Free Speech
Definition
Applications
“I regard free speech as a prerequisite to a civilized society, because freedom of speech means that you can have combat with words. That’s what it means. It doesn’t mean that people can happily and gently exchange opinions. It means that we can engage in combat with words, in the battleground of ideas. And the reason that that’s acceptable, and why it’s acceptable that people’s feelings get hurt during that combat, is that the combat of ideas is far preferable to actual combat.” [Citation Needed]
“If you don’t believe in free speech, you don’t believe in the implicit divinity of mankind.” [Citation Needed]
"[T]o believe in free speech, you have to believe there are autonomous individuals, who have their own viewpoints, who can spontaneously generate creative ideas, and then who can engage in an active dialogue in a manner that consists of fundamental goodwill and truth, and that you can change each other's opinions and come to a negotiated agreement. You have to believe all of that, including the autonomous individual, in that concept - the logos ... and the Postmodernists and the Neo-Marxists - they don't. They believe that the individual is a mouthpiece for a power assembly."[1]
"The alternative to discourse is conflict. Actual, physical conflict."[2]
Interpretations
If liberty means anything, it's the liberty to say things that other people don't want to hear.
Curbing free speech means it is impossible to get at the truth.
People often defend freedom of speech on the grounds that citizens must retain the right to criticize their leaders. That’s true, but it’s not the fundamental truth.
Freedom of speech protects our societies from shipwreck on the Scylla of tyranny and the Charybdis of nihilism and despair. Freedom of speech allows us to identify the problems that beset us. Freedom of speech allows us to formulate solutions to those problems, and to reach consensus on the solutions.
There is nothing in the absence of freedom of speech but tyranny and slavery
Free speech is the mechanism which keeps sanity in the individual and society
We use free speech to adapt, to turn chaos into order, to update the state. If you don’t have that, the state becomes stale, decayed and dead
See Also
References
