I Believe in Unicorns

With great power comes great responsibility - Ben Parker

Unicorns!

They’re dangerous.  They carry disease and they hold anti-American values, like joules, and I read on the internet that they’re planning to overthrow the government and impose pagan law.  This threat must be stopped no matter if it costs trillions of dollars.

Freedom of speech is a right.  Rights exist in relation to duties.  Your right to the fruits of your labor imposes upon me a duty not to steal from you.  Your right to live means I have a duty not to kill you.  Your right to privacy means that the government has a duty not to spy on you.  These rights tell other people they cannot do certain things.  They dictate behavior.  (Sorry, but they do.)

But your right to free speech is a little different.  It merely requires that you are allowed to believe what you choose to and that you can express those beliefs without the government interfering.  The duty it imposes is on the government not to stop you, not to incarcerate you.  That is all.  There is no obligation to treat it as important, correct, or anything but the crazed utterances of a free individual.  Neither the government nor I (really no one) has the responsibility to accept your beliefs, nurture them, or even not to laugh at them.  This is different than the rights mentioned above.  I have to respect your right to your possessions and not interfere.  I do not have to respect your beliefs and can interfere by arguing with you.  I am under no obligation to leave you alone to believe what you believe.  I can try to change your mind.  In fact, I'd say I have the duty where the truth is being denied or ignored.  I’m not sure people really feel that under the surface, however. 

I would like to suggest that each of us has a duty to freedom and posterity to not be actively full of shit.  All the Howard W. Campbell, Jr.s out there create a snowball effect over time, and cumulatively threaten freedom and democracy.  Reality doesn’t care about our fever dreams.  If, for example,  global warming is as grave a threat as some of the more severe predictions (becoming more and more mainstream), then compiling a narrative to the contrary creates a situation where the harsh physical realities to come will very likely dissolve any concept of freedom or democracy.  Raw power will become the instrument of resource disbursement, and therefore the primary (if not sole) determiner of survival.  The more likely scenario, however, is that other places more engaged with this reality will leave us behind economically as the global economy adjusts to these changes and we cling with religious fervor to behaviors that will no longer garner us even a tiny share of the world’s wealth.  And there is also the possibility that groups from the parts of the world where the effects of global warming are most severe today will enact violence against the Unites States in retaliation.  These subservient and/or defensive positions can only strain the ability of our government to concern itself with the rights of its people . . . which is its primary purpose for existence.

In short, the abuse of free speech will ultimately lead to its loss.  Humans, first and foremost, are survivors.  If that survival requires acquiescence to a powerful autocracy or oligarchy and the surrender of rights, it will happen.  “Give me liberty or give me death” is the pampered tough guy talk of someone who has never feared starvation, in the face of mere meddling with local affairs.  Starving people want food, not the right to vote.

What’s abuse of free speech?  I’m a free speech absolutist.  I even defend Fred Phelps right to be the biggest douche bag on Earth.  Abuse is knowingly fostering plainly false information.  Obviously, this is tricky, since the entire point of free speech is to take into account the limitations of human knowledge, particularly a given individual’s.  And I suggest no action taken to prevent it other than more speech.  Appeal to people.  My point is that if you put forward the notion that unicorns are a threat, and that becomes a widely held “truth”, then the behaviors of society, its citizens, and its government will be to take actions requisite to the deadly unicorn threat.  If we proactively divorce ourselves from reality, reality will kick our fuckin’ asses when we’re looking the other way – you know, at the unicorns.

So, I suggest that each of us has a duty to at the very least believe what we spew out into the world.  Words do have power.  Otherwise advertising and propaganda (is there a difference?) would have no effect on us.  I’d suggest (but do not expect) that people take upon themselves a duty to vet their information and beliefs constantly.  In all the often empty rhetoric about individual responsibility, let me suggest that this also goes to how we use our freedom of speech.  If enough of us abuse it enough of the time, we’ll be a nation of dullards ill-equipped to take on reality and ripe for take over and domination.

Free speech + intellectual indolence = disaster

Oh fuck!  Unicorn.

DUCK!