Read on Twitter
When you self-censor what you allow yourself to read, listen to, or think about, because peers or Twitter users would disapprove, you are doing yourself a great disservice.
A lot of people today (especially on Twitter) view unorthodox ideas as pathogens - potential contaminants from which we must quarantine ourselves, lest they infect us and do irreparable harm to our brains.
The reality, of course, is that there are truly bad and terrible ideas out there, and that people who embrace them can sometimes do great harm.
Such is the nature of life, and ever shall it be.
But it is equally true that a willingness to entertain unconventional, unorthodox, and unfamiliar ideas is a necessary prerequisite for the reform and renewal of virtually anything that really matters.
But it is equally true that a willingness to entertain unconventional, unorthodox, and unfamiliar ideas is a necessary prerequisite for the reform and renewal of virtually anything that really matters.
And it's perhaps even more true, that it's difficult to distinguish or discern whether ideas are truly bad and terrible, without being exposed to them and fully engaging with them in their most undistilled, least-cartoonish form.
In reality, few ideas are universally self-evidently good or bad; most lie somewhere along a very long continuum and contain varying degrees of truth and utility (which are most certainly not the same thing).
The best way to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff is to have a culture in which competing ideas are widely disseminated, read, thought about and debated. For the truly abhorrent ideas, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Readers can correct me if I'm wrong, but I am not aware of a historical era of great reform or renewal in which ideas were (successfully) repressed and in which intellectual freedom was (successfully) stifled, either through self-censorship, institutional repression, or both.
We are most certainly in need of such reform and renewal today, in multiple areas of American life. Creating a climate where people are increasingly afraid to say what they think for fear from the online mob, and in which divergent ideas are repressed is not a recipe for success.
I, for example, believe that Marxism is one such terrible idea, and that the past 103 years provides ample and overwhelming evidence of why that is the case.
Others will disagree.
I disagree with them, but respect their right to disagree with me. https://twitter.com/JasonSzegedi/status/1335216584403656704?s=20
Others will disagree.
I disagree with them, but respect their right to disagree with me. https://twitter.com/JasonSzegedi/status/1335216584403656704?s=20
It is for this very reason that I'd like more, not less, people to know exactly what went on in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, particularly with regards to habits of thought and attitudes toward intellectual discourse and free expression in those places.
I'd like more, not less, people to have a keen understanding of what present-day Marxists think and believe, and to know as much as possible about their ideas, their cultural beliefs, and their attitudes toward dissent. The more information, the better.
