The Trouble With Censorship
Apr. 14th, 2020 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kimberlysteeleCensorship is great within limits. There is no reason for a four year old to watch A Clockwork Orange, and hence we have movie rating systems that indicate language, nudity, and gore. Forbidding an eighteen year old to watch the same film is where we run into a wall: can’t we trust their judgement? Do we actually believe they’re not going to find the forbidden film and watch it anyway?
In the Midwestern US, there is an unwritten system called Midwestern Nice. Midwestern Nice is a tacit code of everyday conduct made famous by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) and epitomized by the movie Fargo. Midwestern Nice is about saying volumes without saying anything at all. It is the opposite of wearing your heart on your sleeve. Don’t let Midwestern Nice fool you — it is often unflinchingly brutal, because for the uninitiated, it’s like trying to win a game of Don’t Blink with a potato. She who shows emotional upset first loses the Midwestern Nice game. Therefore, people more prone to express themselves are the losers at this haute form of emotional poker. So imagine that you want to force someone who is Midwestern Nice into your way of thinking or your agenda: how exactly do you plan on doing it? How do you tell if they are following your orders or not? Easy, you don’t, because you’ve already laid it all on the table and lost the game by telling them what you’re up to, and all along, they’ve been doing their quiet and extremely opposite thing with a pleasant smile on their face.
These days, it’s exceedingly common to witness random, otherwise-intelligent people who are interested in censoring what others have to say because it does not mesh with their opinion. It is one thing to shut down a friend or a mate when you don’t feel like discussing a particular subject at a particular time and it is quite another to attempt to shame them out of discussing the topic with people besides yourself. This is a key distinction between intimacy (that which is discussed among friends, lovers, and family) and community (that which is discussed in the public forum). When you try to shut down all discussion of say, Pedogate, instead of just saying to your friend, “I don’t believe in that, can you save that opinion for another day or for other people?” and instead you cry, “You are not allowed to talk about Pedogate with anyone, anywhere because it doesn’t exist!” You have just ensured the person you are trying to censor will talk about Pedogate with reckless abandon, just not with you.
The attempt to shut down free speech is ultimately what the brilliant Christian occultist Dion Fortune conceived as the behavior of the Left Hand Path: it tries to force devolution and to strip away complexity to return to a simpler, more primal state. When the Left tries to shut down any form of dissenting voice of the week with an -ism such as racism, sexism, ableism, or Anti-semitism, it is the bull in a china shop action of wrecking the playground because they are afraid of losing the game. Long ago, George Orwell wrote the prescient novel 1984 to describe a State gone wild with its own power over its people. The goal of Big Brother in 1984 was to strip away the subtleties of language, to unify the rainbow of human dissent into an amorphous, voracious greige blob of groupthink.
The reason Donald Trump is President at the time of this writing comes from the attempts of Democratic censors to police free speech and extinguish free thought. Luckily, their efforts have proven largely unsuccessful. In the aftermath of COVID-19, I believe even the Chinese Communist Party will find it increasingly difficult to ruin average people’s lives enough to make them submissive. The next Cultural Revolution in China may end up ushering Big Brother to the guillotine.
In the Midwestern US, there is an unwritten system called Midwestern Nice. Midwestern Nice is a tacit code of everyday conduct made famous by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS) and epitomized by the movie Fargo. Midwestern Nice is about saying volumes without saying anything at all. It is the opposite of wearing your heart on your sleeve. Don’t let Midwestern Nice fool you — it is often unflinchingly brutal, because for the uninitiated, it’s like trying to win a game of Don’t Blink with a potato. She who shows emotional upset first loses the Midwestern Nice game. Therefore, people more prone to express themselves are the losers at this haute form of emotional poker. So imagine that you want to force someone who is Midwestern Nice into your way of thinking or your agenda: how exactly do you plan on doing it? How do you tell if they are following your orders or not? Easy, you don’t, because you’ve already laid it all on the table and lost the game by telling them what you’re up to, and all along, they’ve been doing their quiet and extremely opposite thing with a pleasant smile on their face.
These days, it’s exceedingly common to witness random, otherwise-intelligent people who are interested in censoring what others have to say because it does not mesh with their opinion. It is one thing to shut down a friend or a mate when you don’t feel like discussing a particular subject at a particular time and it is quite another to attempt to shame them out of discussing the topic with people besides yourself. This is a key distinction between intimacy (that which is discussed among friends, lovers, and family) and community (that which is discussed in the public forum). When you try to shut down all discussion of say, Pedogate, instead of just saying to your friend, “I don’t believe in that, can you save that opinion for another day or for other people?” and instead you cry, “You are not allowed to talk about Pedogate with anyone, anywhere because it doesn’t exist!” You have just ensured the person you are trying to censor will talk about Pedogate with reckless abandon, just not with you.
The attempt to shut down free speech is ultimately what the brilliant Christian occultist Dion Fortune conceived as the behavior of the Left Hand Path: it tries to force devolution and to strip away complexity to return to a simpler, more primal state. When the Left tries to shut down any form of dissenting voice of the week with an -ism such as racism, sexism, ableism, or Anti-semitism, it is the bull in a china shop action of wrecking the playground because they are afraid of losing the game. Long ago, George Orwell wrote the prescient novel 1984 to describe a State gone wild with its own power over its people. The goal of Big Brother in 1984 was to strip away the subtleties of language, to unify the rainbow of human dissent into an amorphous, voracious greige blob of groupthink.
The reason Donald Trump is President at the time of this writing comes from the attempts of Democratic censors to police free speech and extinguish free thought. Luckily, their efforts have proven largely unsuccessful. In the aftermath of COVID-19, I believe even the Chinese Communist Party will find it increasingly difficult to ruin average people’s lives enough to make them submissive. The next Cultural Revolution in China may end up ushering Big Brother to the guillotine.
no subject
Date: 2020-05-11 10:38 pm (UTC)My husband hitchhiked through the South with his friend as a young man and he felt overwhelming hostility there. He hates the South to this day and we have never considered moving there for that reason. Personally, I am not a traveler and I have only been to Florida twice. Seemed fine to me but I like cold weather, so I'd never want to live there.
Kyoko Mori analyzes this very topic well and deeply in her book Polite Lies, explaining the Japanese distinction between hon-ne (the truth) and tate-mae (the polite lie).
"To me, liars were people who pretended to be nice, whose sweet words and malicious actions didn't match." She says about a young, rebellious phase where she idolized Jane Eyre.
Mori has lived in the upper Midwest for decades at a stretch and she often compares and contrasts Midwestern to Japanese politeness in Polite Lies. Let me know if you want to borrow it and I'll send it to your P.O. Box!!
no subject
Date: 2020-05-12 02:23 pm (UTC)Yay!!
Date: 2020-05-12 10:12 pm (UTC)Re: Yay!!
Date: 2020-05-13 05:46 pm (UTC)