“A really great text about speech.
What’s interesting is Mill was writing in the 1800’s, and he was writing about the problems with speech oppressed by societal norms as opposed to government suppression of speech. It’s pretty relevant in modern times, which is sort of surprising. You’d think our gizmos would render something like this ancient and worthless, but there’s a lot of applicable good in here.
He’s got three very basic tenets:
1. Dissenting opinion is important because it may be correct. This is a tougher one that it sounds because we all like to believe that we’re mostly right, and when we look back at history we like to think that we’d somehow know things the people living in that time didn’t know. We’ve all heard someone wax on about how they surely would have behaved during witch trials, civil rights struggles, wars, etc. But the truth of the matter is that most of us have been wrong most of the time, and this hasn’t stopped being true. We are all wrong about something today, and 50 years from now we’ll be seen as monsters. Count on it. Hey, if it turns out that in 2069 people are like, “Those 2019 folks had it all figured out!” I’ll buy you a drink.
2. It’s in arguing with a dissenting opinion that we reaffirm our understanding of the truth. When truths become accepted and are no longer challenged, we lose touch with their meaning and origin, and future challenges to the truth are more difficult to dismiss. To make a technology analogy, we all use lamps, but very few of us could wire one from scratch. Having received knowledge on an issue challenged forces us to understand the issue and our stance on it completely.
3. Both the correct and incorrect opinions contain portions of the whole of truth, and it’s by those opinions combining that we get closer to truth. Without dissenting opinions, we only get the portion of the truth that serves our purposes.
All of this requires a lot of listening skills and patience, but there are some really thoughtful ideas in this piece, and it’s only like a 30-minute read. “