Amerika

Most of us secretly believe that we will never die. Almost all of us have some belief, whether stated or not, that just going about our normal days somehow absolves us from facing crisis and disaster. At least, the usual response to an awful event is to exclaim disbelief because “it just seemed like a normal day” as if horrors showed up only on national holidays.

In the same way, most humans disconnect concept from reality. They agree with something in concept because it lines up evenly with other concepts that they know they support; they have no conception of how it will look in reality, which is as much a failure of imagination as it is of analysis. To them, reality and concept overlap in a murky and poorly understood way.

For this reason, we see a great number of people who support ideas “in theory,” but when an application arises that clashes with some of the concepts that they agree with, they reject the idea supported in theory. Such is the case with free speech, which almost everyone agrees is good but then immediately applies restrictions.

Much of this arises from the nature of tribalism itself. Consistency and fair-minded principle win less than simply advancing your own interests by any means necessary and not giving a thought to whether or not your positions are contradicting one another. However, a bigger issue arises.

The future belongs to those who offer better and also more realistic options to the current world. That requires some degree of commitment to civilization, which includes the idea that we maintain consistency even when it does not benefit us. In the end, this shows a concern for positive solutions and not merely beating back the other.

Naturally, that leads to a troubling quandary, since we are all familiar with the “principles over politics” cuckservatives who will hand over command to the enemy in the name of being fair and consistent. No one wants to go that far, and the best way to avoid it is to identify the enemy and reject every one of the ideas upon which they base their platform.

However, as part of creating a better society, it makes sense to uphold certain ideas, one of which is what we might call open discussion. In open discussion, any reasonable opinion in the correct form may be introduced so long as it is not used as an abuse of the medium, as occurs with spamming or filibusters.

With that in mind, it makes sense to support Georgetown University in its defense of free speech as the first part of an open discussion policy:

University spokesman Matt Hill replied by email: “The views of faculty members expressed in their private capacities are their own and not the views of the University. Our policy does not prohibit speech based on the person presenting ideas or the content of those ideas, even when those ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable.”

He added, “While faculty members may exercise freedom of speech, we expect that their classrooms and interaction with students be free of bias and geared toward thoughtful, respectful dialogue.”

Nothing here sounds out of place, but that is only the first part of our open discussion policy; the second is that we expect them to apply the same to similarly extreme speech from other sides of the issue. For example, if one of their professors tweeted a defense of Flat Earth theory, Holocaust revisionism, or the idea that democracy corrupts people and then fails.

In other words, let them have free speech for the crazy Leftists, and then give them enough rope to hang themselves. Georgetown University is in the right so long as they apply their defense of free speech to all viewpoints, but the minute it becomes merely a shield for Leftist aggression, they lose legitimacy and it is time to call them out and enact regime change.

We are coming to a time of great divorce. It turns out that the Magna Carta, The Enlightenment,™ and the Constitution are wrong and that we cannot rope together large groups of people, indoctrinate them with the “right” ideas, and make them into ideal citizens.

Instead, people separate by who they are. Different tribes support their own interests, which is why Detroit has not had a white mayor in decades. Different regions have their own interests. People also separate by where they are on the bell curve for intelligence. Hierarchy arises naturally as an emergent property of humanity.

There is no “we are all one” for humanity. As that illusion fades, it becomes apparent that our current methods based on the idea of universal human nature have failed, and that we need open discussion in order to contemplate new ones. To that end, protecting speech — even unpopular speech — remains essential to our continued survival as a species.

Tags: censorship, christine fair, free speech, georgetown university, open discussion