You really do have to watch what you say
ACCORDING to the egg-heeds and academics, self-censorship in public is on the rise in both the UK and the US – Hell’s bells man, I don’t know if I should be writing about this in case these facts offend anyone!
So if this is true, what’s going on? I did me research! A recent paper by two political scientists in America noted “that from the 1950s (the height of McCarthyism in the US) to 2021, self-censorship actually tripled”.
How they worked that out, when people aren’t supposedly saying what they think, is a bit of a heedhurter.
So why are we stopping ourselves from saying what we think?
Wey, to start with, we all self-censor all the time anyway. When a kindly but off-the-wall auntie gives you a Christmas jumper she knitted – but which looks as if it was based on what Freddy Kruger wore in the Nightmare on Elm Street films – you don’t mention those thoughts as you thank her. You use your filter (if you’ve got one).
Even back in the Seventies we held back! For example, the commonly held belief in my second year junior school class was that Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, could easily chin Captain Scarlet.
Givowwer! Even at nine years old, I knew this was cobblers.
Captain Scarlet was flippin’ indescribable man!
How could some hairy-chested poser with a robot arm and bionic eye even dent a bloke whom dynamite, sharks, falls from tall buildings, rockfalls (and other perils from the opening sequence) didn’t even touch?
Yet I kept this unpopular view to myself. I knew that to utter such dissent might lead to banishment from the group. I’d end up sitting at the table with the smelly kid from the problem family who wore wellies in the summer and had a new surname every couple of years (schools were harsh and cruel places).
So self-censorship may be a surdo vival strategy in a culture that a new book calls “toxically polarised”, in which different camps see themselves as “divided aggressively over an increasingly broad range of issues”.
Aye, say the ‘wrong thing’ about Boris, Brexit or even Mrs Brown’s Boys and you risk identifying yourself as as being from ‘the other side’ (and we don’t mean south of Washington).
The social media inquisition hasn’t helped, with people being publicly demolished for things they’ve opined – even if it was years ago.
A virtual firing squad of adult trolls awaits – misfits sitting in their parents’ spare rooms behind the anonymity of the net.
I had a comedic colleague crucified online for a gag they said nearly two decades back.
Admittedly, it wasn’t one I’d have advised using, even way back then.
It wasn’t even one of their best lines – but nobody gave it a second thought nearly two decades ago.
Nobody complained. It wasn’t an issue. Yet suddenly it was!
All this against the backdrop of a global pandemic, where our lockdown partying Prime Minister lies to all and sundry, with a barely concealed contempt for the plebs like us.
Thank god that one person isn’t self-censoring at the moment – though I never thought I’d be glad to hear what Dominic Cummings had
to say!