Freedom of Speech is overrated

There are no eternal laws out there that we can find to construe society and legislation around. When I was younger I was convinced that unrestrained free speech, shounting fire in theatres and the like, was a god given principle that the race of men ought to uphold at any cost. Although freedom of speech is essential, the legeslative aspects of it are overrated. What people are afraid of, those who want to express radical thought, is not primarily some prison time or slap on the wrist, it is the subsequent ostracization that often follows the expression of radical thought. It is the cultural and sociaital pressure to think alike, to form a cohesive whole in which divergence is seen as treason. If people know I am a racist, then free men and women can deny me work, or avoid me and so on. We are, in fact, very limited in practice when it comes to the free expression of thought, but these constraints are invisible to us, because to us they are the boundaries at which people become insane, unfit for society, and so on. We are grown into a way of being and thinking that respects a set of constraints that we do not directly percieve.

     Although free speech in legislation is a good thing, and one that we should hold dear, it is only a very limitied aspect of the broader notion of free thought and speech. We get worked into communities and are expected to behave, think and act in certain ways. When people say "free speech" they think of something concrete, the act of expressing a thought, but the processes through which any thought is expressed is deeply ingrained with the culture and society that rules on what strings of words are fit to exit ones mouth and when. The very limited cases when this process fails, as with rabid racists, we prohibit their unwanted behaviour through legislation such as "hate crime" laws.

      Anonymity in the internet age has perserved a forum for opinions that are not attatched to a certain known person, people can say what they like without their name being associated with their words. This is precisley the sort of freedom that escapes the cultural and societal pressures that often governs speech and writing, and it is valuable for that sake. Even controversial biologists, physicists, philosophers, benefit greatly from the possibility of expressing radical views while being anonymous. They will not express radical views as long as it hurts their careers, damages social relations, and upsets authorities in their own field.

      The contemporary rage from goverments over internet trolls that "hide behind anonymity" is a fear that is equivalent to that of the Church when they prosecuted people for un-religious thought. They want to drag people out into the light of the moral majority, they want us to play their game and be judged by their rules, but it is the rules that radical thought is questioning, and hence we cannot be asked to play a game that is already rigged against us. Radical thought is suppose to undermine large parts of our web of beliefs, and those parts under question can not be assumed to be true at the outset, then new ideas will be dismissed simply because of dogma.

        We enter into the oligarchs paradise as soon as every internet user is identifable with a physical person. Now adds will be more efficient, the goverment will together with buisness have large oversight over any thought that occurs anywhere in the world, and who is thinking what. Westerners today are too full of themselves to think that there wont come a time when their own thought needs protection, we have let govements run rampant over the internet and annonymity. This suggests that people think that it is suffiecent to protect free speech by simply having an amendment to a constitution, yet this is not sufficient to protect and care for free and radical thought.