“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion,” he wrote, “mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
As I think back on my impressions at the time, the book seemed like a series of indisputable truisms. It occurred to me that I had no idea why he felt the need to write it or our need to read it. Perhaps there were some historical interests, but his views clearly won the day. It struck me at the time that absolutely no one favored meaningful restrictions on free speech.
We can fast forward two decades and I was asked by some college kids to lecture on the topic. I simply could not understand why they were so upset. To prepare, I had to do a deep dive into the emerging campus culture in which disagreement was being silenced and campus administrators were punishing students who had political views that ran contrary to elite opinion.
What we need, he wrote in opposition to Mill, is “intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. ... Part of this struggle is the fight against an ideology of tolerance which, in reality, favors and fortifies the conservation of the status quo of inequality and discrimination.”
When I first read Marcuse, I thought it all sounded insane, like a template for totalitarian speech controls. Oddly, his views gained popularity, however, to the point that we hear them all the time. Whenever politicians speak of wanting to shut down “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation,” what they are referring to are views with which they disagree.
They no longer even argue about facts on the grounds. Already the censors have shown themselves willing to stop the expression of true facts that encourage the wrong way to think. Speech today is increasingly seen not as a right but as a means to a political end, a method of propaganda to curate and cultivate a particular type of public mind as a means of managing the political culture.
In short, Mill has lost and Marcuse has won.
It all happened in the course of only a few decades. The free speech rallies on campus from 20 years ago seem quaint today, for most students would not even dare to stand up for a broad range of speech today for fear of the consequences on their grades and even their status as students. At least 20 years ago, students had the freedom to speak for freedom; it isn’t clear that they even have that anymore.
As for the broader culture, the Marcuse revolution has taken full control of media and technology, as all the dominant players are playing for one team and against another team. That is unbearably obvious from even quick encounters.
I leave my car radio on the public radio station in hopes of hearing classical music, but I sometimes accidentally land on what seems like a news report offered up by the tax-funded National Public Radio. There ought to be some other word besides bias. The content is so over the top in terms of politics that it is jaw-dropping.
And yet, as much as I am mortified by these opinions, they should not be stopped from being expressed. Ideally, they would not be funded by tax dollars; that is the offensive thing. Every nation does have its official radio channel, to be sure, and that’s fine, so long as other voices can find a footing without repression.
As for the opposition, we should be profoundly aware that Steve Bannon, perhaps the leading strategist and thinker of the Trump movement, has been imprisoned for the entire election season. Many other innovators in technology and communication are being given similar treatment.
The founder and CEO of Telegram was arrested while traveling from the United Arab Emirates to France and accused of failing to give a backdoor to government officials. Meanwhile, the UK mass arrests citizens for memes. Ireland tries to ban “mean memes.” Brazil forced X, formerly known as Twitter, to flee the country. Australia tries to censor X posts. The European Union has tried to pressure Elon Musk. And Nicolás Maduro blocks all access to X. As for campuses, forget it: The censors have won.
The crackdown today seems full on, in ways that I simply could never have imagined as an undergraduate naively reading Mill and wondering why anyone should have an issue with it. As it turns out, the very idea of free speech is as controversial today as it was during the War of the Roses. This is for a reason. The freedom to influence others is a freedom that no truly unpopular regime can ever tolerate.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong,” he wrote, “and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
At least he admits it. Many others need to step up and do the same.
In many ways, free speech is the first freedom, which is why it is listed first in the Bill of Rights. In the United States, the government is restricted from interfering in speech, and the courts have been very clear on this. Over the decades, the censors have had to become more clever in using university centers, third parties, and various nonprofit cutouts and deployed more subtle techniques in influencing platforms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others.
We sit on tens of thousands of pages of court discovery that proves that these efforts are ongoing and quite effective. That said, there is still an ethos that favors free speech out there. We find voices in defense of it with Musk and others who still believe that the right is fundamental.
Above all else, the path out of this terrible trap must take recourse in the words of Mill: “Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.”
These days, doing so can come with a heavy price, and that is tragic and intolerable. Still, it’s a great time to be grateful to Mill for saying what might have seemed obvious to me when I was 21, for we live in fluid times when what was obvious to one generation is not so much to the next. We need his wisdom now more than ever.
“The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”—John Stuart Mill
