Americans are told to be proud of the First Amendment and the right to free speech. However, upon closer examination, there is little free speech that can actually be exercised. If you say something your boss dislikes, they have every right to fire you, and you spend most of your life at work. In schools or colleges, you can be suspended, expelled, or even lose your diploma for protesting issues administrators care about. If you post something online that violates copyright, offends a privileged group, or breaches unknown rules, you can be blocked by social media companies. Protesting on the street requires a permit—though maybe not on the sidewalk, depending on the circumstances. At political conventions and other political events, special free-speech zones are often placed so far from the event that attendees remain unaware of your protest. Free speech? It barely exists in this country.
What Free Speech?
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The TMI Show" talk show. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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It sounds quaint, but free speech isn’t free. It carries an implicit expectation that you actually know what you’re talking about. That you’ve made an effort to inform yourself. That you can do better than just meanspirited, weak, personal attacks. It means that you have to listen to the other person and, on occasion, admit that you hadn’t thought of a particular point or that you have to reconsider your position due to what the other person said.
I see very little of that on either side.
While exercising “free speech” implies taking the responsibility you speak of, it is not a requirement. “Free speech” also implies the right to make a complete fool of oneself in public by exercising it irresponsibly.
For me, the subtext of Ted’s ‘toon is that we do not live in a “democracy.” We live in an authoritarian society, in which we are, as Ted points out, subject to the authority of “our” bosses, “our” colleges, “our” social media platforms, and “our” police. “Our” is in quotes because, obviously, we are much more theirs than they are ours.
The funny thing? The boss fires you? So you take him out to the parking lot and beat the living daylights out of him. “Keep this in mind the next time you fire someone. They might shoot you in the back of the head.”
The school kicks you out? The faculty and students riot. “Today it’s him; tomorrow it’ll be me.” And demand the president resign and that your degree be reinstated.
The online community bans you? It goes viral and so many people drop out that the venture capital firm that owns the platform reverses course for fear of losing profit.
It’s hard to swallow but whenever you look at slavery situations in world history, it’s a whole lot of slaves and a very small number of masters. They rule by our consent.
True enough about the “very small number of masters,” and theoretically they “rule by our consent,” but it’s more that they rule because they have “force dominance,” I think it’s called. Beat up your boss, and you’ll go to jail. We have seen plenty of student/faculty riots, but the college prez calls in the law and it is the protesters, not the Prez, who get the boot. I know plenty of people who have been banned, or are soft-censored, by fbk, and have every reason to believe I’m one of them, and none of it’s gone viral. The whole thing is overloaded and certainly looks like it could go over at any minute, but, whatever it’s going to take, the moment has yet to arrive. I think resource constraints, the climate, and changing economic realities are going to break things loose in ways we can scarcely imagine, just as nobody seemed to be able to imagine the disintegration of the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact, only orders of magnitude more disruptive. But it ain’t happening yet.