Guardians of truth
The most dangerous thing in America today isn’t “misinfor- mation” (or “disinformation,” the two seldom distinguished), but the increasingly energetic effort to suppress it on the part of governmental officials, corporate media, and Big Tech.
In that effort is found a remarkable loss of understanding of why free speech is crucial to liberal democracy and a free society.
What we are witnessing is nothing less than an embrace of the foundational assumption behind authoritarianism throughout time—that the people can’t be trusted to distinguish true from false, which is another way of saying that they can’t be trusted to live free and govern themselves.
In some cases, if you say “A” you must also say “B,” and in this case if you accept the principle that government exists to protect us from ourselves (to protect us, more precisely, from allegedly false information regarding covid vaccines, mask-wearing, lockdowns, etc.), you must also accept the principle that our governmental leaders should control what we can see, hear and read, for “our own good.”
We either trust people to discern true from false, or we don’t—and if we don’t, we can’t allow them to conduct their own affairs as members of a free society, either.
The idea of suppressing information that we believe to be false also undermines the very process that allows us to determine true from false—open debate and discussion. It ignores that it is only such debate and discussion that has ever allowed us to pursue truth in appropriately disinterested fashion and acquire knowledge.
The argument that information must be censored because “lives are at stake” during an emergency can, if accepted, outlast the emergency and be expediently invoked for other emergencies, both real and imagined; a precedent will have been established that will inevitably be exploited.
There is a fine line between saying that X should not be allowed because it is untrue and saying that X should not be allowed to be expressed because it is heretical.
Those who now seek to suppress what they call “misinformation” are only doing what would-be authoritarians of various stripes have always done, which is to attempt to suppress information that threatens their interests and jeopardizes their authority.
Once you move into the realm of censoring any expression that you consider false you have effectively abandoned any limiting principle for the practice of censorship and embraced an all-purpose and inherently elastic justification for it.
When government engages in censorship, or encourages others to do so (“outsourcing” it), a remarkable reversal occurs, in which a First Amendment that exists first and foremost to protect us from government (by protecting political speech; that is speech about government) is rewritten to say that only speech which government finds congenial is permitted (with all else conveniently labelled “misinformation”).
There will always be an inverse relationship between intellectual confidence and the resort to censorship—the weaker your ideas, the more the need to try to suppress criticism of them. The totalitarian state must always, as a consequence, be primarily an exercise in censorship.
In the end, there is no more effective means of encouraging belief in bad ideas than to attempt to censor them, and no more effective means of discouraging belief in bad ideas than allowing them to be openly expressed and then refuted in free debate.
When you censor what is claimed to be false, you inherently reduce faith in what you claim to be true; the more truth is viewed as instrumental in nature (the “noble lie”), the more meaningless it becomes. Indeed, there are few things that we firmly believe to be true or false and that matter that are incapable of being proven otherwise, so long as free debate is permitted.
Throughout history, much that was deemed false was later judged to be true, because, at least with the greatest contribution of the Enlightenment— freedom of speech—we were allowed to winnow it out.
In a purely public policy sense, as the performance of authoritarian governments has consistently demonstrated over time, the odds of getting it wrong go up when you suppress criticism and debate. It becomes possible to trundle off the cliff together because you have lost the quality control function previously performed by a culture of robust give and take.
As more knowledge has accumulated, much of what has been taken as gospel during the pandemic (constantly wash your hands, wipe down everything) now looks silly, while other things we thought we knew for sure and thus constituted “settled science” (that cloth masks are highly effective, that the pandemic could never have started in a Chinese lab, that lockdowns, school closures and other draconian measures were worth the associated costs) are coming increasingly into question.
Because people were still, despite the best efforts of our would-be censors, allowed to ask questions and to express skepticism and carry out more research and crunch more numbers.
Those who eagerly suppress “misinformation” aren’t “following the science.” They are gutting the freedom of speech and unfettered inquiry upon which science has always depended.
They almost certainly know this, but their primary concern isn’t defending science or even combatting a virus; rather, it is to acquire power and exercise control over others.