What Happens When You Make Words Illegal

Interesting thoughts by a Jungian psychologist at the the center of a free speech legal maelstrom in Canada, Dr. Jordan Peterson article. Here he discusses the problem with authoritarian attempts to make certain types of speech illegal.

"This is why free speech is so important. You can struggle to formulate some argument, but when you throw it out into the public, there’s a collective attempt to modify and improve that. So with the hate speech issue – say someone’s a Holocaust denier, because that’s the standard routine – we want those people out there in the public so you can tell them why they’re historically ignorant, and why their views are unfounded and dangerous. If you drive them underground, it’s not like they stop talking to each other, they just don’t talk to anyone who disagrees with them. That’s a really bad idea and that’s what’s happening in the United States right now. Half of the country doesn’t talk to the other half. Do you know what you call people you don’t talk to? Enemies.

If you have enemies, you have war.

If you stop talking to people, you either submit to them, or you go to war with them. Those are your options and those aren’t good options. It’s better to have a talk. If you put restrictions on speech, then you can’t actually talk about the difficult things that need to be talked about....

What happens when that truth actually does contribute to violence against groups?

You pick your poison, and free speech is the right poison. There are groups that advocate for hate, but that’s not the issue. The issue is whether repressing them makes it better or worse. I would say that [repressing them] just makes it worse. There’s [sic] lots of times when you don’t have a good option. People think that if we just don’t let them talk, it’ll go away. It doesn’t work that way at all. In fact, if they’re paranoid, you just justify their paranoia. By pushing them underground, you don’t weaken them. You just give them something compelling to fight against. You make them into heroes in their own eyes."