Free speech is under attack. Where we once had the freedom to object, to think for ourselves and have open and honest debate, we now have censors soliciting our conformity and forbidding any deviation from the norm. The window of public discourse is continually getting narrower to the point where it has become socially dangerous to point out facts.

We have multi-billion dollar companies like Facebook and Twitter censoring the ‘wrong opinions’, and it seems like this problem is becoming ever more endemic, with news agencies, our supposed bastions of free speech, also adopting this dangerous idea.

Despite this rather bleak view though, it seems like progressivism is currently at the height of its powers and can only lose what it has gained. This is what happens when you build an ideology on feelings and anecdotes instead of reason and evidence.

Campuses are increasingly dropping reason and evidence as their main tenets of intellectual inquiry and replacing them with anecdotes

Talking politics with a progressive is like talking religion with a Jehovah’s Witness. No matter how explicitly and unambiguously one argues, progressives will only hear what they want to hear, otherwise they would have to address the argument. Progressives have not only continually shut their ears towards criticism, but have also actively suppressed scrutiny using powerful language and the threat of social ostracism.

Apparently their inherent mind-reading abilities and moral superiority allows them to disapprove of dissenting opinions, unlike normal people who would simply disagree using reason and evidence.

One reason for the perpetuation of this surreal world we find ourselves in is at least partly because of the indoctrination centres we call universities. Campuses are increasingly dropping reason and evidence as their main tenets of intellectual inquiry and replacing them with anecdotes and grievance culture. We’ve gotten to a point where some people are coming out of universities dumber than when they went in.

Instead of challenging controversial ideas, like the biological legitimacy of transsexualism, or the supposed religion of peace, we hold minority groups to adifferent moral standard and hereinlies the utter hypocrisy endorsed by so-called progressives.

University is supposed to be a place of free and open inquiry and if you continually denounce dissenting opinions for your own self-righteous indignation, then you’re advocating intellectual laziness and homogeneity for the sake of your shallow moral preservation. Sadly, if one fails to adhere to this echo-chamber mentality, then one will face severe social consequences and possibly even social ostracism.

The belief that we must protect people from words is an infantile claim of the highest order and deserves to be mocked into the nothingness that it stands for. All ideas should be debated and rebutted in the open marketplace of public discourse, not censored because someone finds words offensive.

Whenever you censor a comment, however offensive or inappropriate it may be, you inadvertently deny everyone else the right to hear what that person has to say. At this point, you have made yourself and those around you a prisoner of your own actions as you have silenced an opinion that you would have otherwise heard on the basis that someone, somewhere might not like it.

To exacerbate this further, we have managed to delude ourselves into believing that we can delegate the censorial role to the chosen few. The assumption here is that a select few have enough moral authority and clarity to determine the possible harmful ramifications of speech in advance, before they have even been said.

Sounds like an Orwellian nightmare, but let’s entertain the idea for the sake of argument. The question that follows is, to whom are we going to award the task of being the censor? Who should decide what we can read, say, think or feel?

Do you know anyone who could decide to relieve you of the responsibility of what you might have to hear? I don’t know anyone, and I don’t think you do either.

The truth is that this disturbing concept is inviting us to be liars and hypocrites, and one can’t help but be cynical of the motives of those who approve of censorship and who are determined to be offended.

Generation snowflake, being so fragile and scared of words has advocated the denial of free speech for years and it’s time to stop this. Are we not able to express our own disagreement with different opinions? Can we not debate and inquire upon different views? Do we need to be protected from words? If we are to maintain our prosperous civilisation, we must allow ideas to be challenged, upheld, debunked, shamed and laughed at in the open marketplace of public discourse.

As George Orwell so eloquently said, if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Christopher Attard is a University student studying psychology.

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