Censorship - The Destruction of Thought
Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
–Benjamin Franklin
There is something very wrong with the world today. Of course, we could point to many different things to illustrate the issues that we are facing. But there is one glowing example that cannot be overlooked. And that is the attack on free speech through the use of censorship, whether the censorship takes place by the government or by corporations, it still has the same damaging effect. In the world that we live in today, we are faced with an interesting challenge. The challenge being the digital world. Most modern cases of censorship are coming from multi national corporations. Corporation such as Facebook (Meta), X (formally Twitter), Reddit, and others have in our modern time become the digital public square. Unfortunately, we cannot live a life and not be affected by these corporations in some form or fashion as even legacy media uses these platforms as official sources. And this is where the problem comes in as the first amendment to the United States, Bill of Rights only covers protection from government, not multinational corporations.
This leads to an interesting questions. What is the role of censorship today? Do these platforms have a right to censor us? And even if they do have a technical legal ability to do so, should they have this ability? Should the government be able to work hand-in-hand with these corporations? Is there truly information that is so dangerous for us to be able to hear? And is it the right of these corporations, or the government itself, to determine what is and is not dangerous information? These are all questions that need to be answered, even if some of them have been answered before. Some will be easy to answer others will not. However, there are still objective truths that hold true.
Censoring information does not allow people to form a correct judgment because you’re not even allowed to form one. Having truth handed down from authoritarians up on high, while black holing or hiding any information from you that might contradict or call that truth into question disables you from being able to build and use logic and reason to arrive at a conclusion of truth for yourself.
You do not even get to use your brain in the same way. It bars you from being able to build the skill of thinking for yourself to censor information. This breeds obedience to authority, not intelligence. Just repeating something because some authority figure said is not intelligence. That’s not intelligence.
This should go without saying that something true should stand up to questions and scrutiny just fine, if it is the truth. Disallowing questions of a so-called truth, actually negates the truthfulness as people aren’t even allowed to consider other possibilities and test that truth against them to make sure it is indeed true.
Test the truth. Test it against competing theories, ideas, hunches, purposeful deceptions, whatever. Test it against everything in order to think, in order to use their brains and verify for themselves that “yes, I do think this is true.”
Because if you were just handed down the “truth”, top down, and you were not allowed to question it then you are put in a position of being forced to trust those who provided the truth. They aren’t earning that trust. They’re just trying to force you into giving it. Which means deferring to their authority. But is that authority legitimate? How legitimate is that authority if it requires censorship in order to maintain itself.
Censorship shuts down entire avenues of thought that may have occurred before they even can. This is how you shackle people with their own consent. You manufacture consent. Thomas Jefferson stated that the founding fathers were experimenting with being able to establish that man can be governed by reason and truth, but that cannot be done if we are not trusted to hear all the information, everything, true and false and form a correct judgment between the two for ourselves. Because the ability to discern cannot be formed at all without open access to information.
Censorship keeps people from the ability to build the skill of judgment, discernment, to build critical, thinking skills, to build their own intelligence. Censorship doesn’t allow people to think for themselves because censorship doesn’t require thinking at all. When so-called truth is being dictated and everything else is being censored, a person is stopped from thinking in an attempt to enforce belief. And belief always has a middleman.
Censorship takes away an inherent right to our own minds, this is why it’s first. You can’t even have an understanding of and then uphold the rest of the Bill of Rights if you don’t have freedom of speech and press and religion first. Without those there can be no such thing as freedom of thought, and as our thought form our perceptions, our perceptions form our reality, and if those perceptions are merely being provided to us from someone else up on high then who’s reality are we existing in?
Because it’s anything but ours.
And if we are going to live in an artificial reality damn it, then shouldn’t we at least get to choose that?
