A Rationale for Policing Speech

Free speech is costly to all of us.

Problems in the world, realities, inherent horrors and evils in this world are not the problem. It’s people that racistly and divisively talk about those problems without giving any thought to what it does to the rest of us that want to hold simplified views of reality that discount all the underlying issues and truths.

Instead of tackling these problems, we can attack those that talk about them, the people that attack our ability to create a distorted view of reality. A comfortable view of reality.

A least effort view of reality. A view of reality where everything is already equal, except when we want to tip the scale. No injustice is an injustice, but we can create injustices where we want.

Are children getting harmed by the simple, reality-reducing ideas that we spew out on social media? Not a problem, we’ll just attack those that talk about this, we’ll arrest them and deplatform them. This is the only way. We cannot exist in the world where activism is reduced to actual action.

We want a world where activism is merely destroying those who would remind us that we do nothing but contribute to the ills of society.

We should police speech because it protects our little bubble of unreality. We should police speech because it allows us to keep going on pretending that shouting down dissent to evil is the same as fighting evil.

We should police, importantly, because it allows people to expose us. To explain that we need to shut down the truth as it exposes our collective guilt, our complicity in the evils that we shut out as complications to a simplified world view. Never stick your neck out, it’s much easier to sacrifice children on the altar of political collimation. All for one.

We should police speech because it makes us feel better. It makes us feel better if we stop people talking about the bad things, things so bad we don’t want to hear about them. Realities that are too complicated and impinge on our rights to create simpler realities that hide problems under a rug, unfortunate problems, real suffering, real consequences that directly impact our ability to hold simplified “if we’re all just nice and don’t talk about bad things or make each other feel bad everything will be ok” views.