Freedom Makes Asinine Ideas Ultimately Self-Correcting

Free Speech Makes Asinine Ideas Ultimately Self-Correcting

by

Eric Paul Nolte

The student organization called Young Americans for Liberty just posted a blurb on their website that praised ancient Athenian democracy for ostracizing citizens whose ideas offended them.

I would caution these young students to remember that democracy is just another oppressive political system unless it is chained on a short leash to a thick wall of constitutionally protected respect for the rights of every individual to life, liberty, and property.

Never forget that unfettered democracy is what happens when two hungry mountain lions and a llama vote on what to have for dinner! Unfettered democracy is a lynch mob, not the road to Utopia. 

Remember too that ancient Athenians, peeved at Socrates for publicly leading his students to embarrass powerful citizens, voted to put him to death! They voted to banish Aristotle too, but, thinking of poor Socrates, he left Athens before they could snag him, vowing that he would not let Athens so sin twice against philosophy. 

Attempting to censor ideas one does not like is not only wrong, but pointless and even self-defeating too, because in a free market of ideas, rational, life-serving values ultimately tend to prevail. Why? Because the rational is the life-serving! Stupid ideas ultimately must gurgle down a graveyard spiral of self-destruction because they are life-threatening. This is intellectually Darwinian and therefore the better ideas must necessarily prevail, in the long run. 

Let everybody trumpet whatever they believe, no matter how foolish. The craziest ideas will be most obviously crazy in a free market of ideas, where the contrast with rational ideas is available in a side-by-side comparison. 

A key point here is that the creation of a political machinery that might allow one party to attempt to suppress bad ideas will also allow tyrants to attempt to suppress good ideas too. 

The raging fires caused by crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses must eventually fizzle out, even when this extinction may not happen in our lifetime! 

The trend line, measured from the dawn of Homo saps to the asinine and murderous mutterings of blockheads and jackasses today, is nevertheless tilted slightly upwards, to the benefit of life, liberty, and the very possibility of Aristotle's eudaimonia, or rational happiness.

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2015.0427
rev. 2015.1129