The World Of The Wordless Chimpanzee
Hate Speech Is Really Thought Crime - Silence And Libel Others At Your Peril
I was recently involved in a discussion with a person who claimed that, “There is no such thing as cancelling. Cancel culture is just something that adults say that isn’t true”, to paraphrase. In ordinary times, I would have just let things go and left this person to get more information and reckon with reality on clearer terms. However, delusions and the people who harbor them now dominate the seats and positions of power while those who want to occupy objective reality and live in a state of liberty under the rule of law, people like me and probably you, have seen our ideas of the proper order of things pushed to the margins.
In the first pass of this conversation, the cancelling of Dr. Seuss and J.K. Rowling were dismissed with a fact check that J.K. Rowling promoted ideas harmful to transgender people and used anti-semitic stereotypes in her books. Similarly Dr. Seuss had a book whose cartoon caricatures purportedly conveyed racial stereotypes. In both cases which stereotypes and which specific and objectively racist and anti-transgender language was never provided. The conversation was not concluded, so we left it for another time.
I have been giving a lot of thought recently to my moral obligations to the future. While a follow-up conversation was a coin toss in terms of being suitable, I decided it was my moral obligation to try and help this person a) see and acknowledge that Cancel Culture is very real and b) see the potentially catastrophic consequences of woke ideology and using libel and slander as a tool of censorship. For that is what Cancel Culture really is: the use of libel and slander to silence viewpoints and the people who express them. For some it is done to rid the world of, “hate.” If that hate exists or if it is eliminated is another matter. For some it conveniently destroys competing ideas and rivals to their power.
My compass was pulled to the true north of having a conversation by one thing this person said in the first conversation. This person said, “Well, yeah if a person asks for forgiveness then they should be left alone and be able to come back.” Aside from admitting that Cancel Culture is real, the implications of that from the standpoint of due process, libel, and the religious nature of demanding, under threat of marginalization, that a person ask a faceless mob for, “forgiveness”, without any objective proof of harm presented and proven in a court of law are truly frightening. So, I decided that I was obligated to have a follow on conversation. We owe it to ourselves and to our youth to provide moral clarity on such important matters.
I prepared six examples of real people in the public eye who were cancelled, (Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier; Jordan Peterson; Alex Epstein; Brett Weinstein; James Damore; Palmer Luckey), and two examples of people I know who were cancelled in the sense that they were recently denied jobs - one based on race and one the content of their blog.
At the outset of the conversation the person said that people can’t be allowed to engage in hate speech. I stopped right there and said, “There is no such thing as hate speech. Hate speech is an illegitimate idea/notion/concept that is antithetical to our civilization’s values and our natural right to freedom of speech.” I was immediately fact checked when a Wikipedia page, I assume, on hate speech was pulled up on an iPhone. My point was weakly/partially conceded not because it was considered thoughtfully, but when the page said that the Supreme Court has ruled against, “hate speech”, laws.
That approach to considering if, “hate speech”, is legitimate stunned me. If, “hate speech”, was ever codified into law, as it is in Europe already, a person would refer to what the authorities at Wikipedia said and hate speech would be legitimate. It wouldn’t be legitimate because it was the best idea, but because Wikipedia or the Blue Check source du jour said so. The calvary is not coming. We are on our own and we must be prepared to take the upper hand. We must stop being passive. Cancel culture and “hate speech” are legitimate in the minds of a significant portion of our population and especially our youth and in particular those who are going to be running our institutions and poised for greater success and influence in our nation.
I am not writing this blog to whine. I write in order to analyze problems we face as a nation and propose solutions after some reflection and sense making, and to highlight greatness that we can and should aspire to. I want to transition this discussion to helping us all to have the tools to refute this illegitimate notion of, “hate speech”, that is a major justification for, “Cancel Culture.” Hate is an emotion. Having an emotion is not a crime. Crime involves physical harm to a person or their property. That harm must be provable in a court of law beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury of our peers.
Hating someone, however reprehensible that may be, is not a crime. At one point in time, most people understood that the person most harmed by hate was the hater - so long as hate was merely felt and if expressed, expressed solely in words. Relegating crime to the objective realm of physical harm was one of the great and sublime insights of our civilization. It is unique to The West. It is this insight that makes the definition of crime and the adjudication of criminal accusations on the whole more just and far less arbitrary than in any other legal framework devised in the history of mankind.
There is one form of speech that is a legitimate candidate for criminal prosecution. That form of speech is libel. Libel is tied to our civilization’s notion of objectively measurable and provable crime because libel involves harming a person’s reputation so that they cannot earn a living or otherwise participate in society when they are falsely accused. The standard for proving libel is very high. You have to prove that the libeling party caused you financial harm by loss of standing due to verifiably false public statements made about you. Notice there is no place in that standard that discusses emotional harm. You cannot measure or even prove harm to your emotions, so how can you adjudicate it and sentence justly? You cannot. That is why emotional harm is not and never should be in our legal canon.
I have shown that, “hate speech”, is a verifiably illegitimate notion. You cannot make an emotion and the thoughts that may lead to or accompany it illegal. Society’s have tried to outlaw emotions and thoughts before. In the 20th century over 100 million human beings were killed trying to prosecute such, “criminals”, and trying to create a utopia without hate and harm, filled instead with nothing but safety and comfort. The final delegitimizing aspect of, “hate speech”, as a criminal offense is the subjective nature of the concept.
Who gets to define hate? Do we give some people the power to divine the intentions and inner thoughts and feelings of someone to prove the emotion and intentions behind their words? Do we outlaw specific words and phrases? Which ones get outlawed and by whom? There is a being who is presumed to have the power to know the thoughts and feelings of human beings. That being is God. Do we give other human beings the power to play our clairvoyant God, divining the thoughts and words and thus the lives of others? Do you play God and prosecute, “hate speech”, by condemning its utterers to hell, and do you thus create a category of, “love speech”, by giving its utterers a place in heaven? Do you permit an anonymous on-line mob to accuse someone of harm by, “hate speech”, and make the accused guilty-by-accusation and give them as the only way back, the ability to, “ask for forgiveness?” Or, has Satan tricked us into believing that he and thus you are God; creating a living hell for all?
Cancel Culture is real. The proper terms for it are slander and libel. The strategy of the libelers is to ruin a person’s reputation by impugning the motives and feelings behind their words or just defining that some particular words constitute, “hate.” They claim they have been emotionally harmed and thus violated. Then, in a fit of highly coordinated hysteria-channeling done by powerful media organizations, the guilty-as-accused hater has their livelihood ruined and they are removed from the public sphere. It is a digital age stoning by thousands or millions of 140 characters of outrage where the libeled is left to live but whose life is ruined. The stoning is not confined to a village, but there for the entire world to see, so at once and everywhere speech is chilled. We all wake up with a horse head in our bed. Today it was James Damore. Tomorrow it will be you, say the Corleones through the digital newsfeed and the evening news.
We need to reclaim our language and with it the legal foundations of our civilization and with that our natural rights. These people are not, “cancellers.” They are libelists and slanderers. We must ignore the rabble and we must root out the wicked who use them to do their bidding by using censorship and libel or threat of it to eliminate their rivals.
Today these people have no compunction or remorse in firing college professors, engineers, doctors, journalists … and ruining their reputations. Give them the ability to define speech as hateful and make a mere emotion like, “hate”, a crime, and look to Cambodia, Maoist and even modern day China, Soviet Russia and Romania as to what they can and might very well do. This idea of, “hate speech”, must be roundly and firmly repudiated and its progenitors and benefactors with it. The only legitimate speech is free speech.
I want to close with a message to everyone, and I want anyone here who thinks or is inclined to think that, “hate speech”, is something we need to police and/or eradicate to give my words careful consideration. Legitimizing and adopting a legal regime to classify and prosecute some speech as, “hate speech”, has two primary dimensions that it corrupts. As such, one should be wary of conceding that we should define and eliminate, “hate”, by eliminating speech deemed, “hateful.”
The first is the moral dimension. Let us presume that the proponents of eradicating and/or punishing, “hate speech”, are motivated by a moral impulse to do good - to eradicate bad words and the bad people who speak them from the world. Thus, with less bad there would be more good. Understand that some of the proponents are not motivated by good intentions, and they are using the morally confused for nefarious purposes. They want to define hate and words of hate that suit their pursuit of power. If you can define hate and remove the expression of it and enlist a mob of well-intentioned hate eradicators and, “emotional safety”, seekers, then your ideas and thus your power goes unchallenged. You have silenced your opposition and eliminated alternatives.
This will mean that the desire to do good results in the tyrannical and very real oppression of anyone whose words give you and others offense - people who have never physically harmed you or anyone. They have merely expressed that which you feel should be forbidden to be spoken. Your intentions do not matter. What matters are ideas, their quality, how they are acted upon, and the consequences of those actions. In short, promoting a regime of criminalizing, “hate speech”, makes you an authoritarian and, wittingly or not, the enabler and assistant of tyrants. Is that what you want to become? Will that reality comport with your idea of who you are and claim to be?
The second dimension is the physical. Someday, inevitably, the polarity of power flips. You gave the government the power to define, “hate”, and to define which words and ideas express it. You’ve given legitimacy to claims that hurt feelings constitute legally sanctioned claims to harm. You opened Pandora’s box of subjectivity. You gave the government and/or the mob the power to punish the expression of hate. Maybe in your hands, the hands that levitate beneath the wings of angels, this power was not abused.
That is not a likely scenario, but let’s say the angels ruled. Tomorrow, a gaggle of devils, who spot a golden opportunity, take power. Now the cultural, philosophical and legal legitimacy and institutional powers granted to you and your flock of angels is in the hands of devils. In a worse and much more probable case, your authority figures abused the power to police thoughts and words and their expression and did terrible things to good people sanctioned by your best intentions. After all, you wanted to eliminate the bad words - by eliminating those who speak them.
Yesterday you and your tyrant defined, “hate”, and who was punished for saying, “hateful”, words and ideas out loud. Today, the people you abused and persecuted have come to power and their only path to power is not by using their words to persuade, but by using the only thing you left them recourse to once you took away their words - physical force and violence. They will use it to take power out of the necessity of the terms that you dictated. That force and violence will be amplified by anger and a cause for revenge that your means of eradication and punishment legitimized. Your words will be defined as, “hateful”, and your punishments will be meted out against you - the angel now bedeviled.
Are you prepared to deal with those kinds of consequences of turning the expression of thoughts not in actions but solely in the form of words, into a crime? Look around you and see who advocates with you for this safety feature of silencing, “hate speech.” Are they emotionally fragile, physically weak, crybaby center and safe space dwellers? Are they prepared and able to help you when the polarity of power flips and those who now wield it are strong, capable and resilient and whose well-being has long been solely dependent on sweeping you aside and casting you to the margins that you once cast them to? At the gates of the hell they have for you, will you be given a chance to repent? Will you be lucky enough to speak and, “ask for forgiveness?”
Let us all recognize and call the concept of, “hate speech”, what I have clearly and easily proven it to be - thought crime that is illegitimate and has no place in our civilization and legal canon and order. ‘I think your words, which speak your thoughts, are a crime therefore you who spoke them are a criminal. You expressed your thoughts in words thus you are guilty of harming those who heard them.’ Let us all repudiate that idea and those who promote it - respectfully, honorably and with unyielding resolve. Let us all help our youth to understand the essential goodness, value and importance of free speech. Preserving it keeps us safe. Preserving it keeps us informed of the good and the bad. Preserving it leaves room for prudent warnings and reminders. Preserving it calls us to cultivate our minds to choose the good and refute the bad after careful discussion and deliberation. Eliminating it leads to violence, suffering, ignorance and even to genocide.
Let us help our youth and those stuck in it in perpetuity. Let us stop them from being degraded and demoralized by the peddlers of this sad sack idea that the words of another person can hurt you. That is a truly pathetic and disempowered state to encourage and teach them to dwell in. Permitting them the power to silence strangers via a mob is a dangerous power for them to fill that hole of disempowerment with. The consequences of permitting them that power that comes from the dark disempowerment of not being able to withstand words will be catastrophic for them and for us. Let us call them to actually do good in the physical world in true anonymity by helping a person who needs it without the accolades of, “Likes”, “Shares” and advertising dollars that degrade even a simulacrum of service into self-service and self-aggrandizement.
Let us help them feel the true empowerment that comes from being able to constructively engage with thoughts expressed in words and selectively ignore those that they find offensive. Only our species can do this. But, we must exercise our will and choose to use our words. That choice has been bequeathed to us by God and by our ancestors, who wrote it into Our Constitution. If we don’t actively affirm it by exercising our choice with intent, we will allow children and their infantalizing deceivers to take us back in time rather than us guiding them into a better future. Once there, lost in the cacophony of a silent, primordial jungle, we will see and experience the horrors of how the wordless Chimpanzee resolves disputes and jostles for power.