Rethinking Public Speech

Rethinking Public Speech examines the death of free speech when violence by one part forces others to retract their ideas.

America is founded on Freedom of Speech

In contradiction to many countries in the world today, and also to many situations in the past, America is base on freedom of speech. But really, we do not understand this principle at all. We think that this principle is license to ventilate any expression a person has, and it is not the liberty the founding fathers wanted to establish.

So what is the difference? Liberty is the God given right to express your opinions, be they wrong or be they right. The difference between foolishness and wisdom is often hard to discern.

The concept of wisdom in the Bible is that based on a discerning between two things. You first must separate the elements of a thing so that something good is not condemned because it is in association with something bad, and vice versa, that is something bad is not accepted because it is with something (however small) that is good.

Wisdom continues beyond discernment. For wisdom to happen, the person discerning between the things has to accurately assign values, good and bad. Then wisdom is actually seen when that person uses that discernment and values to actually benefit them and others.

For example, we go to doctors, and moreover we pay doctors a lot of money, because they are wise in matters of our health. We can tell a doctor a lot of things in our life, but he discerns between the good and the bad (and what is neutral) to target the bad, and what is happening in that bad thing. His wisdom is shown when he gives counsel to the patient as how to remove the bad from their life (the application of wisdom).

The Playground of Ideas

A schoolyard playground is basically an area where the kids can go and basically do anything that they want to do, but within reason. They cannot physically harm one another, but beyond that kind of prohibitions, they can “play.” This play takes the form of an unrestricted area, and some yell, others run, others just talk, some are quiet. But free speech is like that playground. Bullies enter the scene because they don’t like somebody, so they make life in the playground “uncomfortable” for them. They don’t care about the teacher seeing them abusing others (a prohibited conduct), usually.

So free speech is the “liberty” of being able to express one’s own ideas, in an atmosphere where the person is not unilaterally condemned just because they are short, or a girl, or from an ethnic group.

Do we have Free Speech in America?

The point of the playground illustration is to point out that free speech ends when bullying begins. Bullying is associated with violence. Individuals are “repressed” in their speech when someone pressures them with violence.

In the playground of America, we can all speak, or really, can we? When pressure is placed on a person expressing this ideas so that they shut up, free speech has ended. Things go to the bullying illustration when violence happens.

Why do Public Marches go Violent?

This is a good point to meditate on. Why? If we superficially analyze the events we see constantly in marches anymore, we note that property is defaced and destroyed. But you never see a person who has bought a Tesla car take it out in one of these marches, and he destroys or defaces “his own car.” The universal element in these marches is that other people’s personal properties are defaced, destroyed, or store are robbed. This is a crime in itself. It is not any kind of speech.

In the riots (yes, that is what they are because they are not about any kind of expression of a point of view), it is disturbing to see marchers walk into a 7-Eleven and just grab food off the shelves and walk out of the store without paying. What kind of speech is that? Isn’t it just plain robbery?

Exodus 20:15 Thou shalt not steal.

So in the name of “free speech”, a crime is committed. This is the essence of misdirection. In the confusion of a march (many marches are organized and orderly, but what we see is not), individuals use the march to commit crimes. That is not free speech. The police that begin to take people into custody, and they resist, and the police use force is because of a reason. The people change from free speech to violence. Their resistance to police stopping that violence causes police to “get rough” with them, and the police in such situations are 1000% within their rights and duty to use physical force.

Sheriff Ivey in Florida made a threat that any rioter that threatens the police with violence will be handed violence back from the police, and the rioter will most probably end up dead. That is not a miscarriage of justice, but a protection of free speech, and a protection of the police force that is supposed to be supervising a free speech march. More power to him.

Why do People have to Get Violent?

The reason because this happens is that people do not have any other way to win. In an open expression of ideas, usually it is obvious when one person have logic and facts on their side, in their position. The point is that taking the logical and fact based position is what makes a person have the advantage. That is wisdom applied for benefit.

When a person has ideas that are not well thought through, or when there is deception involved because they want to get unfair advantage over another person for their own personal gain, most people will not concede to them that they are right, that they have reason. The idea is that one person’s position is the best for advantage.

When in real debate, when logic and facts are what decides the winner, people have to have logic and facts and forcefully defend them in order to be judged as “being right.”

The Democrat party situation is that, for many years now, they just cannot win on the basis of reason and facts. Climate change, for example. Scientists refute climate change’s most basic foundational tenet. Any high school kid knows from biology class that animals produce carbon dioxide and plants take in that carbon dioxide and give out oxygen. The obvious interconnection means that carbon dioxide is neither good nor bad in itself, it is just one “cog” in the system. Demonizing it is illogical.

The gays and transgender arguments also are simply fiction, fantasy, delusion. There are only two genders. If there were more than two genders, the living being has no way of transgendering itself to another gender. Dressing up a man to look like a woman is a mental pathology.

So arguing for such positions is a losing effort from the beginning. Why do people argue these kinds of senseless, foolish positions? The reason is that they want to get to the point where they have no other way “of winning” so that they can use violence. Some of these foolish people might really be deluded into believing that their position has logic and facts behind them, but reality steps in to prove them otherwise.

Free Speech has to Defend Speech that Others Don’t want to Hear

This is the point of free speech. It is not to force other people to your position. It is to give an airing or hearing for many different positions, and a public examination to see who has wisdom in their position. But the key of free speech is exactly this, hearing what is not your position so that you can possibly evaluate the position against your own thinking, and MAYBE YOU WILL CHANGE YOUR POSITION if somebody presents a better position. If you enter all debate with a closed mind, then you are doomed.

When the forum of free speech degrades to the point of violence, you are dealing people with a closed mind, and who are trying to force other people into taking their weak, failing position by force. Free speech has completely disappeared at that point.

Rethinking Public Speech