Restriction of freedom of expression

An idea deeply embedded in liberal democracies is that people are equally empowered to engage in debate and freely express their ideas. But is this really so? The public sphere is a fractured space of competing elites. Idealistic visions of equal access fail to acknowledge disparities of knowledge and resources between social elites and disempowered groups. In this respect, it is useful to remember that the kinds of speech and actions that society deems acceptable are historically contingent and an effect of power relations.

There seems to be a movement in modern society to avoid information, theories or opinions that trigger cognitive dissonance and the associated psychological pain. Often associated with terms such as “cancel culture,” “virtue signaling,” and “wokeism,” this movement appears to have manifested as a belief system which holds that both individuals as well as the collective body politic have a fundamental right to intellectual protection, to not encounter unpleasant thoughts, information or ideas that are inconsistent with their internal model of reality. These are the intellectual roots which nurture censorship, denialism, and the weaponized gaslighting, defamation and slander that many have experienced, as well as the idea that anything which causes individuals to lose faith in their government constitutes domestic terrorism and should be treated as such.

There is a long and rich human history of punishment by death for such dissident thought crimes. I suggest that these behaviors and actions are among the ugliest manifestations of the unpleasant tribal human tendency to reject those who are willing to speak inconvenient truths, and that this tendency has always been behind the dark reactionary aspect of common processes by which scientific and medical knowledge advance. Awareness of this phenomenon is not something just recently discovered. It extends back even before Galileo Galilei and the Roman Catholic Inquisition to at least the fourth century BC, and probably further beyond that into the mists of time.