Dear Friends,
It seems to me, no culture, people or nation can call itself civilized until it not only allows, but encourages freedom of expression. Human beings are social animals. We tend to congregate, most of us are drawn to live in large cities, yet even with, or perhaps because of our social nature, tensions build up in society. No matter how constituted, any group of people will build up tensions, which is only exacerbated by limiting communication. Clearly then, without freedom of expression to release some of that tension, if it build’s up too much, limiting that ability to communicate will result, indeed it can only result… in violence. Some may mistakenly believe that the people can be monitored sufficiently and regulated effectively enough to hold off violence. Despite the growing absurd violence we see in our ever more m surveilled and regulated society. When government will do nothing to stop the violence by savage factions, their aggression will eventually generate a backlash from their victims, and societal cohesion will break down. All because freedom of expression was blocked.
Take a pressure cooker, fill it with beans and water, close it and weld the release shut. No matter how strongly it is built, eventually the heat will cause the thing to explode, the weakest link will fail, leading to catastrophic containment failure. The complex system of a pressure cooker therefore can be considered to have experienced a long tailed event, ie, the container catastrophically failed due to the release being welded shut. Groups of people are also complex systems, our ability to communicate between ourselves freely and without overt threat of violence, (since all communication between humans contains some undercurrent threat of violence), allows us to drain off some tension. Block our ability to communicate however, and the tension cannot be drained away, it builds until eventually we encounter a long tailed event… catastrophic failure of societal cohesion.
Censorship by whatever means builds tension, rather than relieves it, and so is detrimental. Government censorship is the most obvious yet there are other forms of censorship that are even more pernicious and problematic. It should be obvious that any group that has, and especially one with a history of doing violence to suppress the freedom of expression of others, is engaging in censorship. That group need not be governmental, it can be an economic faction, political faction, religious faction, racial faction, gender faction, or any other arbitrary idea someone can exploit to subdivide the human race. There is also the soft governmental censorship of political correctness. Political correctness is, as it’s name states openly, is political in nature. It is the will of the political elite, effected by the cultural elite, as to how we are supposed to self censer, in order to be considered correct, or in other words, considered “cool” by the cultural elite, and thus be correct with the political elite.
The faction shutting down freedom of expression is the one that needs to be taken far less seriously. Since clearly censoring another is by its very definition, oppression, those who do it are oppressors. It then stands to reason that a faction that at their core is oppressive, then the rest of their policies, most probably are tyrannical. By their own actions, those supressing the voice of others, discredit their own arguments! Any society that takes the arguments of factions that have discredited themselves is one that will soon see difficulty. If we don’t want more difficulty in our futures, we must give the opinions of those who seek to censor us, every bit of credit they deserve… a hearty laugh.
Our society is rapidly losing freedom of speech. That statement becomes more and more unassailable every day. From out of control political correctness, thought laws in the form of hate crime legislation, violent protests on university campuses to shut down freedom of expression, to outright legal censorship in Europe and even Canada to prevent criticism of Islam, our civilization has openly given up on free speech and has replaced it with absurdities. Our elite are effectively welding the release valve shut on the pressure cooker, that is every society of human beings there ever was and ever will exist, and the end result can only be, a long tailed event… the catastrophic failure of societal cohesion.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
