Muted
In recent times, a few prolific proponents of free speech—people I’ve had ongoing friendly relations with—have either lashed out at me, unfollowed me, or both. And in each case, it’s been over something rather small: a respectful disagreement on my part. There were no heated arguments. No personal attacks. No insults. Just a moment of not seeing eye to eye on a particularly topic.
I was more than willing to have a dialogue about it. They weren’t.
Each time, it’s been disappointing.
Agree or disagree, that’s the whole point of free discourse—allowing different ideas to clash with each other, not just listening to echoes of your own.
Of course, no one owes me a conversation. No one is required to engage with me for any reason. And to be clear, none of these people advocated to strip away my right to speak. They simply chose to omit me from their discourse.
But nonetheless, their choices do reveal something about their tolerance for ideas that don’t mirror their own. What makes it more striking is that not too long ago, each of these individuals was loudly critical when others ostracized them for their views. They railed against cancel culture. They lamented the shrinking space for dissent. They positioned themselves as defenders of the unpopular opinion.
Yet now, with their ideas gaining momentum and their power growing, suddenly the big “tent” they’ve advertised feels much smaller. And some people are being told to go sleep outside. The openness they once asked of others seems to have had an expiration date—conveniently set to end once they were no longer the dissenting voice in the room.
It would be rather idealistic to expect anyone to stay perpetually open to every viewpoint, no matter how bizarre or personally grating. Most people can’t stomach that. I won’t pretend I can either. And maybe it’s not even necessary. We must curate what enters our proximity and not every opinion (or person holding it) is of equal value.
But what does seem necessary, at least to me, is to follow and engage with voices that are intelligent, thoughtful, and principled—even though we might disagree with them on certain things. Especially when they come from people you know aren’t arguing out of malice.
Personally, I tend to give far more leeway in private conversations, especially with people I have ongoing relationships with. If it’s a close friend, even more so. I trust that even if they’re wrong (in my view), they’re still good humans doing their best. And they tend to extend the same courtesy to me. That’s foundational to our friendship.
In fact, when someone shares a well-reasoned, opposing viewpoint in good faith, I consider it a gift.
Ultimately, people get to choose their boundaries. I’ve never advocated that everyone has a right to be listened to, or that people cannot judge others for their words. And we all get to decide who to associate with. That’s what freedom is about. Choice. However, what I do advocate for is greater tolerance for good faith dissent. And I think it’s worth noticing the gap between public posturing and private practice.
And if we’re constantly tiptoeing around others just to avoid triggering their disapproval, limiting what we share to only things we know they’ll agree with… then there’s no authenticity in that relationship. No real exchange. Merely the illusion of conversation.
Because if we’re only open to dialogue when it matches our own thoughts, or only engage with people who think exactly as we do—then what exactly is the point?
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"Free speech" advocacy has become a good gauge of ideological hypocrisy on both the left and right. The self-styled, primarily alt-right "free speech absolutists" of a couple of years back quickly made it clear that, the moment they had power (whether over a corporation or government) the only kind of speech they valued was their own. It's the same on the ideological left. Freedom to protest -- but only if it's against Israel. Book bans are bad -- unless it's J.K. Rowling or Laura Ingalls Wilder. It's not really about speech -- it's about ideological power and control.
Someday, if the (classical) liberal democratic centre is able to hold, we may reclaim the understandings until recently shared by most westerners within a standard deviation of the political centre: that freedom of expression is a vital social right, subject to limited constraints (e.g., sedition, actionable threats of violence, libel / slander, etc.) that had mainly been worked out in common and civil law. But of course it is precisely this kind of understanding ideologues on both the far right and far left have sought to undermine as they push society to be destroyed and remade under their authority.
I think what we are talking about here are forbidden ideas. For those people, more terrifying than being outsmarted, is being convinced and thereby becoming the thing they despise.
Winston Churchill once said this and I think it is related because the power of ideas is that they can change who we are:
"You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them."