Keep Right – Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
The state slogan of New Hampshire is part of a longer salutation from a Revolutionary War leader, “Live free or die: death is not the worst of evils!” “Vivre Libre ou Mourir,” the French version, was a popular motto during the French Revolution.
Live free or die!”
Slogan of New Hampshire
One cannot live free while being censored. To think a thought without being able to give expression to it is nothing less than slavery. Tyranny suppresses the mind by punishing expression. It leads to self-censorship. To self-censor oneself out of fear is to participate in one’s own enslavement.
The most important inalienable, natural, and God-given right is the freedom of expression. Without this freedom, there can be no other type of freedom. Free speech both sparks liberty and is the best evidence for its existence in any society.
These may seem like overblown and hyperbolic statements. They are not. They are literally true, because free speech is the indispensable byproduct of free thought.
Hannah Arendt described thinking as being, “a silent dialogue between me and myself,” requiring solitude, harmony, and an ability to imagine the world from another perspective. Censorious speech-control intentionally disrupts those very things by creating in each individual a hesitation to think forbidden thoughts, lest they escape one’s lips and bring about one’s own destruction.
Thinking cannot inspire action when it remains inchoate. Only when we can put an idea into words can we genuinely understand it. Only then can we determine with any clarity what we must do in order to bring this novel concept to fruition.
We can neither inspire others nor coordinate useful action unless we have fully mastered our fundamental reasoning about why a new notion deserves serious consideration. Such a process of developing understanding is the germ of every major movement in human history.
Ideas make history. They cohere society. They comprise what is generally accepted as being those convictions worth living for, dying for, and killing for. Nothing is more powerful in transforming the world than ideas; not fire, farming, writing, steel making, printing, steam power, nuclear power, space travel, or the internet. These crucial innovations transform how we human creatures live in relation to our physical world.
However, such technologies pale in comparison with the epiphanies revealed by Zoroaster, Abraham, Moses, Prince Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), Confucius, Jesus, Mohammed, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ignatius of Loyola, Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, John Maynard Keynes, F. A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman. These thinkers’ ideas about why we should live in certain ways transformed our human relationship with the divine, between one another, and within our own skins.
Nothing is more important to us Homo sapiens than the question of why, of meaning. Abraham Maslow was famously wrong when he asserted a hierarchy of needs that prioritizes the satisfaction of physical needs over all other urgencies. After all, he opined, one must survive in order to believe. His argument is logical, but history proves him wrong. For better or worse, human societies strain to serve the transcendent even when such service causes poverty, pain, disease, and destruction.
Jews have chosen to suffer since the time of the Prophet Abraham by standing apart in order to be true to their Covenant with God. Early Christians martyred themselves by the tens of thousands rather than perform a symbolic sacrifice to the Divine Roman Emperor. Moslems wage Jihad in Allah’s service regardless of any calculation of risk, because the significance of their lives is measured in fidelity to the divinity rather than by any worldly success.
Communists are utterly dedicated to do whatever it takes to totally destroy the naturally evolved human societies of the present day with a thoroughgoing Revolution that will clear the way towards their utopian Marxist Millennium. In service to their God-Emperor and their Shinto belief in their unique national essence, most Japanese were prepared to die fighting Americans in 1945. It took two atom bombings to shock Hirohito into surrendering, telling his people
that they must endure the unendurable.
In human affairs, faith always trumps mere survival. Faith sprouts from the seed of ideas. Free expression is what makes this all possible.
Today, like never before, an unelected global elite of plutocrats and bureaucrats threaten free speech. These censorious totalitarians are developing the whole scope of the high-tech medium into an inescapable surveillance tool that will monitor our every word and deed. They mean to restrict our thoughts by manipulating our every expressed utterance. By stoking fear as they punish us for our “problematic” words, they intend to blight our very capacity to think for ourselves.
A Brazilian Judge bans X/Twitter, the French arrest Pavel Durov of Telegram, Britain deepens its crackdown on all speech, American Democrats like Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison praise efforts to prosecute Elon Musk for promoting free speech, Facebook caves to Biden’s efforts to control the COVID-19 narrative, Alexa praises Harris while damning Trump, online community guidelines throttle open discourse, and every technocrat purports to be a fact checker capable of discerning “misinformation” from objective reality. These are not merely isolated events. They constitute part of a concerted effort to restrict thinking, speaking, and taking principled action to themselves alone.
If we allow free speech to die under this assault, we will be enslaved. We must fight such efforts in thought, word, and deed. Truly, we will either speak freely or die.
