https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=E9PxdJNIc6w
The thing about free speech is that, like I’m not a free speech advocate, let’s say. I’m a true speech advocate, which is to say that I believe that people should say what they believe to be true. I think that’s your obligation. It’s also your right, but it comes with an obligation. But I don’t believe that true speech is possible without free speech, because you’re just not very good at thinking. And so you have to stumble around when you’re first formulating ideas and wander into territory that’s not necessarily productive, and manifest your biases, and in short, you have to be a fool. And the only way that you improve upon that performance is by, well, first of all, stumbling through it to begin with, and then second, by observing carefully what sort of reactions you’re getting and having a dialogue around it, so that you can start to sharpen up your ideas and improve their focus and find out where you’ve made a mistake and all of those things. So a lot of what’s necessary with regards to thinking is the freedom to make mistakes, because what, are you going to do it right the first time? I don’t think so. And, you know, that’s why for Carl Jung, for example, the fool was a mythological precursor to the hero. The trickster is a mythological precursor to the hero, because unless you’re willing to stumble around badly to begin with, you know, and to be a fool when you first start doing something, which is always the case when you’re learning something new, then you’re not going to make any progress. And so, practically speaking, free speech has to be as untrammeled as possible, so that people can be wrong and they can be biased and they can still express their opinions, including their darker ones, and then allow themselves to be subject partly to improvement by the world, because if you say things that are too stupid and then act them out, the world smacks you a good one. But there’s also the social intermediaries, the other people that you’re communicating with, who will also do the same thing. You know, and we’re always broadcasting information at each other, constantly trying to shape each other’s behavior, and what we’re trying to do is to bring forth from other people that which we would like to see them manifest. And so, there’s an implicit ideal as well, that people are broadcasting at each other all the time. And there’s tremendous social pressure, generally speaking, to manifest that implicit ideal as closely as possible, because otherwise people disapprove of you or lack interest in what you’re saying or criticize you or so on. And you have to be allowed to be exposed to that kind of corrective feedback, because otherwise you drift and you become subject to your own idiosyncratic insanity. And I mean, I’ve seen that very many times in my clinical practice, because, well, first of all, I have some isolated people that come to see me and all they do is talk. I just listen, I mean, because they don’t have anyone else around, and they need someone to run their narrative by to keep their minds organized. They can’t do it themselves. And they can’t do it without listening to themselves talk even, because for most people, talking is how they think. And talking socially is even more how they think. And I mean that literally, I don’t mean that metaphorically, and I think that’s true for almost everyone. You know, I mean, there are people who are trained academically who can actually think, but to think, you have to divide yourself into sub-personalities, I suppose, each of which has a differing opinion, a well-elucidated differing opinion. And then you have to let those different elements of your personality have an internal dialogue, and you have to draw conclusions from that. It’s very, very difficult for people to do that, and we radically overestimate the degree to which they do. Jung said at one point that people don’t think so much as thoughts appear in their head and they believe them, which I think is a much more accurate way of describing the general, because true thought is not only that the thoughts arise in your mind, it’s that you look at the thought and then you critique it, right? You have to separate yourself from the thought and decide whether or not it’s valuable. That’s more like an editing function, and you know, it takes a long time to be a good editor, a tremendous amount of time, and it just doesn’t happen, generally speaking. So, well, so I would say, well, without free speech there’s no true thought, and then you might say, well, who the hell cares whether or not we think? And I think the answer to that is fairly straightforward. I mean, you might think it’s so obvious that it doesn’t need explanation, but there are very few things that are so obvious they don’t need explanation. So, the reason you think is so that the world doesn’t smack you as hard as it might, fundamentally, you know, and I really mean this technically, because the way that people evolved the capacity for thought was that the prefrontal cortex, which mediates a lot of voluntary linguistic ability, actually emerged over the course of evolutionary history out of the motor cortex, and so that’s a very interesting thing to understand, because it means that, you know, animals basically think by moving, and the problem with that is if you think by moving and you make the wrong move, then you’re dead. Whereas what human beings can do is they can generate fictional avatars of themselves in fictional worlds, and they can run the avatars as simulations, and the ones that get killed they don’t express in behavior, and I mean, you could do that with words too, although people, you know, originally would have done it mostly with images, they do the same thing with drama, and so the reason that you think, and I think it was George, was it Alfred North Whitehead that said this, I think, but I’m not absolutely sure, the reason you think is so that your thoughts can die instead of you, and that’s a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant phrase, and absolutely the case, so if you think properly, then you kill off the ideas that if you acted out would kill you, or at least cause you suffering, or perhaps cause suffering to the people around you, and since it’s more or less obvious a priori that suffering is worse than not suffering under most circumstances, it seems reasonable to act in a manner that will minimize it to the degree that that’s possible, and so you need clarity of thought because that helps guide you through a world that’s enshrouded in fog and full of sharp objects, and if you don’t want to stumble into them and impale yourself, then you should have sharp vision and sharp capacity to communicate, you know, that’s one of the things I tell students when I’m trying to teach them to write, because they, no one ever tells them why they should learn to write, it’s like you learn to write so you can think, and you learn to think so that the world doesn’t treat you any more harshly than it absolutely has to, and that’s no joke, you know, and if you’re a person who’s been around a bit, you see very rapidly that people who sharpen their arguments properly, and can articulate their position and defend it, are always, always the people who are most successful and most compelling, and that change the way structures function, and that also help things continue in the proper path when they’re running down the proper path, it’s no joke to be articulate and to be able to think, there isn’t anything that’s more powerful than that.