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Johnathan at Limbo — 404
“I am completely opposed to the spirit of this age, because it promotes the neglect of thought…
Today there is not only a neglect of thought but an actual distrust or depreciation of it. The organized political, social, and religious groups of our time are bent on inducing the individual to take up uncritically ready-made beliefs rather than
The freedom to express a thought, a doubt, a joke, even a mistake is vanishing under the pressure of ideological purism. That, too, is a form of soft authoritarianism: not imposed from above, but enforced through fear of social exclusion. When even freedom’s champions become its censors, we are entering dangerous terrain.
Freedom’s Fragility, Democracy’s Decline
Results from a recent paper titled ‘Keeping Your Mouth Shut: Spiraling Self-Censorship in the United States’ by the political scientists James L. Gibson and Joseph L. Sutherland is consistent with the findings from Cato/Yougov. They find that self-censorship has skyrocketed. In the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism, 13.4 percent of Americans... See more