Why We Need to Call Out Free Speech Hypocrites

And why we need to bring back fairness, humility and compromise as core political values

Photo by Carl Tronders on Unsplash

Let's continue talking about laying the foundations for a culture and politics rooted in shared values. So far, we have covered compassion and respect for the objective truth. I think we need to talk about commitment to fairness and willingness to compromise next, because these are strongly related to both compassion and respect for the objective truth.

Today, both the left and the right clearly believe that politics is only about winning and 'owning' the other side. This has led to no respect for the notion of fairness across the board, both in terms of cultural and political debates, and in terms of how groups of people seen as associated with the 'opposite' tribe are treated in the real world. The problem with this is that, a society with no commitment to fairness can't have a marketplace of ideas with a fair playing field, by definition. This leads to an inability for the most sound ideas to prevail, and in turn, for a just order to arise as a result. Therefore, any order that results from an unfair playing field is necessarily going to be bad and oppressive in some way. Commitment to fairness is therefore necessary to produce good and just outcomes, and a sound order for society. This is how fairness is linked to respect for the objective truth, and ultimately to justice as well as the common good.

I would even go as far as to say that upholding fairness in the marketplace of ideas is a matter of morality. Morality thrives when people are able to pursue the truth, and to understand the truth, because we only know how to apply our conscience and our values to a situation when we know the complete and unbiased truth of a situation. When people don't fully understand the truth of a situation, they can easily come to the wrong conclusions, and support a wrong or even immoral answer to the problem. This is why, when people are pressured to bow to ideological untruths one way or another, to obey falsehoods imposed by political and/or economic threats, immorality and injustice will result one way or another. Sadly, this happens far to often in contemporary politics. Both the illiberal left's de-platforming and cancel culture, and the reactionary right's zealous use of state power to fight the culture wars, and to impose their agenda on the whole of society, are examples of using power to silence dissent or otherwise distort the marketplace of ideas, and hence suppress aspects of the objective truth that are inconvenient to their ideology or their agenda. This is the core reason why, as a Moral Libertarian, I have long held that I find both the illiberal left and the reactionary right to be morally repugnant.

Which brings me to my next point: people who are essentially for free speech for me (or my team) but not for thee (or the other team). Despite the theoretical increase in scrutiny and transparency in the online age, where everybody's record is open for all to examine, the number of 'free speech for me but not for thee' hypocrites are sadly at an all time high right now. Just look at what is happening out there: many of the self-identified 'free speech activists' who vigorously opposed left-wing cancel culture in the past decade are now silent about the Trump's administrations attacks on free speech, or worse, coming up with excuses to justify Trump's blatant authoritarianism. I'm frankly very angry at these people, some of whom I actually wrongly believed to be free speech allies at one point. On the other hand, I can't help but notice that some of the people who are rallying in support of the victims of Trump's crackdowns didn't have much to say about left-wing cancel culture, or worse, actively supported it. I'm saying this not to excuse the right's free speech hypocrisy, but to point out that the hypocrisy exists on both sides. Both of the aforementioned types of people clearly don't support free speech as a principle, they only support free speech for their own team. This kind of hypocrisy has sadly been made more acceptable by political polarization and tribalism, and even actively encouraged by online influencer culture.

I also want to talk about a closely related phenomenon: the increasing unwillingness to compromise across the political landscape. I believe the two phenomenon are ultimately linked by the common root cause of a lack of humility, encouraged by tribalism and the toxic online political culture. Unwillingness to compromise effectively leads to a 'winner takes all' mentality. Given that nobody alive in this world is perfect, or has perfect knowledge of everything, this logically has to lead to social outcomes that are oppressive in some situations and to some people. This, of course, is incompatible with a true commitment to compassion or justice. The reactionary populist right and its recklessly harmful policies are a good example of this. The Trump administration, feeling justified by the 'mandate' it won in last year's election, has set out to fulfill all of the wildest wishes of the toxic online right, not caring about how many people it is harming in the real world out there. This immoral course of action is, in turn, cheered on by that same toxic online right that demanded it in the first place, creating a dangerous feedback loop. Of course, this problem is not limited to the right either. The illiberal left's cancel culture activism is also actively encouraged by the online left, and it similarly cares only about 'winning' and 'owning', and not about actual people and their welfare. The common theme between the right and left versions of this phenomenon is the 'winner takes all' mentality, where people feel justified to openly oppress and harm those that they perceive to be on the other team, simply because they can. This is basically aggressive animal instinct that belongs in the jungle, not in any civilized society. If we let this continue, I fear civilization as we know it will come to an end sooner rather than later.

It is time to bring back the values of fairness, humility and compromise. As a society, we need to relearn to be fair towards those who disagree with us, to have humility in the face of disagreement, and to be willing to agree to disagree and to compromise. Important long-standing values like compassion, objectivity and justice can't survive without these values. More fundamentally, I fear that our civilization won't survive very long without these values.

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TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Progressive Conservative Manifesto, the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series. She is also the author of her autobiography The TaraElla Story.