Why are so many people scared to speak their mind?
Self-censorship and the impoverishment of public life
The first time that I was directly confronted with the phenomenon of self-censorship was two decades ago. After publishing my book, Where Have All The Intellectual Gone: Confronting 21st Century Philistinism (2014), I received dozens of emails and letter from fellow university professors who congratulated me for having the courage to criticise the conformist turn of higher education. What bothered me was that many of my correspondents also indicated they could not make their support public because they feared that if they echoed views like mine their career would be put at risk. In an apologetic tone they indicated that they had no choice but to self-censor until they became full professors and were therefore in a strong position to push back against would be university censors.
Four years later in February 2018 I came across the problem of self-censorship yet again. After I gave a public lecture on the subject of ‘Socialisation and Fear’ at York St John University in England, a young professor came up to me and said- ‘you forgot to mention the biggest fear we face as teachers – the fear that many students have of opening their mouth’. Subsequent to this experience I frequently came across students who earnestly turned to me to ask, ‘can I say this’?
Regrettably during the past decade, the phenomenon of self-censorship has become more and more evident to me and at times it feels as if has become the new normal in contemporary Anglo-American culture. Survey after survey indicates that a growing number of members of the academic community self-censor. As Robert Van de Noort, the vice-chancellor of Reading University observed in February, universities risk becoming ‘uniformities of rigid views and self-censorship[i]. If anything, in the United States, the situation is even worse. One survey after another show that the majority of undergraduate students self censor[ii]. Since the outbreak of the War in Israel the problem of self-censorship has become far more prevalent, and a significant section of society fears to reveal their view in public[iii].
Nor is self-censorship confined to university campuses. People working in the public and private sector and whose opinion does not conform to the prevailing norms.feel that they should keep their views to themselves. The language police operate throughout society and one controversial remark can lead to public ostracism and the end of a career. In some sectors – higher education, publishing and the arts – linguistic policing is so widespread that people feel that they have no choice but to keep their controversial thoughts to themselves. Consequently, cultural and intellectual life is far less open to a genuine clash of views than in the 20th century. As one commentary on the American publishing industry noted:
‘Though the publishing industry would never condone book banning, a subtler form of repression is taking place in the literary world, restricting intellectual and artistic expression from behind closed doors, and often defending these restrictions with thoughtful-sounding rationales. As many top editors and publishing executives admit off the record, a real strain of self-censorship has emerged that many otherwise liberal-minded editors, agents and authors feel compelled to take part in.’[iv]
This sentiment was echoed by the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her BBC Reith Lecture. She stated that it was likely that Salmon Rushdie may have felt unable to write The Satanic Verses today because society is seized by ‘epidemic of self-censorship’[v]. And she rightly added that the issue has gone ‘far beyond the publishing world, with young people caught in an “epidemic of self-censorship” because they are too afraid of being cancelled’.
The compulsion to self-censor
Sometimes, people self-censor because of politeness and tact. The motive of not wishing to hurt another person’s feeling often leads individuals to keep their opinions to themselves. This form of self-censorship is understandable and does not represent a threat to public life. This is a voluntary gesture form of self-censorship. Self-censorship represents a danger when people feel that they are compelled to remain silent about their genuine views because to do so otherwise carries great risks. When you feel you have no choice but to keep silent there is nothing voluntary about this form of self-censorship.
The American academic and commentator Glenn Loury has described self-censorship as ‘the hidden face of political correctness’[vi]. As Loury noted what is at work in this scenario is not the imposition of force by a ‘thought police’ but the internalisation of the fear of the consequence of saying the wrong words. He wrote that:
‘For every act of aberrant speech seen to be punished by "thought police," there are countless other critical arguments, dissents from received truth, unpleasant factual reports, or non-conformist deviations of thought which go unexpressed, or whose expression is distorted, because potential speakers rightly fear the consequences of a candid exposition of their views. As a result, the public discussion of vital issues can become dangerously impoverished’.
This point is also affirmed by Auron Macintyre in his fascinating book, The Total State. He contends that ‘despite the lack of gulags or internment camps people in liberal democracies are increasingly terrified to speak their minds’[vii].
Macintyre asserts that what is at work is both a powerful cultural pressure to self-censor and its acceptance by a significant section of society. As he explains;
‘An errant word on social media or an awkward interaction at work can end a person’s career and make them the target of a hate campaign that will strip away their friends and family. The progressive outrage machine combs through every human interaction seeking out wrongthink. The impressive part is that the machine trains the population to do most of the monitoring and policing for it’.[viii]
In present day society the policing of speech is pursued through the work of devoted activists employed by educational and cultural institutions, charities and non-government organisations. These institutions are fiercely committed to the cause of linguistic engineering and believe that intolerance towards those who voice dissident ideas in entirely justified.
Today, official censorship is far less significant than its freelance counterpart: unofficial censorship. As anyone who is familiar with current trends in political and cultural life will know, the promotion of censorship is no longer the preserve of state or religious authorities. Advocacy groups, educators, campaigners, media organisations and, most notably, university-based individuals are now all actively engaged in crusades to ban individuals and censor views. Indeed, recent expansions of official censorship have in part been a response to the pressure exerted by unofficial agitators for intolerance. These days, an online petition demanding the banning of this or that is sufficient to get a sympathetic reaction from an institution or a government agency.
The pressure to self-censor does not merely aim to stifle people’s views but also deprive them of their voice. Regardless of their views those are rendered silent risk losing their sense of agency and become passive. Self- censorship can represent a form of moral self-enslavement. That is why we must all learn to speak out and be prepared to live with the consequences of our action. Human freedom does not come cheaply. But if we are not prepared to face the consequences and assert our freedom, we will discover that the cost of what we have lost is enormous.
Many people are scared to speak their mind because the cultural valuation for courage and freedom has significantly diminished. It is important to note that supporters of Cancel Culture are not simply devoted to the policing of speech but also to the project of discrediting many of the foundational values of western society such as courage, risk taking, freedom and tolerance. The Culture War is not only about gender ideology, race and identity. It is also about culture and the values and the ideals that a society stands for. If they succeed in scaring people to give up using their voice then we will have lost the War.
[i] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/feb/27/universities-must-overcome-echo-chamber-and-self-censorship-says-reading-vc
[ii] https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-problems-of-campus-culture-presumption-and-self-censorship/
[iii] https://www.thefire.org/news/surveys-reveal-rising-student-and-faculty-concern-about-censorship-self-censorship-post
[iv] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/24/opinion/book-banning-censorship.html
[v] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/30/satanic-verses-would-rejected-today-self-censorship-says-chimamanda/
[vi] Self-Censorship in Public Discourse: A Theory of "Political Correctness" and Related Phenomena* by Glenn C. Loury, Boston University1
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Glenn_Loury/louryhomepage/papers/Loury%20(Politcal%20Correctness)_02.pdf
[vii] Auron Macintyre (2024) in his fascinating book, The Total State Regnery : New York, p.68.
[viii] Auron Macintyre (2024) in his fascinating book, The Total State Regnery : New York, p.68.
Roger Scruton debunked - 'deconstructed' (to use a term of his enemies) - the ideas of the left in a series of articles for The Salisbury Review. These were updated and published in his 2015 book "Fools, Frauds and Firebrands". Thomas Sowell began a similar programme of critique in 1980 - beginning with his now out of print "Knowledge and Decisions" - and a series of books have followed (focused mainly on economic ideas). Sowell locates 1964 as the year the ideas of the Fools and Frauds (Foucault et al) fully took root in the US.
These critiques and warnings came too late to stop the infestation in the UK that followed and was well established here by the seventies. Initially finding fertile ground in sociology and literature departments the invasion took longer to infect history departments but, we now see and as Frank highlights in his latest book, conquered them as well. The result, via education departments (once known as the intellectual slums of campuses) was the knotweed of left ideas filtered into wider society through generations of graduates that now run our institutions from the BBC to the Civil Service via museums, the judiciary, the police, schools, charities, and even the 'it's OK to cry' armed forces. [Hard to see how a box of tissues will be effective against Al-Qaeda] Thus it has come to be that we have to self-censor.
Try announcing yourself as a member of the Conservative Party (or worse Refom UK), for example, in the Home Office even though both are entirely lawful paries in the UK (for now). You would not be regarded as merely misguided or gullible but morally defective with all that would entail for your career.
The progress of bad ideas - my summary may not be accurate (I am a retired mathematician not a scholar of history or ideas) but probably followed something like the trajectory I outline - does not explain why they proved so potent. It is as if there is a need for people to believe they are morally good, the definition of which is decided by the zeitgeist, the grip of the knotweed now out of control in our garden, the sources of moral belief such as Christianity now atrophied and ineffective. In contrast, the left's bad ideas provide an easy route to a morally worthy purpose by simplifying with the shortcut of oppressor and oppressed. Everything is recast through this prism. But to sustain that history has to be rewritten. There is no celebration of Britain's role in ending the slave trade. Heaven used to rejoice over the sinner that repented, but no longer does. Redemption for sin is no longer a morally worthy route available to us.
But the road to hell is still paved with good intentions. The Equalties Act 2010 and its public sector duty requirement probably arose from good intentions - I do not credit the left with the ability or intelligence to forecast and plan long term effects over generations. There is no Bond villain sitting in a basment stroking a cat and planning everything that happens - but it has created a monster, the religion of DEI which clouds out and crowds out recognition of the damage that multiculturalism has done and is doing to society. It may even be too late to promote, support and celebrate a dominant culture for people to assimilate to. Thus the weekly horror show in London of anti-semitism and terrorist support that paralyses the establishment. And the cover up over the Southport terrorist was not a cover up by mastermind Starmer (at least not wholly so). It was enough for senior police and the Home Office to do the 'right thing' by the lights of their morally superior subservience to the religion of DEI that now sits atop the doctrine of muticulturalism. As Frank noted last April, we are undergoing a decivilising force. The left's elite vanguard, like all censors, beleive they are immune to, or can handle certain facts and ideas with impunity (and about as self-regarding as you can get), but intellectually and morally defective neanderthals like me cannot. They do this oblivious to the supreme irony that if anyone has been indoctrinated it is them.
Living in central London I can easily access librairies and bookshops and while browsing in Waterstones I came across an A level Politics text book. Curiosity aroused I sat down with it - Waterstones Piccadilly has armchairs for that purpose - and it was no surprise to find socialism got a good write up but conservatism less so. In particular there was no mention of Disraeli's definition. Change, Disraeli said, is an inevitable part of human existence, and the question is not whether change should be opposed, but “whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary general doctrines”. There were many injustices in the 19th century but deference to customs and traditions defined the English.
Or rather it used to. Today we are in the grip of "abstract principles, and arbitrary general doctrines" such as Labour's proposed amendement to the Equalities Act whereby larger companies will have to racially classify their workforce. (Given the increasing number of mixed race children good luck with that).
As to the arbitrary doctrine of multculturalism I had personal experience last Armistice Day. My wife and I were walking up the Edgware Road as thousands of wannabe Hamas jihadists were streaming to that Saturday's rally. We were wearing poppies as we were both well aware of 'how we got to here' having had fathers who fought in the second world war. As two masked men passed us one looked at our poppies and said 'f*ckers".
George Orwell highlighed the danger of "abstract principles, and arbitrary general doctrines” in his brilliant novel "Animal Farm" and came up with the memorable "Four legs good, two legs bad". We live under that abolute morality today and we two legged creatures, to do what Marx once believed of the working class, that a class in itself would become a class for itself, need to become a class for ourselves. We really do.
Excellent points and a very necessary article! When I entered American academia in 1993 as an immigrant from a former Communist country, I remember feeling so suffocated by the atmosphere of intellectual conformity that I thought: "If, God forbid, this country ever took an undemocratic course, this would be worse than communist Romania because the intellectuals here are conformist by nature, while in Romania they were conformist by necessity." I think one can explain conformism in many ways, but if we chose a psychological and sociological explanation, I would say that puritanism as a mindset plays a big role here. A "puritan" is a person whose biggest desire is to be valued morally by her (it is usually a she) peers (hence moral righteousness and "virtue signaling") and who watches and denounces anyone who seems even remotely a heretic. The other big role is the feminization of the institutions (a phenomenon explained by many psychologists, in particular Jordan Paterson). Women are socialized to be "nice" and to avoid conflict, he says. I would add to that: this is the case for middle-upper-middle class women in Anglophone societies. Niceness, "kindness" and social conformity (ie the fear to disagree) are traits of the bourgeois (ie, middle class) women in the Anglosphere (this is very different from Eastern Europe where the middle class is much more rarefied; traditionally, these are societies of peasants, and peasants are not " nice".) And so, the more women in institutions, especially in position of power, the more conformity.
And then, there is another possible explanation related specifically to American academia and the way people are being evaluated there. It is a system masquerading as democratic in that everybody evaluates everybody else, including the students their professors (something non-existent in Europe), and this creates conformity because it encourages professors to play to the gallery and submit to the students' demands. And last but not least, the idea that the student is a customer also creates a context in which the "seller" (the professor) submits to the demands of the "customer" (the student).