Understanding the free speech paradox
Oh no, a follow-up post appears
i. Tangential introduction 1 of 2: Let’s just ban free speech criticism
It should tell the person who values free speech something that nothing would strike them as more meet than for criticism of free speech, such as I offered in my previous post, to simply be made illegal.
“Stop saying free speech is not good - you might make it go away!” “Be ‘free’ to say it is not good, but also do not do what you are ‘free’ to.”
Or, instead, the person who values free speech perceives that I am in a trap because the criticism I offer is made possible by free speech (though, it would be so much better if it weren’t). Again this is only a confusion brought about by the myth that there is something magical about free speech, that it is unlike any other freedom. Of course I am employing free speech when I criticize it. But that doesn’t mean free speech is good. Just as if I were freely imposing any other social negative for my own personal ends. Yes, I am free to do this, I am doing this, but there are consequences that are detrimental to the order of society.
ii. Tangential introduction 2 of 2: ‘Free speech’ gave us lockdowns
I will now use the construction ‘free speech,’ apostrophized, to denote clearly the American convention of considering the government proscribed from passing laws regarding speech. This isn’t really free speech, as in the ability for anybody to say anything they want in society without consequences; it merely denotes a given society’s decision to mostly not let the government pass laws about speech. There are no real freedoms in a society; as will be revisited below.
Consider then that thanks to ‘free speech,’ no legal means existed to prevent a handful of twitter users and the mainstream media from selling lockdowns to the West. As I argued in “The Origin of Lockdowns,” the entire reason for lockdowns was the construction and publication of a single, irresponsible, arbitrary graphic.
“If you’re waiting for someone to tell you what to do, here it is.” Speech gave us lockdowns — it told us what to do. During lockdowns, it should be remembered, no overt state suppression of speech was required — dissent was handled via normal media policy, i.e. pure silence. The media invented lockdowns; sold the idea that lockdowns would somehow be of any benefit; and erected the false impression of consensus on lockdowns and suspect election results that sailed the country into the Biden era. During all of these speech-inflicted perversions, every single other right extended to the citizens of every Western government but Sweden was suspended until politicians became convinced the media no longer supported them, which varied from months to years in different lands. Religion. Assembly. Work. Play. Healthcare. Public security. Every single liberty; every single privilege.
Whereas if the media’s “telling” people to “flatten the curve” were not legal, none of that would have happened.
Consider this my blanket reply to the magic-think idea that speech is the first legal right to fall in the descent to tyranny. Reality trumps fantasy.
iii. In support of ‘free speech’
With those introductions hopefully calibrating the reader’s understanding of my priors, we may talk in a serious and clear-minded way about ‘free speech’ and examine the simple paradoxes that operate on the subject.
There is, as pointed out in the previous post, no real such thing as free speech, any more than there is free sex, or free car — no society can function if humans can say whatever they want, anymore than have sex with or take the car of whoever they want. Therefor the only real question on all of these matters is whether restriction of action is enforced by the state or merely the mores of civility, i.e. politeness.
Typically only those sins which imminently threaten individual life and property or collective order are made subject to the state’s monopoly on violence; the latter category can be quite over-arching, and certainly includes speech, e.g. laws against fraud and libel.
Societies do not withhold power from the state because this creates more “freedom.” They do so because state enforcement of preferred behaviors is onerous. Therefor despite every criticism I have raised vs. ‘free speech’ (as defined above), I can acknowledge obvious benefits. (I can also point out again that there is no misunderstanding on my part that the US Constitution, except for the civil rights amendments, grants the Federal government no power to regulate speech; but this does not apply to states except under a positive interpretation of the civil rights amendments. We could still imagine a scenario where individual states could make it illegal to tell people they should “flatten the curve.”)
State restrictions on speech are not only onerous, but especially onerous, because speech is nuanced and non-objective. For any instance when the state might make it illegal to say X about Y, for example, any speech that says “not X” about Y can be interpreted as actually saying X. It therefor becomes almost impossible to say anything about Y without fearing state recrimination; further, the judiciary and/or bureaucracy becomes a de facto dictatorship as regards state enforcement of speech laws, since it is in the courts or appointed panels that every instance of speech must be inspected for compliance to a given law regarding X and Y. And so we seemingly must end up almost immediately at Soviet- or Red Scare-style purges of wrong-think.
And so this is a pragmatic way to understand the value of ‘free speech.’ It isn’t necessarily good in of itself; instead, it is what we ought to settle for in light of the practical difficulty of regulating speech in a non-arbitrary and oppressive manner.
iv. The paradox of ‘free speech,’ 1: Societies still fall due to lay censorship
And so now we have defined ‘free speech’ in terms of leaving social restrictions on speech out of the realm of government.
Those social restrictions are still operative; they must be, because no society is going to function well if anybody can say anything they want at all times. In other words, ‘free speech’ does not by any means grant us free speech. Even before the race panic of 2020, American corporate culture has long been prudish and hyper-restrictive at least on the lower rungs. A colleague of mine landed in an office job after four years at William & Mary, and was fired within weeks for referring to his boss as “a bitch.” This was in 2005. The year before, I, having dropped out of William & Mary1 and becoming content with a life of honest working-my-way-up-in-the-world, was written up in my menial retail management job for pointing out an obvious contradiction in policy to a (Black, female) manager.2 Within a few months, I gave notice. So much for all that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness stuff.
Societies, America included, can certainly fall due to these informal restrictions on speech that lead to purges just as easily as due to state restrictions on speech that lead to purges. Maybe we take comfort in the fact that the purges are free of hypothetical bloodshed, but they still have the caustic effect of potentially excluding ideas and viewpoints that, actually, would preserve society or increase human flourishing within it.
Both my examples above can be interpreted as speech restrictions necessitated in society by the embrace of certain values regarding sexual equality in the workplace. Certainly they would not have occurred if the respective female managers were not entitled to be cosseted and preserved from impolite criticism or simple questioning. And if these social values have restricted what can be said in the American workplace for decades, it would be no wonder that the sex which is most likely to run afoul of these speech restrictions has now become underemployed and without value in the marriage market. But “most men no longer have value on the marriage market” is just another way of saying society has fallen.
Thus we observe the paradox: There is no such thing as free speech in any operating society; all of them depend on censorship mediated by civility and the exclusion of taboo-breakers. But this same dependency can lead to the collapse of society, if things are rendered taboo that would right the course. None of this requires the state to be given authority over speech.
Purges of “wrong-think” can destroy society entirely without the help of the state; therefor and in conclusion, ‘free speech’ as a convention of not letting the state regulate speech does not preserve society, and does not grant free speech to anyone.
v. An aside: On criticism of the government
One of the first choices a society granting the government authority over speech might make is to issue a carve-out for criticism of the government; they may declare that this type of speech must not be made illegal even if all other speech is potentially subject to legal restrictions. Ironically, of course, this is exactly the type of speech that the Federal government banned in 1798, almost immediately after the Bill of Rights was passed, and again in 1918, and in a squishier form in 2001, and has begun to contemplate restricting again. We might therefor be skeptical that such a carve-out would be respected in times of exigency; but this danger wouldn’t be created by the hypothetical government’s exterior authority on speech in general, since it operates in reality despite our Federally enshrined ‘free speech.’
Therefor, a society that chooses to let the government regulate speech is not necessarily one that wants to stifle dissent of government policy; nor is the opposite false.
vi. The paradox of ‘free speech,’ 2: ‘Free speech’ does not reduce state power
In iii, we observed that societies often wish to leave most collective preferences on behavior to the realm of civility, and only give the state providence on matters of individual life and property, and collective order. This is essentially the approach of a society purporting to embrace ‘liberalism.”
Nothing about this approach intrinsically limits the state’s regulation of behavior. One of the most problematic facets of liberalism in fact is not understanding that it is pre-scientific, which prevents seeing the obvious manner in which scientific developments have eroded coherent confinement between what is and is not considered “individual life and property, and collective order.”
Public health emerges soon after the advent of liberalism as a manifestation of biopolitics; this is a problem created by advances in medicine and biology that allow society and the state to understand new behaviors as having an impact on collective order — your virus can cause an outbreak that kills me, so of course (per the operating consensus of what the government should regulate) the government should seek you out and lock you up. And for this reason almost every state constitution in the US contains outright totalitarian language when it comes to their public health codes. New York’s, for example:
[Public health]
The protection and promotion of the health of the inhabitants of the state are matters of public concern and provision therefor shall be made by the state and by such of its subdivisions and in such manner, and by such means as the legislature shall from time to time determine.
In other words, literally any law that the government of New York decides “protects and promotes” health is pre-authorized by the constitution. Proscriptions on state power given in New York’s bill of rights are potentially not valid, depending on court interpretation, since such proscriptions frequently have a carve-out for “practices inconsistent with the peace or safety of this state.”
In this simple way we demonstrate that liberalist governments have no intrinsic limits on state power; any prevailing limits can be redefined away by changes in human understanding of the world. This is what took place in 2020, when lockdowns were codified after having been proposed by the media and embraced by private corporations and public conformity. Suddenly, overnight, visiting one’s own elders was a threat to the health of the inhabitants of New York state. This grotesquely totalitarian imposition on society was not only made possible but necessitated by a new consensus of reality driven by biological events, preceded by a longstanding blindness on the part of Americans regarding where our freedom really comes from (i.e., a fragile and obsolete paradigm of liberalism).
In such a context, free speech (not legal ‘free speech,’ but actual pure freedom of speech in society) would be an important safeguard against scientifically-inspired speech that discovers new behaviors to move into the realm of state authority.3 But of course, we don’t have free speech, nor can we. So now we must examine “who” actually regulates speech in America. Hint: It is the same people who boast about “saving” our elections.
The paradox of ‘free speech’ is that the mainstream press, which is immune from state regulation, is precisely the entity that polices our speech. It does so by gatekeeping which ideas have the imprimatur of being visibly regarded as correct or valid (potentially correct) by subject-matter authorities. In America it is not necessary for the state to ban speech that offends the collective preference; the media simply ignores it, or portrays it as the backward leanings of “deplorables” (we must understand Hillary as only articulating an understanding of reality perpetuated by TV; she was giving a label to a media-portrayed adversary of the good).
To continue this year’s trend of playing off Ron Unz, let us abruptly consider his critique from today of the media’s treatment of Robert F Kennedy Jr. (emphasis added):
So we have a situation in which the American media directed a firestorm of outrage against some casual remarks that Kennedy made at a private dinner in New York City [regarding hypothetical racially targeted bio-engineering], but almost totally ignored his repeated public statements and writings regarding the conspiracy that claimed the life of his own father and also that of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.
It is not difficult to see that the hostile media feels very comfortable discussing the first topic but desperately seeks to avoid the second. The Kennedy assassinations constitute a terrifying threat to the credibility of the media; if the cover-up unraveled, the American public would be outraged at discovering they had been fed lies for sixty straight years.
Unz characterizes the claims regarding the assassination of the senior Kennedy brothers as “unmentionable.” The media silences Kennedy Jr’s speech on the topic simply by not mentioning it, in open conspiracy, seemingly in order to protect their prestige or at the favor of the deep state; who knows.
To circle back to my conclusion in the previous post, this is the explanation for the apparent contradiction in the New York Times’ open contemplation of Federal censorship of “misinformation.” The Federal censorship is merely a reinforcement of a usually more effective, but currently stressed status quo in which “misinformation” is ignored right out of the public square by a mostly coherent media class with shared, common values and self-interest. This is not free speech, because once again scientific progress has degraded an element of what we might call the “natural” organization of man that operated when the Constitution was written. What prevails today is that the public at large outsources understanding of the world to credentialized experts, and prefers and is delivered a press that is informed by these experts. There is therefor no such thing as a press of the people.
Rather, the press is a conspiracy of service-sector management which besides pursuing its own ends and promoting its preferences, generally seeks to erode state power by creating dissatisfaction with the most elemental functions of the state, while simultaneously being capable of redefining great swaths of human behavior as being relevant to those same elemental state functions. Rather than liberalism, this is a sort of libertine totalitarianism that we all just agree not to point out. Protect “DEMOCRACY!” No, protect “FREE SPEECH!” None of it means anything.
Trump’s destabilizing effect on this paradigm comes as much from his open derision of the media as from his ability to move things in from the void in media discourse, e.g. “Remain in Mexico,” tariffs, not using the Orient for American military make-work. Once Trump voiced any of these from-the-void notions he would be roundly pilloried, only for the notion to turn out to be perfectly valid. No wonder an election had to be “saved” from him.
Rather than the expert consensus on what is “correct or valid” being narrowly managed by the experts themselves, Trump shows that there exists a world of correct and valid ideas beyond, which completely destroys the illusion that the experts the press bases its presentation of reality upon are much better a source of truth than a magic eight ball. In other words, he destroys the press’s control over speech.
vii. Protect “FREE SPEECH!”
While we can still affirm the conclusion in section iii as a trivially obvious argument for preferring ‘free speech’ — it isn’t necessarily good in of itself, but is what we ought to settle for in light of the practical difficulty of regulating speech in a non-arbitrary and oppressive manner — it’s not an obviously correct argument. Maybe we should try having the state interfere with the press in some way, to protect the rest of society’s life, property, and collective order.
Individual states can experiment with their own laws in this respect; again, it is not the Federal government’s business. People could leave the same states if they don’t like the results and aren’t in jail.
Regardless of agreement on the remedy, it should be clear that defenders of ‘free speech’ are either victims or perpetrators of a grand delusion in American culture. The credentialized press controls our speech by determining which speech is correct-thinking or eligible for the state’s consideration. Really, what possible government regime could more stringently control speech than what we have (rather than impose an arbitrary penalty on speech that leads to universal social hypocrisy)?
When the American right calls for protecting ‘free speech,’ all that it really wants is the freedom to say things the news ignores or portrays as incorrect, because this regime is stifling to anyone who wants to hold values that don’t align with the media class’s unnatural and unrealistic preferred vision of reality; if not overtly hostile to most of the country’s prevailing way of life. It is correct to feel that the media wants to silence and reform us all. It is wrong that this problem becomes less existential as long as it isn’t reinforced by government authority. America is being destroyed.
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Extremely bad curriculum-choices on my part due to entering as a sophomore and negotiating core requirements with an indifferent Scottish advisor led to my flunking literally everything except Philosophy, thanks to my final essay on “freedom.”
Specifically, if anyone is curious: I was chided for following a policy-ordained response to an event, and in reply commented to the effect of, “Then why don’t we just turn off this event today.” Negotiating openly with the inevitable contradictions of corporate policy was within the working culture that I had established with all the other managers before this one’s recent arrival; and furthermore what is even the alternative, except total indifference to the function of the store by everyone except five employees at the top? Idiotic. I have considered America’s corporate apparatus mostly a de facto communist entity since this moment, though it seems to have taken until 2020 for the inertia of performative competency to give way.
Specifically, one could imagine an out-group political party in March, 2020, who declares that “viruses don’t cause disease,” which is false, but politically refutes the rationale for lockdowns; however, expert consensus does not permit such a position.
The way that I remember the lockdowns is that no one spoke out because mostly they had no interest in speaking out. We all went home with pay and thought it was stupid but it was stupidity that somebody else was paying for, which anyone who works for a corporation has gotten very used to accepting quietly. Yes, they were stupid and destructive but it was a multi-month vacation for a lot of us. I knew that there were long term consequences but I didn't see how I could do anything from my position and I was content to sit at home and get paid for not finding a way to fix it. Of course, it was '21 and '22 when the bill started to come due and will be coming due for years, but selling the future to buy the present is a major hallmark of our society. Had some problems with the, now revealed to be insanely corrupt, Department of Labor but mostly the employment side of the lockdowns wasn't bad.
Now in Georgia, you could still do most things. We went to the beach. We did normal shopping and things just in a much less crowded and relaxed way. The part of the lockdowns that raised our hackles and made me start to care was the school closures and then the next year of sending students home if some dude on the bus had a sniffle.
I guess what I am saying is that a 'hard power' approach to censorship is not only unneeded but less effective than the soft way of just making people not want to speak out with either carrots or sticks. The Trumpian censorship of paying us not to make a fuss made the lockdowns was a success from the State point of view whereas the Bidenite mandates were an utter failure. Hard censorship is both unnecessary and ineffective. Only moronic administrations try it and they pretty much always fail. The soft censorship of decreased reach worked on conservatives for decades but the bans triggered a nearly instant groundswell of rage. Open suppression will pretty much always provoke an overwhelming reaction and it may be wondered if it is not often arranged exactly for that purpose.
So, to look more directly at Brian's thinking. We can categorize speech like this:
1)speech that is suppressed by government-only speech that is never helpful and always harmful should go into this bin and because of the blunt and headless nature of government it must be rather nonspecific and deal only with entire classes, that is broadly obvious categories of speech. is there any class of speech that is never helpful and always harmful? as long as we live in nations of 'laws and not of men' government should never regulate speech because their is no statutory way to specify speech such that only speech that is never helpful and always harmful will be regulated. In a hypothetical government where men of sense administered justice based on their own sense of right and wrong this might change. But that state does not exist.
2)speech that is disfavored by cultural gatekeepers or speech that is favored by cultural gatekeepers - this bin is administered with sufficient flexibility and specificity that it can sort out beneficial from harmful speech quite accurately. the problem that we currently have is that cultural gatekeepers have no accountability either to universal truth or to the nation as a whole. they simply favor what they are paid, in whatever form, to favor. thus, they favor the payors, private or governmental. it is highly necessary for society to be able to control speech on a gradient with a flexible and accountable mechanism. but like all tools in our hands corruption ensures that the wrong speech is favored and disfavored. hate the corruption not the gatekeeping. we don't need less gatekeeping. we need better gatekeeping. but if we can't get it we might have to settle for less gatekeeping. but as Brian says, this is a concession to our inability to do better. It is not an optimal and desirable state.
4)speech that is compelled by government- not sure that anything should ever go in this bin except testifying to a crime that you witnessed
Still laughing at the 'shortage of economically attractive men'....when we can't even define a man or a woman...