John Stuart Mill must be turning in his grave at the state of free speech today, as we devolve into a cancel culture that validates personal destruction as a means to invalidate an opposing view, rather than arguing the merits of one’s position. When historians criticized the empirical underpinnings of the 1619 Project, they weren’t arguing that Nikole Hannah-Jones didn’t have the right to express her opinion on the origins of the American Revolution. Their issue was with the accuracy of that opinion, and now its assertions are under scrutiny. And who gets to decide which thoughts are allowed and which are not? A student mob, the faculty Senate, the university president? When one side can effectively stifle the views of the other, that’s not democracy. It’s tyranny.
In a 2019 Freedom Forum Institute survey on the First Amendment, almost half the respondents (46 percent) said they were willing to shut down a speaker at a public institution if the appearance would be “likely to offend.” Anyone who values liberty should be concerned that so many Americans are willing to let others restrict their right to free speech and assembly. In too many venues today, the purpose of political speech isn’t to question and debate ideas but rather to ensure ideological conformity dictated by a cancel culture elite that punishes those with “contradictory true thoughts” because those thoughts are seen as incompatible with what amounts to an absolute belief in the infallibility of their own dogma.īari Weiss, a former opinion page editor of The New York Times, is a case in point. She sent shock waves across the ideological spectrum when she issued a blistering indictment of the Times’ oppressive newsroom in her resignation letter. John Stuart Mill argued that speech gives us the opportunity to listen, to debate and understand differing views and ideas. More, not less, speech leads to rationality and liberty.
We see a young woman run through a room full of human drones and heave a hammer through “Big Brother’s” screen as he says, “We have created for the first time in all history a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests of any contradictory true thoughts.” The world of Orwell’s “1984,” where free thought was replaced with group think, is beginning to feel a lot like the “cancel culture” that now permeates college campuses, social media, major newsrooms and corporate boardrooms, an increasingly alarming environment, driven by a self-defined infallible elite.īut it was another Englishman 125 years earlier, whose essay, “On Liberty,” delivered one of the most important rationales for individualism in what he saw as an inherent conflict between tyranny and liberty that continues today. In 1983, as Apple was about to debut its new Macintosh computer, the company hired English film director Ridley Scott to make what is now one of the most iconic ads in cultural history, “ 1984.” Taking a page out of George Orwell’s book, the Super Bowl ad was designed as an anti-conformity message, selling the idea that technology empowers individuality and individual thought can change the world.