One of the strangest developments in the recent history of Western democratic states has been the heartfelt call by duly elected officials for government censorship of citizens’ speech. This trend has emerged simultaneously across various nations, including the United Kingdom, Australia, and, oddly enough, the United States of America. No one is surprised that tyrants throughout history, who seize power by force, have retained their positions primarily through silencing dissenters and political opponents. The very foundation of democratic states, however, is what the nineteenth-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill, a great champion of liberty, called “the marketplace of ideas.”
In a public square conducive to open discourse among free people, individuals with diverse interests and opinions hash out ideas and prospective policies in order to determine which ones should prevail. In effect, this competition among ideas reflects the very process used to elect government officials in democratic states. The candidates are permitted to express their views and what they plan to do, and the voters then choose between the available options, however dismal, at the voting booth.
Just as candidates who do not stand to represent and promote the interests of the people are to be defeated through the electoral process itself, in a free marketplace of ideas, bad ideas and flagrant falsehoods will eventually be rejected. This takes longer in some cases than others, above all, when powerful lobbies have significant financial interests at stake, a salient example of which is war and what has become a military-industrial-congressional-media-academic-pharmaceutical-logistics-banking complex. But at some point, eventually, free thinkers come to believe that the policies of their government, which they formerly condoned, are in fact misguided, counter-productive, and even immoral. When many people change their view, concluding that practices such as slavery, or withholding the right to vote from women, have no rational basis whatsoever, then they press their representatives to alter the laws of the land.
Hellbound and Down 