NER Contributor, David Ferg
Freedom of speech and freedom of thought are in real danger. That may sound alarmist but hear me out. According to a 2019 survey by the Campaign for Free Speech, “51% of Americans think the First Amendment is outdated and should be rewritten” and “48% believe ‘hate speech’ should be illegal”. Those are some big numbers. Having grown up in a country where we have been free to speak our minds, we naively assume these freedoms will always exist. An America without these freedoms is unimaginable to us and seems outside the realm of possibility. We are so sure our freedoms are permanent fixtures we comfort ourselves with the thought that things would never go too far, not here in America. But this is an artificial safety net we have built in our minds and it blinds us to the dangers of today’s modern social justice movement that seeks to control language and its uses as the means to achieve its goals.
The modern social justice movement is built on Critical Theory, an oppressor/victim philosophy with Marxist/ postmodernist roots. Its goal is to deconstruct western, white European society by controlling the language and changing the voices allowed to speak in the society; groups deemed to be victims are given preference and groups deemed oppressors are silenced. Contrary ideas are called violence, racial colorblindness is called racist, reason and science are called whiteness (being oppressive); statements like these are designed to silence ideas contrary to the movement’s principles and to redefine acceptable thought and language. The illiberalism of this movement is Balkanizing our society into a chaotic collection of identity groups in the name of “justice”, a justice not interested in equality. It is a movement to redefine power and its primary weapon is using social pressure, with the increasing aid of big corporations, big tech, and government, to restrict speech for certain segments of the population.
Whenever I hear people speaking about the new “woke” speech codes or about the cancel culture phenomenon, eventually someone will say something about the First Amendment. The First Amendment is important, but it does not address where our danger lies, at least not yet. First, let me say the First Amendment does not grant us freedom of religion, or freedom of the press, or freedom of speech, it just recognizes we naturally have these rights, and it is prohibiting the government from infringing on them. Freedom of religion is the freedom of thought and conscience; freedom of the press is the freedom of opinion; both are inseparably linked to our freedom of speech. These rights are ours as individuals, they do not belong to, nor should they be controlled by, any particular subset of the population. Thought, conscience, opinion, and speech work together and are foundational rights on which virtually all other rights are based, limiting any one of these rights starts the process of limiting the others. For now, our Constitution protects these rights in the political sphere, though I see signs of that fading into history. The danger today is coming from the social and corporate spheres of society, and it is coming from these because we, as a people, have lost a reverence for a truly classical liberal society and are accepting the erosion of freedoms (the freedoms of others to be more precise) in the name of some strange concept of justice. Too many have been duped into believing the social justice movement’s name properly defines its goal and so its illiberalism is being tolerated to the detriment of us all.
Fifty to sixty years ago Critical Theory was a fringe idea found in the universities. Over time it spread into the general education system, and, gaining momentum, it moved into the corporate world as the social justice movement. It would not be the danger it is today if corporations were not cowed into accepting this vile philosophy out of the fear of being perceived as against “social justice”. With corporations and governments supporting the movement, the intimidation to accept, or at least grudgingly go along with, the woke narrative can be intense. The consequences of speaking a contrarian view can easily mean loss of your career or your business, and even discharge from the military. The evil of social justice’s cancel culture is its attempt to control the language and narratives deemed acceptable and the silencing of what it deems unacceptable. It is effectively creating something similar to the old Soviet Union’s idea of free speech…you are free to speak the approved narrative.
Since 48% respondents to the survey mentioned earlier said hate speech should be illegal, let’s take hate speech as an example of how language and thought can be controlled and what that might look like in action. Though I am going to present a generic argument, people in countries that have enacted hate speech laws are dealing with the ramifications every day.
What is hate speech? There is no real answer. Actually, that is not an accurate statement, there are a myriad of answers, which is the same as having no answer, and so we default to saying hate speech is what the offended party says it is. And I guess that is okay to some extent, at least in an informal social context, but is that a good standard if there are legal ramifications behind an act of hate speech? Can we have laws where one group can subjectively define when the law was broken? Wouldn’t that lead to a situation where some language is okay with one audience and not with another? How does a society work under those conditions? The only way it can work is to silence all speech that could potentially be interpreted as hate. With hate speech laws in effect, it would be easy to shut down any contrarian idea by calling the language of the idea hate. What you end up with is a society that is afraid to speak freely, and when it does speak, it speaks the approved narratives using the approved language.
Hate speech is just one example. Let’s carry the concept of restricting speech (and thought) to the idea of truth. In a free society, where people can hold many opinions, who has the authority to define truth? I am not talking about facts; facts are only one component of truth. Truth comes from the interpretation of those facts, and interpretations are not black and white, they are a thousand shades of grey. So, the question becomes, who has the authority to define the interpretation of facts? The increase in fact-checkers and calls for truth commissions are warnings that someone wants to define the official interpretations for all of us; from providing an official interpretation of what a person said (regardless of what the speaker meant), to what scientific study is correct, to which climate forecast is accurate, to which history should be sanctioned. And by deeming one interpretation as true, all others are by default deemed false. Then, in the name of “truth”, the censoring of false information (contrary ideas) is just a baby step away. And once you are comfortable with censoring “false” information, you are bumping up against censoring political thought. If you don’t think this is possible, read The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn and find out just how easy it is to do and the ramifications for those who believe the “false” interpretations.
We must stand up, speak up, and fight against these illiberal tendencies growing in our society. With the current administration supporting the modern social justice framework, and as the WEF’s Great Reset is accepted by more corporations, financial institutions, and governments, the pressure to accept the new paradigm of “justice” will get worse. Free societies are messy, and that is okay. We were making great strides in righting past wrongs and moving closer to our nation’s ideals, we cannot allow this mockery of justice derail our progress. There will always be injustices that need correcting, but the corrections must include the society as a whole, we cannot allow ourselves to be Balkanized into groups competing to be the favored. Truth must come from the battle of ideas and not from truth commissions. All our voices and ideas must be heard, and we must agree to disagree at times without being offended. We cannot allow businesses to use their economic clout to bypass the principles of the First Amendment. We must get our heads out of the sand and see what is happening and stop being the silent majority before being silent is our only option.
We can lose our freedom; being “America” does not make us immune to becoming a totalitarian society. We are still a republic, if we can keep it, but we are on a slippery slope. The illiberalism of Critical Theory, a theory based on the premise of two wrongs makes a right, has a foot in the door through the modern social justice movement and is gaining entrance. Free and unrestricted speech for all members of society is vital to winning the fight and restoring a classically liberal society.
David Ferg
David Ferg is married with three children and five grandchildren. He holds a BS degree in Business Administration from Towson University and is an IT consultant by profession. David is an avid reader of non-fiction; history, science, politics, and theology being the most common topics.