On Censorship

The egregious censorship occurring on the internet now is suffocating, of grievous harm to public thought and discourse, and just plain stupid. It betrays a deep insecurity among the corporate giants, media conglomerates and military-industrial-complex. They want to hold on to their power. This is plainly evident. They also want to control the narrative legitimizing their actions, however manifestly heinous and destructive they may be. And to a large and very disturbing extent the public is complicit in their authoritarian control. They like it. They feel secure. The paternalistic control over their opinions and individual agency is a welcome tyranny. It removes them from responsibility. There are many people whose happiest years were the time served in the military. Decisions were made for them. They were liberated from the burden of personal agency. Consequently, narratives maintained by the corporate media propagandizing and legitimating acts of atrocity, even to the point of making these atrocities appear heroic, go down the gullets of the subservient public as smoothly and sweetly as ice cream.

Nobody likes to think. Thinking is hard. Thinking interrupts the pleasurable fantasies pumping dopamine and joy from the galaxies of neurons in one’s brain and the fun and frolic of weaving happy illusions about one’s status and place in the world and replaces it with a defiant vulnerability and earnest inquiry. With demurral and doubt. With analysis and curiosity. It allows for tolerance, permission to entertain opposing views, assent to dissent, consent to entertain an opinion that threatens one’s ideological structure. Thinking can be a painful process. I don’t particularly enjoy it, it can lead to a pained awareness of one’s dilemma as a human being or a shaky disassembly of one’s assumptions, but if I don’t allow it, if I thrust up defenses and distract it with fantasies and games and celebrity gossip I feel diminished, my existence begins to feel stale. I need opposition to strengthen the feeling of being alive. When I’m deprived of information and ideas I wither. I shrink. I become infantile. I become stupid.

John Stewart Mills had some interesting views on the subject. An ardent defender of religious tolerance against those who arrogate "infallibility," defined as "the fact of wanting to decide for others without allowing them to hear what may be said on the other side," Mill formulates a criticism of an astonishing breadth of censorship. He warns us of the risk of intellectual anesthesia produced by the internalization by each of what she or he or they feels authorized to think or say. We police ourselves. “Our merely social intolerance kills no one,” Mill wrote, “roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion…but the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification, is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind…while that which would strengthen and enlarge men’s minds, free and daring speculation on the highest subjects, is abandoned.”

Especially vulnerable are those employed in academia. The universities have deferred to the Woke idealogues and cancel culture and other like-minded puritanical despots and shut down what used to be - and needs to be - a robust environment of intellectual daring and bold and searching polemic. Simultaneously, the social media platforms have paternalistically and arbitrarily assumed the right to decide who and what to bar from social discussion. And the mainstream media conglomerates spew outright lies about current events in an effort to support the overarching power structure.

Mill proposed eccentricity as an antidote to the insidious policing of thought and opinion. “In this age,” he wrote, “the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”