Is Free Speech Absolutism the Answer?

Reflections on Minds.com's "Festival of Ideas"

Last Saturday, I went to the “Festival of Ideas” (roster of speakers here) put on by the social network minds.com at the Beacon Theater, New York. It was a strange, interesting, in some ways depressing (my friend called it “a gathering of rich people with tiny brains”) and in some ways hopeful event. My friend Bill Ottman who organized it, is the CEO of Minds.com. Minds is the closest thing to a full-spectrum alternative to Facebook I have seen, with many similar features, but it attracts a largely Libertarian, Right-leaning crowd (although it could change).

The event was structured as a series of panel discussions interspersed with comedians. The panels included a range of political and social perspectives, although Right wing and Libertarian types predominated.

I will give some relatively off-the-cuff thoughts here, which may change or evolve later. The Festival of Ideas led me to reflect on the brutal polarization in the US today, and to wonder if anything can be done. Next time, I will review a new book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, by Stephen Marche, who just wrote this article in The Guardian.

The topics of the panels included “Satire and Disinformation” and “Media Manipulation.” The underlying theme was free speech. Some of the comedians — including Jamie Kilstein, who was fired from Joe Rogan’s podcast due to sexual harassment charges, and Right-winger Chrissie Mayr — were no-holds-barred nasty, offensive in the way comics (Andrew Dice Clay, Richard Pryor) used to be in the old days. Whether or not I liked their jokes, I found this refreshing rather than disturbing.

I admit there are many important topics about which I haven’t developed philosophical certainty. Free speech is one of the topics I circle around, never quite landing. Here are my current thoughts:

I definitely find extreme “woke” progressivism that promotes hyper-sensitized discourse (trigger warnings, policing of pronouns, and so on) and incessant self-criticism to be a mistake. It increases separation and dissent. I think our culture has been reshaping subjectivity (among liberals and progressive) so that people feel more victimized and fragile, rather than more autonomous and resilient. This is partly a result of social media. One of the problems of the Internet is that whatever someone did or said remains preserved forever, like a mosquito in amber. Mistakes never get forgiven; old wounds can always be reactivated. On the whole, we are better off when we feel free to speak openly, even if this means giving offense at times, and then apologizing.

“What you resist, persists.” As Freud realized, what we try to repress or suppress takes on a greater unconscious power. It ultimately returns in a more virulent, dangerous form.

Having said that, I admit I was relieved when Twitter banned Trump. Trump was like a massive black hole, sucking public discourse into the abyss. I still think it was the right thing to do. It reduced his power over the collective Psyche, which he was wielding destructively.

Rather than having an absolutist perspective on free speech, I sympathize with Karl Popper’s idea of the “paradox of tolerance,” where tolerance of intolerance can lead to the intolerant taking power. The intolerant will then repress (or imprison and kill) those with other political views, such as the tolerant. I believe, for example, Germany made the right decision to ban Mein Kampf and other Nazi propaganda after World War Two. Yet I realize this is a very slippery slope.¹

I was horrified by “Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal” in The Atlantic, which reveals current establishment views. According to the two law professors who wrote it, the Chinese model of restricting information is already the norm in the US and other liberal democracies. This takes place via organized censorship on private Internet platforms. They subtitle their piece: “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.” They write:

As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China. Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.

The way that alternative views, ideas, and information get censored or “shadow-banned” across Meta and Twitter is crude, stupid, and offensive. Underlying all of this is the belief among the World Economic Forum / Davos establishment crowd (the fusion of government, tech, and financial elite) that the populace cannot handle the unvarnished truth, that the collective consciousness needs to be managed and tightly controlled. Chomsky called this “manufacturing consent.”

On the other hand, we have the serious problem that the US population absorbs a massive amount of media indoctrination (much of it paid for by corporations and plutocrats) that stupefies and half-hypnotizes the masses. We don’t train people in critical thinking skills. A holistic, systems design perspective is not even discussed in most schools or universities, but it is necessary for properly framing debates. At the same time, somehow, our American ideal of equality includes the belief that everyone’s opinions have value, whether or not those opinions are based on preconditioned stereotypes and delusions, or on scrupulous research, ongoing self-criticism of one’s own beliefs, and assimilation of opposing points of view.

I appreciated that the Festival of Ideas created a space for those holding opposing ideologies to debate with each other. We don’t see this very often. I think this needs to be taken further, with longer timeframes for the debates.

I was impressed by Steven Bonnell, a successful YouTube streamer known as Destiny, on the Satire panel. Bonnell noted that the essential division was no longer between “Red” and “Blue” but between those who largely accepted the establishment news sources as truthful and those who rejected the legacy systems of institutional authority and invested themselves in alternative news sources of many types. He sparred with, among others, the repugnant Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, a Right Wing humor site (a typically insipid article is titled: “With Progressive Women Protesting for Abortion, Men in Office Finally Get Some Work Done”), and Majad Nawaz, an activist against Islamic extremism (he penned a book with Sam Harris) and a strident anti-vaxxer who came off as very unhinged.