Are We Actually Okay with Censorship?

Last week I wrote about how people in this part of the world seem to want to abdicate control of their lives to government and those seen as experts instead of taking responsibility for their own decisions.

I received a fair bit of backlash on social media for one paragraph, which kind of detracted from the message I was trying to convey.

We've become a society wholly dependant on “experts” for everything, as if we need them to hold our hands as we navigate life. What used to be common sense now requires at least two citations of peer reviewed literature to be considered valid - or at least a blessing from the government.

Some readers were apparently near frothing at the mouth in their desire to set me straight as they seemed to believe I was saying that experts have no value in society and we should all just “do our own research” and go be happy in our ignorance.

I'm not going to try to explain last week's article - you can read it yourself and arrive at your own conclusions. I'll just say one thing about the experts in that piece, which is that even legitimate experts rarely agree on everything (this is what science is all about) and we should be free to judge for ourselves what these people are saying, without a third party telling us which experts are “acceptable” and which ones aren't.

The rest of that piece, which is called Canadians Are Abdicating Their Independence to the State is basically saying that we need to become better critical thinkers and teach our children to be that as well. This is the way to be more independent and productive, rather than just accepting all the latest popular advice trumpeted by government and social media. This is especially pertinent considering our government’s sketchy track record.

So anyway, just a few days ago, I came across this speech by Matt Taibbi at Freedom Fest in Memphis. Matt is one of my favourite investigative journalists and is responsible for (among other things) breaking the twitter Files story along with Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss. By the way, this video is almost six hours long, with Matt's speech comprising about 20 minutes of that. I highly recommend checking it out. His speech starts at 3:56 and goes till 4:17. After that he sits down with Nico Perrino of FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) and talks for another 20 minutes or so.

The reason this caught my attention this week is because he basically tackles the same issue I had just finished writing about, only from another perspective. Whereas I put a lot of this problem squarely on the government (yes, I realize I probably have some personal issues and perhaps even an axe or two to grind in that regard, but I think it's part of my charm), Matt comes at it from more of a social media direction and puts it back on us. Of course he articulates it really well (much better than I could), and I rather think his take may actually make more sense than mine😳.

You really should check out Matt's substack, Racket News, which is one of the few paying subscriptions I've taken out.

The above quote is what really got me thinking about this in a new way this week. Here it is again:

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.

- Judge Learned Hand, 1944

This is a somber warning, and is more of a threat to our freedom than anything else because it directly affects freedom of speech. Though it may not seem like it, the little things are a really big deal. In his speech, Matt talked about his time in the former Soviet Union and how people would constantly “babble” and profess their belief in certain orthodoxies so that no one would think that they were secretly harboring unacceptable views. They learned it was dangerous to be quiet because others might suspect them of “thinking too much”. What a perfect analogy of social media life in the 2020s. And not only social media, but government and corporate messaging as well. Who could forget Black Lives Matter’s message of silence is violence?

This entire notion is built on fear - the fear of saying the wrong thing; the fear of not saying the right thing; the fear of others getting the wrong idea of who you are.

In his book, All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays, George Orwell said this:

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.

This was written in 1941, but it sure rings true today.

Obviously there was a progression that got us to this point, and here's kinda what that progression looked like:

1. The people got addicted to the internet. We need our phones with us 24/7 because we need the convenience of all that knowledge and wisdom (whether we ever intend to use it or not). And cat videos…

2. Social media became a lame substitute for human interaction.

3. Then we became submissive to the wisdom of the crowd.

One thing we didn't count on was that much of the wisdom contained within these social media crowds was often stoked by political and social engineers because these “crowds” weren't really a fair representation of the human population afterall. The Twitter Files made it abundantly clear that much of what we saw on social media (and didn’t see) was curated for us by a collusion of government and big tech.

As worried as many of us are about censorship in general, and government censorship in particular, the most insidious form of censorship is the type we apply to ourselves. As in the former Soviet Union, self censorship is now a legitimate concern in the West, and it’s on the rise.

As long as we're okay with censoring ourselves, or content with babbling our constant streams of current orthodoxies, any other form of censorship is redundant and unnecessary. The more we favour our social media “like” count over what is actually truthful and relevant, the more we are robbed of our will to be free. And the more that will dissolves, the more our liberty dies, and the less power we’ll have to resurrect it.

Thankfully there is also a push among certain segments of the population to keep this will alive. That's what organizations like FIRE and events like Freedom Fest are all about. Even the medical world is getting in on it. Sure, some of these are big on the theatrical and short on actual results (think the numerous “freedom” protests that have been popping up throughout the world), but the fact remains that citizens are seeing a real need for them. I for one am hopeful that we’ll see even more of an effort to fan the flames of this liberty in the hearts of men and women, because that's where it really needs to be. Everything else is just theatre.

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Further reading on this topic: