The Danger of Safety

The Late Stage Republic Blues

Four years from now, there will be no Rocky Mountains. The Great Plains will extend all the way to the southwestern desert and to the Cascade Mountains in the north.

The statement above is as false as it is inconceivable. Such a thing could not happen. And if it did somehow occur, it would be an emblem of utter ruin. But this thought experiment is the geographical corollary of something that did happen. Something as inconceivable a few short years ago as the loss of our storied western mountain range, and likewise an index of ruin: the loss in America of the freedom of speech. More accurately, we’ve lost the consensus that freedom of thought and expression is good and necessary for human flourishing.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of this development. Freedom is a signal American virtue, the sine qua non of our identity. We are a nation defined by an idea, and that idea is freedom. Moreover, freedom of thought and expression is the fulcrum on which all other freedoms rest. The First Amendment is first in temporal sequence because it is first in importance. America in historical context is an incoherent entity apart from an unshakable commitment to ordered liberty. And in the contemporary world, freedom is entirely indefensible if it is not defended in America. If we cannot maintain ourselves as a free republic, there is no one out there who will come to save us.¹

If the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? (Matthew 5:13)

An Inside Job

Almost as incredible as the fact of this loss is the manner in which it has occurred. That we would be conquered and subdued by a foreign army seemed entirely implausible in the foreseeable future, but history teaches that time conquers all empires. Yet neither a long passage of time nor the approach of a foreign army precipitated the repudiation of freedom by a large swath of American society. It was an internal assault. A lie incessantly whispered throughout compromised institutions, exploited by established power brokers for selfish and nefarious purposes, broadcast to the masses by a complicit and subservient media complex, and heedlessly ingested by a populace stripped of its capacity for critical thinking and disabused of the very notion of a marketplace of ideas.

You have to give up your freedom so we can keep you safe.

Whatever incipient forces may have lurked undetected for years, the attack on freedom burst suddenly into public view in 2020. It prompted little suspicion from most because it was asserted to be temporary and strictly focused on a single “unprecedented” danger. Two weeks to flatten the curve…to keep the hospitals from being overrun… It’s a novel virus… There is no treatment… The death toll could be in the millions.

The deadline was repeatedly extended and the scope of restrictions steadily expanded, until it became the status quo, the new normal. Because the perceived danger was so grave, every tenet of our liberal heritage was subject to repudiation and abandonment. The President famously scoffed “What’s the big deal?” in prepared remarks discussing the objection of citizens to his assault on their freedom of bodily autonomy. This was not your father’s America anymore.

Freedom of speech was on the block along with every other tenet of ordered liberty. From regular people reporting their experiences and opinions to credentialed experts delivering findings in highly specialized fields, anyone who said anything outside the approved narrative was ruthlessly and efficiently silenced. Many professionals were harmed far beyond mere silencing. They were subjected to highly organized crowdsourced online attacks, fired from their jobs, removed from advisory and editorial positions, and stripped of their professional certifications.

It had to be done; they were getting people killed. Or so went the public rationale. It’s abundantly clear that this was false. Those who were silenced had the correct view concerning the nature and course of the illness, the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the countermeasures, and the risk and ineffectiveness of the mandated injections. But the worm had turned, and it had become uncritically accepted that words are dangerous, and we can’t have people just saying whatever they want to say. The censorship rationale grew inexorably, spreading beyond the bounds of public health. Within a year of the first virus-induced speech restriction, it became alarmingly clear that the American experiment in freedom was on the ropes, as the sitting US president was banned from arguably the largest and most important social media platform.

A Good Faith Response to a Bad Faith Argument

The foregoing summary is abbreviated and perhaps cryptic to some. I’ve written more about it here, here, here, here, here, and here. Many others have written on it far more prolifically and expertly than I have, with rigorous research and specialized expertise. But I offer a bare summary in this post because I want to focus on the argument about safety. As I’ll argue below, this argument is a smoke screen. Even a cursory look at the big picture reveals the presence of ulterior motives that are far more likely to be driving the push for censorship. In a category error too glaringly obvious to be anything other than intentional deception, the word disinformation is passed off as objectively descriptive, masking its true nature as the instrument of agency for a usurping elite. Nevertheless, let’s take the argument at face value, examining its premise and the proferred solution.

I’ll do that in subsequent posts, examining the case made against the suppresison of Speech by John Stuart Mill in his monumental work On Liberty. For the remainder of this post, I’ll briefly outline other aspects of the argument against censorship. I may address some of these in future posts, but I lay them out here to frame the argument in its proper context.

The Larger Context

Censorship has until recently been seen as indisputably in conflict with American social and political values because of its clear and unambiguous prohibition in our constitution. The recent abrupt departure from this has not been critically examined to any significant degree by captured corporate media, and it has been only sporadically checked in the courts. The recent SCOTUS ruling on Murthy vs. Missouri (aka Missouri vs Biden), while only dealing with injunctive relief and therefore not indicative of the final disposition, was greatly troubling in my view because of its premise. The legal issue, as I understand it, concerns the evidence for and the specific trajectory of harm alleged to have been rendered by the government through its involvement in censoring speech. But the fact that the suppression of speech in itself is not seen as inflicting harm, that there must be articulated some specific downstream effect, seems to me to indicate a tectonic shift in the concept of ordered liberty on the part of the highest court in the land.

A further danger posed by the Missouri vs. Biden case is that by focusing on allegations of government action, we overlook the equally significant question of government inaction. Social media companies are obviously common carriers, and they are engaging in actions that prior to the advent of the Internet would never have been countenanced if done by common carriers. When have phone companies, for example, tracked the speech and beliefs of their customers and cut off their phone service because they violate “community standards”? The government’s duty is not merely to refrain from suppressing speech themselves, any more than they can overlook theft or murder so long as the government is not stealing or killing. To put it in Constitutional terms, the existence of the fourth amendment does not relieve the government of the duty to protect the privacy of its citizens against violation of the same by non-government actors. In our brave new infotech world, social media platforms have the power to target citizens and effectively cut them off from the public square. Does the government not have a duty to forbid this? Do we not have a compelling interest as a society to ensure the free expression of ideas?

How We Got Here and Why it Matters

Recent history is dispositive on this question, because it illustrates the comprehensive effect of the suppression of speech on social media platforms. Until the advent of the Internet and especially the technical advancements that led to the explosive growth of social media platforms, corporate media was a powerful force in our society, with good reason dubbed the fourth branch of government. Although there were always accusations of bias, their hegemony was generally, if reluctantly, accepted because they nevertheless functioned as an effective check on the power of government. In recent years, for reasons beyond the scope of this post, that picture changed radically. Corporate media became the enabler and accomplice of the governing authorities, no longer even finding it necessary to pretend otherwise. They openly serve as a propaganda arm of the government, dutifully promulgating the narrative dictated by the party in power, and even protecting government actors by ignoring and burying evidence of their malfeasance.

Social media arose as an effective workaround to captured corporate media. Thus, the sudden appearance of a censorship regime is clearly an attempt by erstwhile information managers to re-establish their lost hegemony. Legacy media’s power waned precipitously, as social media made it possible to expose their nefarious actions, and more importantly, to make available to the masses the information and arguments that those in control of the narrative were working diligently to suppress. The harm done by the advent of social media to the interests of corporate media and the government and institutional actors on whose behalf the media were operating is incontrovertible. It’s a matter of public record, revealed in countless online venues and, more significantly, in patronage and trust statistics that reveal the depth and breadth of the loss of credibility suffered by corporate media.

This history is relevant to the question at hand, i.e. whether there is a legitimate basis to argue that speech must be suppressed in the interest of safety. It speaks to both motive and scope of effect. Social media platforms and the institutions by whom they’ve been captured have powerful motives to suppress speech to advance their own interests. And given the comprehensive scope of control represented by the collusion of legacy media, social media, and their controlling institutions, the harm that such suppression could do to society is incalculable.

Never the Good Guys

Thus we come at last to the task that I proposed above: to examine the premise that the suppression of speech is necessary for the good of society. We will see that the opposite is true; that free speech is an unmitigated good and its suppression does great harm to society as a whole, not merely to those whose voice is silenced. This is not a surprising conclusion for many reasons, including the oft-repeated observation that any honest reading of history demonstrates that those who are censoring speech are never the good guys. But the case must be argued nevertheless, and Mill offers as rigorous and unanswerable a critique of censorship as we can find.

We’ll walk through Mill’s argument in On Liberty Chapter 2, “On the Liberty of Thought and Discussion”. We’ll do this in three parts, following Mill’s division of the question.²

Part 2: When Truth is Suppressed

Suppressing a true opinion asserted against a received opinion that is false

Part 3: The Suppression Of Dissent from Truth

Suppressing a false opinion asserted against a received opinion that is true

Part 4: The Suppression of Argument

Suppressing an opinion that is partially true and partially false, asserted against a received opinion that is likewise a mixture of truth and error

These being exhaustive and mutually exclusive possibilities, every case of censorship must be applied in one or other of these contexts. We will see that in all cases, far greater harm is done by suppressing the opinion than by permitting it to be published. This conclusion is utterly devastating to the very concept of misinformation, as the act of suppression carries far more weight than the question of whether the suppressed opinion is true or not. The very power of words that empowers them to do harm also empowers them to protect against harm done by other words. Furthermore, the overall effect of the collision of truth with error is such that society is better off in that case than if the harmful words had been suppressed. The cure for bad speech is more speech, not the abridgment of freedom. Suppression of speech has far reaching deleterious effects in a society far beyond the particular conversation into which the censor intrudes.

See the remaining posts in this series for a compelling defense of the freedom of speech by of a Victorian era philosopher whom we would do well to heed in the present crisis.

1. Although we’re concerned here with freedom of speech as enacted in the United States Constitution, it bears mentioning that the ominous flex of authoritarian muscles now gaining strength in Europe poses a threat to the entire world, including the United States, if left unchecked. Reference the blatant censorship provisions in the European Union’s Digital Services Act, the recent flare-up of conflict over the DSA between EU officials and Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter/X, and the detention of Pavel Durov, the owner of the free speech platform Telegram, by French officials who are threatening to charge him with serious crimes over his failure to censor and permit government surveillance of Telegram users.

2. Part 2 and Part 3 were inadvertently reversed in the orignal post. Their sequence has been changed to follow the order of Mill’s argument.