Freedom Sucks (And That's Why We Have To Defend It)

That was the actual argument, despite the fact that such a scenario has never, ever actually happened, and never will (bombs don't work that way). And, once you buy into it, it'll be about five seconds before they say, "And if you think about it, isn't selling marijuana a form of terrorism? And isn't all of society a kind of a ticking time bomb, at all times?"

This playbook has been used to justify centuries of bullshit, because it always works. "Give people the right to immigrate to the USA? What if one of them turns out to be TERRORIST and they SET OFF A NUKE?" "You want people to have a right to privacy? What if they use their privacy to BUILD A NUKE?" "You want people to have freedom of speech? What if they use that speech to RADICALIZE TERRORISTS who then BUILD A NUKE?"

I think that reasoning is dangerous as hell, whether the supposed terrorist you're talking about is a member of ISIS, a Nazi, or QAnon. Their trick is to make it seem like any argument for due process or privacy is really an argument for terrorists destroying cities, as if the extreme scenario is the only one worth talking about. In practice, it winds up being used as a justification to ruin the lives of people who A) wouldn't actually bomb anyone, even if they knew how to, and B) don't have enough money or influence to fight back.

I cannot possibly stress that second part enough: Laws claiming to protect the vulnerable can and will be used to oppress the vulnerable. Politicians sold the War on Drugs as a way to save inner-city communities, then threw teenagers in prison for a decade for having an amount of crack small enough to fit in their pocket. The public was happy to see it, since every day brought panicked headlines about "CRACK'S DESTRUCTIVE SPRINT ACROSS AMERICA." But please note that those laws didn't do shit to stop people from smoking crack.

"That's an amusing rhetorical trick," says the Hypothetical Skeptical Reader Who Talks Back To Their Screen, "but obviously he didn't just watch Star Wars and start filling a U-Haul with fertilizer. Something else radicalized him." Sure, he cited the government killing people at Ruby Ridge and Waco (Google those if you're too young to remember how fucked the '90s were). But those were just ... events that happened. How would you keep him from being radicalized by reality?

"Well, he was probably listening to a bunch of pundits who used those events to push a message of violence and hate!" Probably. How in the hell do you stop that, unless you have the government monitoring everything everyone says about current events in public, at all times? Think about how badly the government failed at stopping us from buying drugs, and how many lives were ruined in the process. Now imagine it tries to ban people from even knowing what drugs are.

It's therefore no surprise that whenever we make it someone's job to police dangerous speech, they will find some speech to police, no matter what. Their funding and paycheck will depend on it. That's how in the '80s, we had cops arresting singer Bobby Brown on stage for doing a sexually suggestive dance.

So when you start talking about using the law -- aka the threat of personal harm -- to suppress dangerous expression, you're on a slope that is, historically, slippery. The logic behind any such restriction always leads you naturally down the same hill:

A) Speech can influence the behavior of others.
B) Violence against innocent victims is a type of behavior.
C) Therefore, speech that could possibly motivate violence must be prosecuted.
D) Since it is impossible to objectively judge which speech would have caused hypothetical violence, the state must have nearly unlimited right to ban any speech, at any time.

The paradox is that every single individual -- including the 60% who apparently want more speech restrictions -- believes that they themselves are smart enough to hear ugly ideas and safely reject them. We need new laws because other people are mindless robots.

You saw this logic in the efforts to ban pornography (they were rampant during my childhood in the '80s -- Reagan had a whole anti-porn commission). Hell, a famous serial killer literally stated that porn made him do it. What more do you need? Are you going to argue in favor of more serial killers murdering women??? What if one of them BUILDS A NUKE?

So who gets punished for violating the porn ban? Everyone who gets caught with the material? Or just the people producing it? But remember that some of the most popular porn today is made by women running their own streams, or posting selfies on reddit. It's almost like, I don't know, a law claiming to protect a group can wind up prosecuting that exact group.

And what if a murderer says he was driven to lust by the Victoria's Secret catalog? Can we honestly say it isn't objectifying women? Or the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue? Or the servers at Hooters restaurants? What about just random women simply showing too much skin in public, couldn't that drive a sex-crazed psychopath to violence?

This isn't like having a law against stealing cars, where pretty much everyone agrees on what a car is and what stealing one looks like. If you make a law banning entire categories of potentially dangerous ideas and hope to encompass every possible iteration someone could express in the future -- including all of the clever ways people will disguise their banned expression in some protected form -- you've created a system so ripe for abuse that the whole thing is abuse from the start.

That the government would then use those laws as an excuse to jail or harass whoever the hell they feel like isn't some alarmist hypothetical. It's the norm through most of the world across most of history. In China, criticizing the government can get you five years in prison after a trial that lasts ten minutes. In Turkey, you can get four years in prison for insulting the president on social media. After all, what if your words inspire a terrorist, or an assassin? Once we've decided that words are a form of violence, pretty much any speech or speaker can be made to fit whatever the government decides it doesn't like.

Related: 5 Ways Stand-Up Comics Hate Free Speech

To a degree, yeah. That's what freedom is.

Freedom isn't, in fact, free. It's fucking stressful. Your right to choose who you get to marry means the stress of dating, loneliness, and rejection. Your right to choose your career means you may fail. Your right to worship or not worship as you please means your neighbor may believe in a god that says you're the spawn of Hell. Your right to a fair trial may mean you get stabbed to death in an alley by a psychopath who was freed due to a lack of evidence.

Freedom isn't free, and the cost comes in the form of lethal risk. Freedom is dangerous. Freedom is work. Freedom is accepting that no one is going to come along and make the bad people and bad ideas disappear. This means, as I keep saying, that we have to do it the hard way. A world saturated with porn means we have to actually talk to our kids about objectification and consent. A world riddled with sickening ideologies means we have to talk to our kids about extremism, conspiracy theories, and the addictive nature of hate. It means learning how to counter bad expression with good expression.

This is what I fear we've failed to teach a generation -- that freedom is hard, that it's sometimes traumatizing, that it's the worst way to live, aside from all of the other ways. And as the world becomes more and more stressful, as we are exposed to more and more ugliness, we will hear more and more voices offering to take it all away. They won't tell you the truth, that right now your freedom is someone else's burden, that they see your choices and expression as a blight on their landscape, that they too have a soothing voice in their ear offering to protect them from you. The same voice that offers to save you from the Nazis promises to save them from Antifa. Or the immigrants, or the rapists, or the terrorists, or the pornographers, or the drug dealers, or the animal rights activists.* Whatever monster scares them into saying, "Yes, you can rule me. Just take my fear away."

*If you think I threw that last one in as a joke, in 11 U.S. states, it's illegal to film slaughterhouses and expose how the animals are treated there.

The fact that the knee-jerk rebuttal to this always comes in the form of "Oh, so you're saying we should just let the Nazis (or ISIS, or gangs) take over?" shows how well they've trained us, how well they've taught us to jump to the extreme scenario, to always assume that monsters lurk in the shadows and that certain words will summon them. Eventually a government can say with a straight face that just uttering the words "Liberate Hong Kong" are enough to cause their entire society to collapse, and we'll have a lively debate about whether or not that is true.

Those voices offering you security for the small price of your freedom and privacy? They're not just coming from the government. It's the corporation offering to simplify your life if you'll just let them monitor everything you do. It's the church offering to save your soul as long as you don't question why the rules are contradictory. It's the mob of vigilantes offering to take out the bad people the government won't. It's the smart-sounding pundit promising to do all of your critical thinking for you. It's the husband saying he'll pay all the bills as long as you let him tell you what to wear and who you're allowed to be friends with.

If your fear of losing your freedom extends only to whether or not the government is making laws, you're going to be shocked by how easily others can put you in the exact same chains. If we as individuals don't have pro-freedom attitudes and the willingness to bear the costs, then the government's actions are irrelevant. We'll all just terrify our neighbors into silent submission. These are choices you have to make every day, not just in the voting booth.

And, yeah, freedom-for-security is a trade you'll have to make sometimes, because we're only human and we live in a society. But it should never be made lightly, and you have to be especially suspicious of the people who won't admit it's a trade at all, who'll feed on your fears and hype up the threats until you're begging for them to take the wheel.

It's only after you've given in that you realize freedom surrendered is almost impossible to get back. Then you'll realize that at a certain point, your choices and individuality stopped mattering, because you are just a puppet that exercises the will and choices of someone else, right down to parroting their talking points. The security they gave you was the security of a caged bird. But, you know, other than that, it's fine.

You can follow Jason "David Wong" Pargin on Twitter, his Instagram, or Facebook, or Goodreads, or any of the many accounts he's forgotten about.

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