Free speech is always perfectly fine. It is never an issue when a minority of people have extreme or weird positions. This is natural and unavoidable...
The thing the government actually has to watch for is the mob that comes to lynch those people or, even scarier, that comes to legally disenfranchise them and create laws that silence their political opponents.
Free speech is an implicit right to basic even to be given by the government... The first amendment shouldn't be about the government stopping free speech, it should be specifically about stopping the mobs and the politicians who inevitably come to torment the individual and create tyranny.
sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 2 years ago
For every one of every ideology that exists, has ever existed, or will ever exist, freedom of speech is the only way that your current philosophy came to be.
Imagine a perfect tyranny where the powers that be can silence all speech they disagree with. Let's say for our hypothetical that there was no ideology, and this perfect tyranny exists solely to control. There would be no new thoughts, there would be no new ideologies, because the moment that it started to form people would be silenced.
Ideologies are not only formed from correct ideas, they are also formed from the rejection of incorrect ideas. Judaism is a rejection of polytheism, for example. Christianity is a rejection of many ideas of Judaism. Protestantism is a rejection of many ideas of Catholicism. In addition to the new ideas that are more correct, the old ideas that are less correct need to be articulated so that we can face them and point out why they are wrong.
For that reason, it's important to be allowed to be both correct and incorrect, and to speak things that are both true and not true, because it's only by digging into these ideas that we manage to find which things are true and which are not true.
It seems insane to me that people on the left wing who advocate for change could possibly think it's a good idea to silence particularly unpopular speech. Every single thing that they hold sanchrosanct was considered unspeakable only a century ago. If we went by their ideological tyranny, then their own ideology would have been long outlawed.
And of course the same goes for those who hold unpopular views today. Perhaps tomorrow those views end up becoming the majority view, and then we will look back as we often do and marvel at the stupidity of the powers that be for silencing what in retrospect turns out to be a self-evident proposition.
In the history of the world there is no ideology that sprang from nothingness and has always been held by everyone. Without the freedom to speak truth or to speak things that are wrong, none of our ideologies would exist today, and if for only that reason we should continue the tradition as we try to build tomorrow's ideologies, by mulling over things that are true and things that are not true and trying to come up with a more correct answer.
Monarque@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
I think that they would actually exist because even in a perfect tyranny, there will be whispers. But I appreciate the larger point here.
Very interesting angle - there is certainly a kernel of truth in everything, and that truth is needed to set up an ideology.
It is also certainly the case that nobody can be to blame for not being 100% correct. Indeed, I think a lot of people do not want their own words to be interpreted that way.