The benefits of hate speech

Hate speech laws deprive people of the chance to build mental strength and resilience.

Much of the debate around the obsession with hate speech focuses on the perceived harms caused. The trauma, the nastiness, the hate itself. Even those pushing against attempts to censor us accept these basic precepts.

But few focus on the deeper problem with initiatives to limit speech, that they deprive people of the opportunity to grow beyond their critics and learn to tolerate opinion that differs from their own.

As a consequence many misunderstand the benefits full freedom of expression brings, not the least of which is fostering a climate of live and let live, and creating the foundation of a mature society that can govern itself without the need for grand visions or social engineers.

There have been multiple attempts in European countries to establish laws to regulate speech. This has met resistance, but even in the United States there are concerted efforts to erode traditional barriers to censorship.

The political class and media elites seem united in pursuing restrictions on speech they consider hateful or aimed at protected groups. Even academia, including some journalism schools, are actively calling for state-controlled regulation in the form of restricted speech.

Censorship, it would seem, is fashionable again.

Many of these initiatives are extensions of existing ideas around discrimination laws and regulations. Western governments have long favoured some groups with whom to grant privileges that include employment and education quotas as well as preferential legal status.

The latest proposals focus on the reduction of harm. There is much discussion about hateful speech, which encompasses anything deemed offensive towards privileged groups. Push back tends to emphasize the impracticability of enforcement as well as fears about censorship.

There is rather less discussion about what such protection does to those singled out for this special treatment. By denying individuals the chance to read or view material they are deprived of developing skills and traits that help them become mature adults able to function independently. Information that challenges an existing worldview is not something to be managed or avoided, it is to be welcomed as a necessary component of the maturation process we all endure.

This natural process has many effects on our lives. Here are three that exposure to alternative views help foster.

1. Forced to live in reality

Real life actually exists. Any proposed theory or idea must conform to reality, a basic litmus test for anything purporting to be important in our lives.

This reality check includes questioning ideas, concepts and behaviours we encounter. This is normal. It is essential as no one person or group has a monopoly on truth.

An environment where others will expose ideas to some reality test always helps improve things. It also teases out common ground opposing camps can agree on. Religious believers may have valid observations about life as do atheists. Either group banning the other from speaking those ideas risks stagnation and complacency.

Taken to extremes restrictions on speech establish conditions that drift towards adherence to orthodox views rather than the plurality of opinions that are the lifeblood of free societies.

The goal in healthy societies is always a free market of ideas. New proposals, theories and opinions should be encouraged. But a confident society ensures robust mechanisms are in place to test these. Freedom of expression is the most powerful weapon to apply basic reality tests, to ensure anything new is scrutinized appropriately.

A recent development is the notion young children can believe they exist within the wrong body. Some insist we must always believe these children. The opposing view asks why we disallow children to get tattoos but let them undergo irreversible surgical procedures. That is to say, transgender activists are reminded reality exists and must be accommodated.

Opposition to children changing sex is considered hateful by some; it deprives the afflicted of gender affirming care, to use the terminology espoused by advocates. The counterargument is that this is not hate. It is fact. It is based in objective reality. It is illegal to tattoo children, which superficially changes the exterior of the body; it is legal in some jurisdictions to permanently alter healthy children using surgery. This is at the very least inconsistent. It does not pass a reality test since there is no rationale for these ideas beyond personal belief. Children are either too young to make major life decisions or they are not.

Everyone who cares about truth benefits from this basic scrutiny, including those proposing changes to society. When all speech is permissible we enjoy a more thorough examination of ideas and narratives that affect us. Labelling some of these as hateful because they upset some people interrupts this important process. Ultimately the usefulness of subjecting new ideas to tests is more important than feelings.

2. Escape solipsism

A key characteristic of the modern age is solipsism, the notion an individual’s subjective experience and perception of events can be an absolute frame of reference to quantify objective reality. More commonly known as thinking the world revolves around you.

We are all prone to this at times, especially when young. Inexperience greatly enhances solipsism as does disturbed thinking associated with some common personality disorders. Both can distort reality as a consequence of limited cognitive ability and lack of experience.

We often grow up rapidly as we enter the adult world and learn others have different views from our own. Some seem to have a distinct mental map or framework in operation. We sometimes come across people who clearly have a superior understanding of an event or phenomenon. These learning opportunities are rare and precious. The best of them can change our lives for the better as we are exposed to alternative ways of seeing the world. Perhaps a well written piece on economics that changes our own views on how society should operate. Sometimes it is an overlooked nuance that tempers a previously hard stance on a complex subject and softens our position.

We see today an absence of this more grounded approach. Hysterical outbursts are common. Strenuous adherence to some established orthodoxy is becoming the norm, with questioning condemned as bigotry or hate. We hear calls to characterize such processes as rhetorical violence, and an insistence this can have real-world effects comparable to eugenics or even genocide.

The most aggressive often seem in the grips of a neurotic worldview they struggle to defend from even basic criticism. This subjective perception feels real to them so they seek special protection from scrutiny which they perceive as attacks. Needless to say this does nothing to help them overcome solipsism but merely cements it into place.

Bad ideas driven by solipsism are a subjective mindsoup projected by cognitively limited people and labelled as objective reality we must all respect. This is patent nonsense. The solipsist is mentally constrained, condemned to never make sense of a real world that exists independently of them and the distortions circulating inside their own minds.

We evolve away from solipsism through experience. Individuals are not fated to think in such a constrained way forever despite how convincing it may feel. Exposure to new ideas and ways of thinking accelerates this process.

3. The cultivation of resilience

The cumulative effect of confronting reality and understanding you are not the centre of the universe can be considerable. The end result is the emergence of mental toughness, an ability to manage criticism of your beliefs and worldview.

Part of this toughness is based on acceptance. Others may see the world differently. A corollary to this is the absence of the need to force others to accept your own views. It is a live and let live mentality born of a need to assess and reassess how the world works at many intervals during our lifetimes.

Resilience is a much sought after trait. Virtually every meaningful philosophy mentions it as a key component of virtue and satisfaction. Learning to manage the inevitable slings and arrows of life is the basis for all positive and strong approaches to living well.

Its antithesis, mental weakness or psychological fragility, is devastating to the individual yet we live during an epidemic of reported anxiety disorders where resilience seems to be in short supply. While it is easy to dismiss these as delusion or whining this overlooks how crippling anxiety really is.

An anxious population is not a happy population. The prevalence of self-reported anxiety, particularly among the young, is worrying. The anxious often live difficult lives. They accomplish little due to the debilitating effects of living inside their heads and can be swayed by fear. A fearful, neurotic nation is easily exploited by the ruthless.

Resilience is not some barely attainable goal only reserved for the lucky few like a kind of mental sixpack, but rather is a necessary tool we must all cultivate to survive and ultimately flourish. Can exposure to hate do all this? Yes. But more importantly artificial protection from hate and bile retards the development of resilience. We never learn to accept the complexities of the world or that our ideas may be flawed.

It is this societal retardation we see becoming more common. The non-resilient are not just hiding away, they are taking active steps to mitigate the anxiety they feel. They are demanding someone else control their exposure to words and images that trigger them. They are becoming intolerant of external events because they cannot cope with internal feelings produced by material they can easily ignore if they wish.

Their intolerance manifests as unreasonable demands to control others in the form of censorship of views they cannot process in a calm or mature fashion.

The overreactions we often see to tweets and memes is an example. Sometimes it is hard to take seriously. But it is serious. That is the sound of anguish. It is the howl of substantial sections of society unable to withstand real life.

Witness the almost psychotic levels of anger when some aspect of radical feminist philosophy is criticized. The behaviours we sometimes observe seem inappropriately hostile, almost deranged. Calls for censure, cancellation, even death. Any questioning of the dogma, however reasonable, is instantly condemned as misogyny or patriarchal abuse. It is considered toxic. It is hateful.

This is not being faked. It is a consequence of a psychological fragility we are told we cannot examine. This aversion to scrutiny itself is a consequence of a non-resilient mentality. Any discussion of these issues cannot be tolerated lest the vulnerable perceive this too as hate, which is increasingly anything short of complete endorsement of other points of view. This is more than just a chilling effect on civilized discourse, it is a fundamental destruction of discussion to accommodate the feelings of crazy people.

The anger is real, it is merely triggered by discussion, often polite, and then labelled as hateful. It is this infantile process that is being used to justify legal censorship by governments in many nations.

A healthy society would allow the hate and take note of the overreactions which would then be examined in a clinical fashion to determine what is going on. None of this happens today. Instead the censorious rub their hands with glee at the thought these mentally disturbed people may help further their aims.

The cure, like it or not, is the psychological strength that comes from exposure. A mental workout in a societal gym, with each triggering meme, essay or humorous video building resilience that can culminate in cognitive strength and manifesting as tolerance for different views.

The resilient are tough. They can assess information and then form their own conclusions. They do not need protection from ideas, hateful or otherwise. Every hate speech legislation proposal entirely overlooks this cultivation of resilience and especially how common it once was in our recent past. Sticks and stones are being replaced with laws and regulations applied to all and sundry. We encourage weakness through indulgence of neurotic, paranoid bullying and call it progress because a loud minority of anxious people will not do the work to rise above their distorted sensitivities.

What this means

Mental strength is built through exposure. People learn with experience to weigh information and come to conclusions.

People learn discernment. What works and what doesn’t. What is substantial and what is ephemeral. They learn to discriminate, making them harder to fool. This sophistication assists in helping assess information that is presented to us, anathema to those who aspire to control whole nations via approved narratives.

The censorious are convinced we cannot be left to our own devices like this. They imagine a more black and white world, where their views are correct and opposing views are dangerous.

In resilient societies what emerges to manage this is not censorship but good manners. Mannerly behaviour helps us navigate life. We engage in a silent contract where we accept others can think what they like as long as they extend the same courtesy to us. Without heavy handed legislation establishing hard rules we fall back on these skills and quickly identify those who lack the maturity to embrace the accepted rules of polite public debate.

The alternative to a mannerly society is an obedient one. Obedience to rules and regulations defined by others who may have a quite different view of life. The ultimate destination for those keen on obedience is a permission based society, where free speech is replaced with a limited list of topics we can discuss with all others forbidden. A society only fit for slaves.

And that is ultimately why we must always champion free speech. Individuals with mental limitations and an anxious outlook are already slaves to their own impulses. They cannot imagine a stronger mindset that is free to make up its own mind. Better then to ban all uncomfortable discussions, and to convince the world their irrational overreactions reflect the extremism of opposing views and not their own disturbed mental landscape. An asylum ran by lunatics creating a world that looks like a circus.

This all sounds desirable, so why not? Why not encourage the development of resilience? To those who wish to control today’s Western nations this is not a desirable trait. Most of our countries have become infected with the notion of victim-oppressor narratives. All those victims need a steady supply of oppressors to worry about.

Denouncing people as speakers of hate makes identification much easier. They are the monsters. We can easily tell because they are the ones posting dangerous memes that make us laugh at the absurdities keeping the excitable up at night. Society will be safer when they are in jail.

This urge to police language comes from deep psychological flaws absent in the resilient. They mainly appear as neurosis. A nation of worriers has a lot to worry about, except the fate of those who question bad ideas and obvious falsehoods.

The tragedy of the push for censorship and punishment for supposed hate speech is the easily triggered who advocate for this imagine themselves as more discerning than the rest. Just one delusion among many driving us all off a cliff.

Their neurosis is not some superior sense of wrongness we cannot detect. It is just a lack of ability to cope with the world as it really is with its kaleidoscope of opinions and ideas that may differ from our own.

It is ironic the intolerant demand zero challenges to their worldview and wish to use the force of the law to do it, all under the guise of tolerance. The kind of nonsensical sequence so absurd the memes practically write themselves.

These initiatives are a social engineer’s dream. A nation of neurotics seeking protection from life and plenty of psychopaths happy to grant these indulgences to further their own aims. Mind control has never been so welcomed.

However, it is not all doom and gloom. If it is true that artificially protecting some groups from ideas they find hateful retards their ability to cope with real life, what then of the groups who are not protected? What happens to them?

The unprivileged can be targeted for all the hate they like and enjoy all the benefits listed above. They become stronger, more resilient, tougher all round. The speakers of hate are also forced into reality and must deal with real life to learn their place in it.

These are immense benefits that lead to mental strength. As our fearful accusers seek more protection from reality we are forced to embrace ever more of it. And as history teaches us it is the strong who prevail, not the weak or the mollycoddled or the delusional. If you are in a group not covered by hate speech legislation be thankful for the exposure and the benefits you will receive.

In this era, where any deviation from some carefully cultivated orthodoxy leads to embarrassing performances online and much gnashing of teeth, be grateful you have learned to deal with it solo. To the lovers of censorship that is a superpower they are actively preventing their favoured groups from acquiring. The wages of neurotic avoidance is stagnation.

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Image by Morgan Basham.

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Trigger the neurotics!

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