As a free speech fundamentalist, I’m not seeing much of value on offer from either Democrats or Republicans in this year’s presidential election. While I’m not especially surprised, I am somewhat unsettled by just how open both campaigns are about their desire to suppress speech that reflects negatively on either their ideas or on their candidates as people, sometimes while cosplaying as “free speech” supporters.
I’m not unsettled because I want to shout “fire” in a crowded theater (unless there IS a fire), or use racial slurs, or convince you that bad actors with space lasers are controlling the weather, or whatever.
Nor is it that I want to hear other people doing those particular things, although I do — because it tells me who those people are and that I shouldn’t trust them with anything, especially political power.
It’s because I’ve read George Orwell’s most popular work, 1984.
“The purpose of Newspeak,” Orwell wrote in that novel’s appendix, “was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [the single party ruling his fictional country of Oceania], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that … a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”
Attempts to control language are attempts to control your mind, and censorship is the oldest tool of that trade.
It’s all good and well to inveigh against “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “hate speech.” But usually when a politician does so, he or she has plans to censor particular words, thoughts, and ideas, either cynically in a raw grab for power or naively in the false belief that Bad Thoughts can be banished by force of law.
I call that belief false because history says it’s never ENTIRELY successful. Even the world’s most totalitarian regimes have always failed to keep their subjects’ minds in a state of continuing pristine belief, mentally (or even vocally) toeing the regime’s line on every subject. But even partial success in such a project costs innocent people their freedoms and their lives.
Forbidding you to say X is an attempt to keep me from hearing X, and to stop both of us from thinking, or acting on, X. Even if X is untrue, that’s a conclusion we’re entitled to reach for ourselves on the basis of open expression and debate. Reaching it for us forcibly and without the ability to appeal isn’t a job we should ever entrust to government.
A little bit of censorship, even for the “best” reasons, is like being a little bit pregnant — there’s no such thing. We’re free to speak our minds, or we aren’t. Any supposed “in between” spot depends entirely on whether those in power agree with what we think … and that’s not freedom.
If a politician wants to tell you what you may or may not say, that politician isn’t your friend.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
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