You know, every defeat is a call for improvement. I have been called
every name imaginable, been kicked off of boards, threatened, and
overall been punished, to the extent of the ingenuity available to my
opponents, for expressing coherently views in favor of my own position,
that they cannot counter with respect to support for their own
positions.
The single most cogent argument for free speech is simply this:
arguments that endure through debate that is conducted using facts and
logic, have greater claim to approximating Truth than those which do
not. For that reason, even supposed sacred cows should not be
protected.
However, this presumes good faith. This is much too high a demand
for most leftists. Moderate Democrats I have no problem with. No doubt
there have been times when Robber Barons truly did terrorize–with the
power of law–the already downtrodden. We have reached a point, though,
where the F word is trotted out the moment anyone says no to any idle
indulgence that is demanded.
Sometimes, you have to go back to basics. Looking back, one book
that had enormous influence on me was Jacques Ellul’s excellent book
“Propaganda”. He is French, and so he is hard to read in any language,
but his points are very good.
One of the most salient points, that comes back to me now, is his
incisive analysis of the history of public opinion with respect to the
Vietnam War. What he shows is that our supposed “thought elite”, our
graduates of top flight universities, invariably conform to the
information that is presented to them by mass media. When Walter
Kronkite supported the Vietnam War, so did most of the non-Marxist
intellectuals. When he came out against it, so did they. ALL of them
thought that, now, the balance of facts had changed. But they hadn’t.
I just told my oldest today, without even thinking about it, that if
you read your local paper assiduously every day, read mainstream
magazines like Time and Newsweek cover to cover every week, and
religiously watch the evening news, or even McNeil-Lehrer (or whatever
it is called today; I obviously have not watched it for many years),
your opinions will be in virtual lock-step with everyone around you.
Intellectuals are BY FAR more vulnerable to propaganda than people
who just look around them, or who operate off of common sense
principles.
What is interesting, is they will look down on anyone who doesn’t
think like them as being somehow duped by someone else’s propaganda.
If you think you are thinking your own thoughts, that you have
nowhere been seduced into patterns of perception chosen by others, then
it is likely virtually everything you believe is unoriginal, your own
conceits notwithstanding.
The only real solution to this is critical thinking exposed to
ideological diversity, and defended honestly. This need never happen
for anyone who has found a congenial ideological backwater, which is
what the internet has provided in spades.
That is why this site is so shocking to so many, and why I keep coming here. I want opposition.