Why Free Speech Is Vital

Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death by Patrick Henry

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you have definitely seen those campus videos, wherein protesters (mainly people with nose rings and pink hair) act belligerently while screaming out “HATE SPEECH IS NOT FREE SPEECH,” or “HATE SPEECH WILL NOT BE TOLERATED HERE.” Now of course, the fact that there is a form of speech that is either hateful or offensive—or worse, both—is rather self-evident. But the solution to speech that you hate is not the cancellation of hate speech, but simply more speech.

    First, two reasons as to why the solution to hate speech is not to cancel the speech (which is just a euphemism for speech regulation. Hello Orwell) are as follows:

A.) It is tremendously difficult, one may argue even impossible, to define hate speech, and definitions are actually very important when trying to regulate something.

B.) Who defines hate? Does it sound even remotely appealing to have other people, a bureaucracy, working from the top-down, surveilling each and every word you say? (Hey Orwell).

In John Stuart Mill’s essay entitled On Liberty, he argues that there is a special need for hate speech (false opinions, wrong ideas, etc.) in a free society—to serve as a litmus test on whether or not the moral compass of said society is working, or if it has fallen into shambles. Not only that, but it also allows individuals to think whether or not their commonly held beliefs are right, and why said hate speech is to be considered ill-conceived.

        One interesting point from one of Dr. Jordan Peterson's lectures on Free Speech is that our prefrontal cortex, the rational part of the brain, developed from our motor cortex. The beauty of this is that we do not think as animals do, for animals think by moving; the danger of which being once you make the wrong move, you're dead. Humans can think, formulate ideas, and have those thoughts and ideas die off instead of ourselves. As Alfred North Whitehead once said, "the purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying."

Yet, how can one fully articulate his thoughts without free speech? And how can one utilize free speech, in order to get to the truth of any topic or dilemma that truly matters, without uttering something that may be considered hateful or offensive? In a one-on-one conversation, sure it’s understandable not to offend one or each other, but what if you’re talking to ten people, can you not offend one? What about a hundred? A thousand? If you have to step over so many hurdles as to not offend one particular, fairy-wand-waving, pixie-dust-having individual, then might as well not talk, but is that alternative really desirable, especially when there are about a million questions running through your head about certain topics?

The better (best, some may argue) alternative is to merely just grow a backbone and toughen up. There will forever be idiots on this planet, there will forever be vapid ideologues who see the world solely through their ill-fabricated kaleidoscope. But it is up to us—the individual—to not let the idiocy of other people get through to us, not by exemplifying force and fighting fire with fire (you’ll end up just having bigger flames), but by more conversations and more understanding. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s idea once went, the world can be as evil as it can possibly get, but I shall not succumb to it.