The prospect of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter dismayed the left and elated the right. Why? Because of the expectation that Twitter would thenceforth stop censoring “misinformation”, that is, facts and arguments that subvert the tenets of wokeism. Chief among those tenets are:
Gender fluidity (e.g., the beliefs that “men” can bear children and that sex is “assigned” at birth)
“Climate
changecatastrophe” as mainly a human-caused “problem”The dictatorship of “science” (when certain “scientists” proclaim “truths” favored by the woke, such as the aforementioned commitment to human-caused warming as a “scientific fact”, which it isn’t)
Conservatism and constitutionalism as fascistic (a classic case of psychological projection)
Blacks as oppressed victims of whites, who are all racists (despite strong evidence that blacks earn less than whites, have less wealth than whites, and commit crimes more often than whites because of innate differences in intelligence and cultural reinforcement of dysfunctional behavior).
There’s much more (see this, for example), but you get the idea.
Imagine what the worlds of politics, journalism, entertainment, advertising, and employment would be like if conservatives had been as successful at suppressing the ideas of wokeism as wokeists have been successful at suppressing their ideological opponents’ views. “Sane” would be a good descriptor. (If you liked the 1950s, you’d love the absence of wokeism.)
Wokeism has succeeded largely because of the mistaken idea that freedom of speech in all matters is a “good thing”. (Conservatives generally agree, but with exceptions for such things as pornography.) Further, practically unfettered freedom of speech is bound to lead to the truth because the “marketplace of ideas” ensures that it will.
But, as it has turned out, practically unfettered freedom of speech is the devil’s playground. It fosters the operation of an intellectual version of Gresham’s law: Bad ideas drive out good ones. This perversion of the “marketplace of ideas” is reinforced by the government’s (i.e., the left’s) command of public education indoctrination; the legalistic trick (known as section 230 of the Communications Decency Act) that allows leftist information brokers to suppress conservative views; and the removal of all constraints on what the left-dominated media may present as “entertainment” and “news”.
I have elsewhere and at length (e.g., here and here) explained and explored the wrongness and consequences of free-speech absolutism. Here, I will focus on the question posed by the title of this post: Why freedom of speech, that is, what is the good of it?
Free speech — speaking one’s mind without restraint at all times and in all places — is the province of innocents and madmen. For most human beings, speech approaches (and sometimes attains) openness and candor only among intimates. Even then — when marriages, romances, and friendships fail — the limitations of openness and candor (“free speech”) become apparent.
Even among academics who work in fields that are supposedly objective (e.g., the “hard sciences” and mathematics) there are rivalries, jealousies, and political differences that stand in the way of openness and candor. It’s not that academics don’t say what they really think; they are notorious for doing so. It’s that the purported objective of free speech — the pursuit of truth through the competition of ideas — is unlikely to be attained when hypotheses and facts are skewed by academicians’ biases. A leading example of this phenomenon is the scientific consensus group-think about “climate change“, which is a shining example of a hypothesis that has been disproved by evidence but survives and thrives on ignorance, emotionalism, and self-interest. (As do many other ruinous manifestations of “free speech”, such as recycling, “green” energy, anti-COVID masking, the innocence of Trayvon Martin, the saintliness of George Floyd, etc., etc., etc.)
In sum, given the left’s dominance of the “marketplace of ideas”, favored opinions will be (and are) those that foster social discord (e.g., critical race theory) and hysterical attachments to destructive pseudo-scientific fraudulence (e.g., “climate catastrophe” and “gender fluidity”).
Freedom of speech, as now practiced in America, favors irrationality and emotionalism. It does not — as evidenced by the current state of America — favor truth, justice, or the general well-being of the citizenry.
Freedom of speech is beneficial only if a vast majority of the populace shares certain fundamental values:
Free markets produce the best outcomes, especially when people take personal responsibility for their economic situation.
Social comity rests on taking personal responsibility for one’s actions, not making excuses or blaming “the system”.
The last six of the Ten Commandments are the best guides to proper behavior.
Duly enacted laws are to be upheld until they are duly revised or rescinded.
Social and economic freedom come down to mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual forbearance, which describes the state of liberty. Without those things, there is no liberty.
The Framers of the Constitution could not envision a free society in which the foregoing tenets were routinely and gleefully violated. That is because there can be no free society where the foregoing tenets are routinely and gleefully violated.
To put a point on it, freedom of speech is a danger to liberty, prosperity, and social comity as long as America’s institutions are held captive or besieged by the left.
But it is evident that the left will not relent. It is therefore time for a national divorce that frees the majority of States from the left’s tyranny.
I will discuss national divorce in my next post.