicians. There is a tendency for many scientists to take an
uncritically contemptuous and at times frankly self-righteous attitude to whatever might
challenge the mainstream of conventional thinking. Another reason the expert is ill-suited to play
the role of the ultimate arbiter of truth is because truth is not discovered by decree.
Truths are converged upon through a spontaneous and free-flowing competition of ideas,
and in this process false ideas play a crucial role.
False ideas are the contrast through which truth emerges.
Or as Frank Faraday writes in his book On Tolerance,
Truth emerges through the process of debate among competing views and opinions.
From this perspective, even views that are deemed to be false can serve the positive
end of forcing others to develop and clarify their opinions.
When a government bureaucracy and its appointed experts become the arbiters of truth, this
stunts the intellectual development of mankind. It hinders our ability to challenge the ideas
of the status quo and thwarts the creative dynamic by which we test, refine, and discover new truths.
The expression of what we believe to be false ideas should not be silenced. These ideas should
be openly debated. For not only do false ideas help us arrive at truth, but sometimes what is
thought to be false is later discovered to be true. Or as John Stuart Mill wrote,
The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race,
posterity as well as the existing generation, those who dissent from the opinion still more
than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging
error for truth. If wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception
and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. A further danger of
permitting governments to censor and criminalize the expression of misinformation and disinformation
is that it creates an infantilized population. When a government claims that it is necessary
to protect people from what they consider to be false or dangerous ideas, what they are asserting
is that the population is too immature to exercise independent judgment. Like children, we are to be
told what to believe, what is right and wrong, and what can and cannot be said. And as the philosopher
Ronald Dworkin explains, government insults its citizens and denies their moral responsibility
when it decrees that they cannot be trusted to hear opinions that might persuade them to
dangerous or offensive convictions. We retain our dignity, as individuals, only by insisting that
no one, no official and no majority, has the right to withhold opinion from us on the ground
that we are not fit to hear and consider it. The greatest danger of censoring and criminalizing
misinformation and disinformation, however, is that it paves the way for totalitarianism.
For, as Frederick Douglass wrote,
Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.
That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants.
It is the right which they first of all strike down.
They know its power.
All totalitarian nations of the past have censored speech and only permitted the expression of ideas that align with the ideology of the ruling party.
All other ideas are classified as misinformation or disinformation,
Creating a regulatory body tasked with determining what is to be considered true is taking a
page out of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
In this novel, the totalitarian government that rules over society operates a ministry
of truth, and the bureaucrats who work there are tasked with censoring the arts, entertainment,
news, and education industries.
Whatever the party holds to be the truth is truth, writes Orwell.
It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the party.
When a government is granted the power to determine what is true, it possesses a remarkable
power over its citizenry.
Without needing to use overt force, it can engineer a population to act in the ways desired
by the ruling class.
And it can quell dissent of destructive government policies by classifying it as disinformation.
In his book Propaganda, The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, the French philosopher Jacques
Ellul wrote that,
The point is to make the masses demand of the government what the government has already
decided to do, and the way a government does this is by creating the lens of ideas through
which a population views the world.
And as John Stuart Mill wrote,
An absolute power of suppressing all opinions would amount, if it could be exercised, to
despotism far more perfect than any other which has yet existed. Whether a government uses its
powers of censorship to promote what it thinks is good for society is irrelevant. The mere act
of stifling our ability to make our own determination about what is true and what
ideas we allow to shape our lives is a totalitarian act as it rids us of the personal autonomy that is
integral to freedom. Or as Ferretti writes,
Propagating and institutionalizing forms of correct attitudes and behavior that are generated
by government advisors and experts is a form of social engineering that is devoted to re-educating
people. If the term totalitarianism is to have any meaning, it is a system where the right to
possess and act on private preferences is continually tested by officialdom. When the
dangers of censoring and criminalizing the spread of misinformation and disinformation are recognized,
it becomes clear that if we favor freedom, social prosperity, and the moral and intellectual
advancement of mankind, we should oppose this form of government censorship. But what about
laws against hate speech? Hate speech, as the author Nadine Strossen writes, can be defined as
speech that expresses hateful or discriminatory views about certain groups that historically
have been subject to discrimination or about personal characteristics that have been the
basis of discrimination, such as race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation.
One of the primary ways that hate speech laws are justified is by claiming that hate speech
constitutes a form of violence. Just as physical blows cause bodily harm, hateful words inflict
emotional and mental harm that can be deeply damaging to the health of one’s psyche.
If words can be weapons, then those who psychologically assault others with words
should be subject to criminal prosecution. This position, however, amounts to a
reconceptualization of language and a fetishization of words. Or as Ferdi explains,
At its worst, the idiom of assaultive speech fetishizes words, reinventing them as objects
that contain destructive properties in and of themselves. Historically, the fetishization of
words emerged with ancient mystical and religious thought. According to numerous creation myths,
saying the word could turn it into reality while a spell or a curse could literally destroy lives.
In ancient Egypt, it was believed that the spoken word had a transformative impact on the world.
In some religions, the word for God could not be said for fear of unleashing its wrath.
These early fantasies of ancient superstition have now been recycled by opponents of free speech
in the shape of psychic threats. This fetishization of words overlooks the fact
that there is a categorical difference between an assault with a word and an assault with a
physical object. If a man is struck with a fist to the face, he will experience harm no matter
his mental state. But when it comes to the weapon of words, the degree of harm a victim experiences
is determined by his or her psychological constitution. Some people can be at the
the receiving end of brutal insults and yet experience very little harm, while others
can be psychologically crushed by the most minor of slights.
When assaulted by the so-called weapon of words, our mental state is the biggest determinant
of the amount of harm we experience.
And as Verity writes,
Unlike physical harm, our emotional harm is limited only by the imagination.
Regardless of intent, a gesture or comment can be perceived in a way that causes emotional
harm.
And this leads to a major problem with hate speech laws.
What one considers as meeting the threshold of hate speech is completely subjective.
And by granting the government the power to make this judgment, the government can use
these laws to silence any individual or group they desire.
For example, they can claim that criticism of the government psychologically harms politicians,
criticism of immigration levels psychologically harms certain ethnic groups, criticism of
abortion laws psychologically harms women, criticism of climate change laws psychologically
harms the youth, or criticism of a war psychologically harms one of the groups involved.
If you can’t express your biases or your hatreds or what others perceive as your biases
or hatreds, then you’ve been preemptively gagged,” explains Gerard Casey.
You are at the mercy of those who get to determine what is and what isn’t hate speech.
Where hate speech is simply whatever those who are given to censorship and have the power
to censor find hateful.
Censoring hate speech laws also divides a society.
It creates groups who are protected from criticism by the government and groups who are not.
The privileged treatment of the protected groups can increase the animosity directed
toward them and turn them into targets due to what many perceive as unfair treatment.
Furthermore, when people are prevented from expressing their hatred in words,
this can lead to pent-up frustrations that manifest in physical violence.
To make matters worse, censoring and criminalizing hate speech stunts the
psychological development of the members of the protected groups.
A key component of maturity is cultivating the capacity to endure criticism without breaking
down psychologically. If we demand that a government use the force of the law to protect
us from what we consider hate speech, we become complicit in the weakening of our sense of self.
Instead of cultivating the resilience and power required to respond to, or ignore,
the cruel words of others, we disempower ourselves and play the role of the victim,
a role that is not conducive to individual flourishing.
And as Verity writes,
and taking offense is often a display of immaturity.
Not only do hate speech laws have many negative consequences,
but they are also unnecessary as there are more effective ways to inhibit the expression of hate speech.
All functioning societies have used informal social mechanisms,
such as norms of politeness and etiquette, and most importantly social ostracism,
to effectively minimize hateful rhetoric.
It is a false dichotomy to believe that our options are between allowing governments to criminalize hate speech
or allowing it to spread unchecked.
Or as Cayce writes,
Such matters are controlled by informal social norms which are more extensive and more effective
than we often give them credit for being.
as indeed is the case with most of the things that we say and do.
Without these moral and social constraints,
it would scarcely be possible to organize a functioning society,
even with the most extensive and minute legal regulations.
Permitting governments to censor hate speech,
misinformation, and disinformation creates a slippery slope.
For if we, as a society, come to accept that hateful speech
and false or dangerous ideas should be censored
and the subject of legal control, why stop there? Why not restrict or punish thoughts?
For the wrong type of thinking is what leads to the expression of hate speech and to the spread
of misinformation and disinformation. If we can identify which individuals are thinking in the
wrong way, perhaps we should re-educate them before they put their dangerous thoughts into
words. And if they resist re-education, perhaps we should imprison them for thought crimes.
To prevent a descent into these dystopian conditions where governments police our thoughts
and control our words, more of us need to exercise our right to free speech and to ostracize
individuals and businesses who are complicit in government censorship.
If we don’t, our future will be bleak.
For as Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned,
Public opinion.
I don’t know how sociologists define it, but it seems obvious to me that it can only
consist of interacting individual opinions, freely expressed and independent of government
or party opinion. So long as there is no independent public opinion in our country,
there is no guarantee that the extermination of millions and millions for no good reason
will not happen again. That it will not begin any night. Perhaps this very night.
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