Censoring

My friend Samantha has a very regular newsletter that I almost always open. And when I do open it, she gives me things to think about and I am always grateful for it.

I want to share her words with you. She said I could share whichever parts I wanted to with you, but I don't think edits could make it any better, nor do I think it's appropriate to pick and choose my favorite parts given the context. So I'm just pasting the entire long email below because I think it's worth reading. And again, I'd include a disclaimer about colorful language, but considering the subject matter, I'm not about to censor any f-bombs. ;-) I'd love to hear your thoughts on any of this as well.

Hugs,
Lindsay

And if you'd like to sign up for her future emails, you can do that here: https://samantha.kartra.com/page/newslettersignup

From Sam:

Censorship is bad.

I find it interesting that I'm writing an email about why censorship is bad. It indicates that I feel that some people out there don't think that censorship is bad, which is very interesting.

I don't have the historical perspective chops to go ham on this but I sure hope that if you have questions or if you think that censorship is fine that you go look into a few historical accounts of what censorship does for a country. You might also look up things like why free speech or a free press might be considered a good thing.

And I would say the reason why I feel compelled to write this now is not because I particularly care about forcing private businesses or platforms to do anything they don't want to do, it is because I have personally never witnessed so much outright applause for censorship from people as I have right now. People want to be shielded. They think it's to help save them from stupid other people. Rarely you or the friends that you agree with. I'd like to put into question what this dismal look at humanity might be serving.

So even though I don't have a ton of historical facts to pull from I do have the ability to look at what censorship does to people and make what I consider to be reasonable speculations about the ripple affects and messages it sends. Particularly the approval and encouragement of censorship by individuals.

You might be for censorship if you:

• Have recently celebrated the Front Line Doctors from being pulled down across everywhere

• Have been extremely happy for things like cleverly named 'Fact Checkers' of various sorts (the genius in the naming reminds me of ever-so-many cereals and other foods that are labeled in green colors or use the word organic or perhaps my favorite - how swedish fish and candy are often labeled a "fat-free food" in an effort to appear healthy.)

• Have posted memes calling people "sheep" or celebrated someone or group of someones being silenced in some way

• Have yourself called for the silencing of someone that you consider an idiot

I hope that this email gives you a little bit of expanded perspective on censorship and its implications.

I have so many goddam notes I made ahead of time on this and I never do that so god help us all that this comes out coherent. And thank you for reading. Please share.

When people are censored it says, 

"I don't agree therefore you should be silenced and not heard."

Sit and feel that for a second.

We'll talk about it more later.

It sets opinions against curiosity or of finding any common ground or value in another. Current culture is to find one thing wrong and to use it to write off the entire person.

I see little to no regard from anyone as to where this road inevitably ends up. Which is, that everyone will eventually disagree with something that you say. This leads to mass cancellation, paranoia, and the squashing of innovation and productive learning. It uses emotion to eliminate the opposition and views anyone who does not toe the line as opposition. It also assumes that everyone is stupid and that an outside party knows what is best for them, which is impossible. Fight me on that and we will get into a debate on what learning itself is.

Cancel culture and censorship supports mass approval over individual thought. It reminds me of Soviet production lines from a centrally-planned authoritative economy in which people would just keep manufacturing things until they were told not to. Meaning, until the supply got so massively out of hand that the central planners were forced to notice and do something about it. I just repurchased Jude Wanniski's The Way the World Works after writing this line.

In the end-point utopia I'm seeing many of my Facebook friends supporting today, everyone would wait until they got approval from a central narrative before sharing or stating virtually anything. You may think I'm being overblown but we have to take these ideas to logical conclusions. Celebrating voices being shut down is like voting for information to only be provided through an increasingly narrow set of approved channels that we are allowed to believe. You must ask where this is going when you celebrate censorship of anyone. 

Driving dissent underground means that you know your "enemy" even less, and that's all that censorship does, eventually leading to harsher and harsher penalties for having dissenting opinions. The dissenting opinions do not have the benefit of your influence or outside input, growing, as it were, in a darkened petri dish.

The act of sharing social shaming in order to isolate and ignore people's voices is the adult equivalent of the time-out chair. I've been looking for somewhere to share this tidbit I learned recently - "time out" was originally "time out from positive reinforcement" and was used to modify the behavior of lab animals. If you look it up today you'll see a whole bunch of articles on different ways to use time out with children. Many of them directly oppose each other. (I'm reading a book on why it's always stupid.) This is simply information for you to look at and decide for yourself what is best for you and your belief system. 

Imagine if you didn't have options.

You don't know what you don't know and in a controlled narrative you lose the point of having other people at all. 

You lose innovation, testing, curiosity, and creative destruction.

Imagine if the only resource you had to learn from was a single teacher or one science book. Think of one specific one from say 4th grade. Where the flying fuck would you be now?

Ok, ok, I know by now that you're probably saying or asking something like, 

"BUT THEY'RE WRONG!!"

Really? Who's wrong? It's more dangerous to assume right and wrong than it is to hear wrong. I have said and consistently share how much we "know" is wrong. Silence people and never discover new ways of doing things. There is always someone with divergent opinions, and that's good. A boss that discourages dissent is bad for business. (They do not have to agree with them, but belittling them is bad policy. Many top CEOs outright encourage sharing opposition.) Brainstorming sessions often lead to breakthroughs because they harvest outlandish or uncommon ideas. Revolutions in industry or country come from subversion and creative destruction. You do not. silence people. if you want. progress. and development. This demonstrates a lack of belief and faith in people. This is not surprising as people have been trained out of having any faith in themselves. Imagine a kid who is never given the opportunity or faith to discover anything on their own or decide for themselves.

How often have you been misunderstood in your life? Celebrating cancel culture and censorship is a mirror of the type of discourse prevalent today - short-form interactions through impersonal channels seeking to judge versus seeking to understand. People secure in their personal value system and self-esteem can seek to understand and don't need the other person to agree with them to respect them. If people chose to ask things like, "That's interesting. Why would you think that?" and let the discussion end without calling anyone names there might not be a problem here. People that can't coexist with other opinions are the people you dread seeing at Christmas and Thanksgiving.

It is important to think of how things affect other people. Purposefully using emotional isolationism to silence others and bringing in socially-displayed battery to force adherence brings me back to the adult time-out chair again. Add in fear of touch and cuddling and people are stripped of their humanity. 

Thinking about how things affect other people necessarily includes what happens when you don't let them make their own decisions or climb their own stairs or make their own judgments. What kind of people are we raising in the world? Fuck safe. There's no safety. The death rate is 100%. We need people taking risks and we need to eliminate the barriers to learning as much as possible. We have to ask what happens when we make it risky to trust ourselves when weighed against bowing to mob opinion.

An important lens here to try on is that of an outside, child observer. What does a kid observing censorship learn? 

Perhaps that it is good to reduce others and to slam opinions. To operate with zero curiosity about the world and what is possible. If you think a kid watching censorship and a population that supports it is growing up to become a "careful thinker" you're full of shit. They'll learn to moderate their behavior and thoughts as much as is necessary to feel they belong to the tribe. Ostracization is the cruelest thing to do to others. It should be among the rarest of penalties doled out and you should think about what your intentions are when you speak to people. You should think through what the implied consequences are and what an entire world operating as you are would look like.

So what should we do? Or what can we do?

At the very least we can not applaud censorship! We can have private, real discussions with people over subjects we at least care about and interest us. We can look for why the other person is right, at the very least from their perspective. We can stop calling for people to lose their jobs over an opinion as if the opinion is the entire person. We can imagine what it would be like to be on the other side of a debate. We can encourage creativity wherever we see it. We can seek to do better ourselves and grow greater than the people we disagree with.

Finally we can ask:

"Is it loving?" to the way we rail against things.

We can ask:
"Is it impossible?" (that the other person is right.)

We should ask:
"What happens if I'm right?
Wrong?
Unable or discouraged to decide for myself?"
"What happens if I am unable to see anything good about other people based on what other people say about them?"

What kind of world are you creating?

When there is no reward for fighting back people will cease to fight.

This is one of my hard lines, of which there are very, very few. Censorship is bad. It is wrong. It says much more about the people censoring than those being censored, and it crushes the people being censored.

Fuck off with censoring.