So here’s the thing about the freedom of speech; it’s an easy win. It’s the first amendment, the one that even those assholes who can’t find Canada on a map can tell you they know. What’s left to say about it that we don’t already know? And even if we can find some nugget of truth kicking around in the idea that we didn’t immediately get, as long as we can tell we’re in a pro free speech mode, there hardly seems to be anything at stake in a free speech discussion, besides of course how hard we’re going to be patting ourselves on the back. As a guy who’s given a huge portion of his life to writing about stuff, I hear these concerns, believe me, and I’m pretty sure we still need to talk about the freedom of speech, because the freedom to speak and the ability to lie are barely different things. They’re crucially different, but the difference is subtle, and the simple fact that a government sized amount of stuff rides on us understanding this difference doesn’t do anything to make it less delicate.
Anything that we love can be used against us. It’s really the first place that whoever is working against us is going to go; to the things we love. From kidnapping to poisoning, as long as someone who really wants to see us go down can tell what we gravitate towards in a consistent way, that’s where they’re going to lay their traps. So we love the freedom of speech, and the enemies of freedom have taken note. From a historical perspective, they’ve changed their strategy. Instead of passing laws that say no one is allowed to talk about our problems, they simply pretend like everyone only has good things to say. The clearest illustration is the shift from fake divine endorsements of dictators, to North Korea style fake elections. A few hundred years ago, a king was a king because everyone was cutting throats to get ahead, and the only real reason that the one guy who came out on top of that process was special in any way was that god had apparently decided he was. Now even our most cut throat dictators feel the need to stage elections suggesting that the whole time they were cutting throats it was because ninety nine percent of people wanted them to. These goonishly fake elections seem silly to us, but they’re no more silly than pretending that God said that whatever the guy with the dumb hat wants is cool. In both cases, the need to defer to some authority outside the guy holding the knife covered in throat blood is there, and which authority is dependent on who he sees standing in front of him wanting some answers.
“Want to hear a good one? I got eighty eight percent of the vote and the only guy running against me died in prison! Wah wah.”
So we can look at this shift as part of a global learning curve. Powerful people are figuring out what the rest of us figured out when we first started knocking their stupid hats off and demanding some answers; that the only reason authority can legitimately exist is to make things better, and that people are the only ones who can judge how much better things have gotten for them. Now that’s a powerful lesson, but nothing about it is finished. We’ve got a right to the freedom of speech, not some fool proof, gun repellant spray that’s going to make it so that people who need the torch carrying masses not to talk about them don’t even bother fingering their triggers. Instead the wannabe dictators of the world simply turn to another page in the big bad wolf playbook, and decide they’d better put on some sheep’s clothing.
Here though is where something much more modern is going on with the position of the freedom of speech in society. Everybody knows about the wolf in sheep’s clothing. What’s probably a little less obvious is a wolf pack in sheep’s clothing. The comparison to sheep is maybe a little needlessly condescending, even if it’s useful. From dancing the twist to planking, we just like to participate in things. There’s nothing about the twist or the plank as a set of movements that’s uniquely enlightening. That’s not the point of them. The point of them is to create something recognizable, something easy and fun that we can flash at each other so we can feel okay about being together. Since we don’t especially care about the content of these token cultural adhesives, the only thing that really makes them catch on as fads is the fact that we can see a circle of some kind forming around them. We go; “Hey, what’s that?” and it’s the simple want to be looking at what everyone is looking at that draws us together.
For the same reason you do impressions of your dad with your siblings. Because kidding around about our sameness makes us comfortable.
So if you’re in some group of douchebags who are so two-faced that they see their own skin as something foreign, this is a fact you’re going to lock on to. If you’re in a wolf pack taking notes on how many sheep it takes to form a circle around something before the whole herd comes to watch, then what you’re doing is weaponizing the freedom of speech. Send enough sheep skinned wolves in one direction, and you can change the direction of the herd, or better yet, simply release a bunch of trendy looking articles about how wolf’s dens are in this year and leave the sheep to assume that those circles have already formed. All sheep will assume that all sheep are some ignorant herd that they’re individually better than, and so the herd will never gather into anything too aware of the power in numbers for the wolves to be afraid of.
So we’ve very much got a problem with the freedom of speech. It’s called; the public relations industry, and it’s called that because calling it the “shoving it down their fucking throats industry” didn’t play well in focus groups. The public relations industry is an industry in the most classic sense of the word, as much as coal or oil are industries. It’s a class of professionals who do nothing but think about the way you think, so that they can figure out how to get you to think you want things you’d never ask for if left to your own devices. That can mean everything from getting you to buy a bunch of crap you don’t need, to making it seem like people are still arguing about something that’s a completely done deal, like whether or not cigarettes are bad for you, or whether or not people are the cause of climate change. The goal of this industry isn’t to conquer us, quite so much as it’s to convince us to hand ourselves over. It’s to lead us around with little half truths and winks from things we know that we want, like looking at what everyone else is looking at, or figuring out what the opposite sex finds attractive. The idea is that we buy the cigarette because of the cowboy hat, that we think there’s a controversy because each guy arguing has half the screen. The idea is that we don’t know what the real idea is, that we can only be convinced to do things if we don’t really know what we’re agreeing to, because most of what people really want is something they can’t admit to. If the freedom of speech works from the assumption that people are trying to get what they really want, then public relations works from the assumption that people are trying to avoid talking about what they really want. The freedom of speech implies there’s something we’re driving at, but public relations assumes that we only get into the car so we can get away from the point. We fought a revolution over the freedom of speech, but people have built empires off of public relations, in some cases even using it to literally overthrow governments. So which thing has the right assumption? What do people really want, not just in name, but enough to get their asses out of their seats and into the streets where they’ll either spend their money or pull their triggers? No matter what we believe the answer to that question is, the only way to know that it is the answer is to point to it in the street. People will be the judge here. The verdict will determine how possible democracy actually is. The trick is that it seems like we can’t deal with the sheep skinned wolfpack dangers of the public relations industry without fighting the freedom of speech itself. And that’s not true and I’d like to tell you why.
Omg you guys. See that pot over there? What’s inside do you think?
“In 2022, the combined fee income of the leading public relations (PR) agencies worldwide amounted to more than 17 billion U.S. dollars, up 12 percent from less than 15.3 billion dollars a year earlier. According to the same source, PR firms in the United States alone accounted for 11.4 billion dollars of the global 2022 figure.” From Statista.
We consider the freedom of speech to be a right we’re born with because who you are is what needs to be said from the spot you’re standing in. Picture a guy who’s about to walk backwards off a cliff. He doesn’t know it. You do. Feel the need there? It pops out of a chain of events, where you are the link that jumps into place to hold the group together. Whether or not the chain is ever yanked quite this severely in your direction, your place in it as a solid link with structural effects on where the whole thing can go never disappears. It’s just what happens when we put a person in a place. They have to fit into it and that fitting happens across a bunch of things that need to be said. We say things like: I need you to sign right here. It’s the third door on the left. Who’s in charge of deliveries? And every time a person starts to move.
So most of the things we need to say aren’t quite as exhilarating to say as: “Wait! Don’t fall off that cliff!” But that’s the point. If we’re doing the freedom of speech right we get our fires in our fireplaces, our crops in sprawling rows, our dicks in our pants or in people saying yes at the top of their lungs. The same need that jumped up to make us yell at the guy walking backwards off the cliff becomes something we’re no longer surprised to see. It’s simply there, like our heartbeats are there. It doesn’t become a need any less, we just get its urgency down to a warm glow. We go on green, we know the number 911.
Dude. HEY!
Now to handle this difference between free speech and the wolf pack in sheep’s clothing, we need to deal with a few subtleties that show up here. There’s a difference between what we want to say and what needs to be said, and it’s a difference that comes from both directions. We see the right to the freedom of speech as something perfectly natural, but we naturally want to say plenty of things that don’t exactly need to be said and it’s perfectly natural to not want to deal with saying things that very much need to be said.
Think of it this way. Everybody likes to laugh. And every time we laugh it’s not something we have to do or it wouldn’t really be laughing. We have to emotionally give something that we want to give to laugh. Laughter is what it feels like to get pushed forward and then scurry to catch up with your feet. That’s why jokes have to surprise us on some level to really work, because they’re part of how we develop. Whatever we laugh at we’re likely to repeat. So to be forced to do it, we have to be totally dominated. Not just captured, but so totally without escape that we develop into a feature of our cage, repeating the things that the guy with the throat slitter wants to hear, the way he wants to hear them.
Like fake dancing, but with your face.
The irony here is that we never really need any one laugh and yet we’d instantly recognize a life with no laughter in it as being in a state of need. Even more, we’d recognize a life full of forced laughter as essentially a hostage situation that’s spilled out into the street. The point being that things we want to say aren’t exactly the things that need to be said, but we need to say the things we want to, as a basic condition of fitting into the skin that’s ours to wear.
Now, if laughing fits us into our skin, then not wanting to say what we know needs to be said is what hollows us out. These are the words we have to swallow. We only don’t say what needs to be said when there’s a conflict between that need and some other more immediate concern, like the guy over there with the throat slitter in his hand. Usually this need trade-off is a shade less gruesome, but it’s no less forced. We can’t tell a boss he’s an asshole because we’ll lose our job, we can’t tell a spouse they’re acting like an idiot because it’s all we’ll hear about for the next three weeks. We can only swallow words that we know to speak the truth. Not wanting to say what needs to be said is a state of triage in that way. It’s gnawing off your paw to get out of the trap.
Understanding this difference is critical to bringing the freedom of speech out of history and into the future. Because the freedom to speak isn’t the duty to speak exactly. That would be like creating a duty to laugh. The freedom we need to be able to really laugh at things, is a freedom to decide what deserves to be laughed at in any given moment, since we never totally know where a punchline is going to come from, and people telling jokes never totally know if their punchlines will work. In the same way, the freedom to speak is the freedom to recognize what needs to be said in an unmediated way. Nobody can tell you what you see in the spot you’re standing in. What you need to say will always come galloping out of that perspective as an essential quality of what it means to stand there. It’s not just the sight of the cliff, but seeing the fact that we might fall off it.
We’re overcome with the need to shout messages like these; about how our groups are moving backwards and pushing people at our edges towards dangers we know how to avoid. Reality as we deal with it on a day to day basis is a collection of these essential qualities. It’s the links jumping up between us, the chain of events that creates the present. So we recognize the freedom of speech as a political necessity with the same breath we use to identify reality itself and the unique sense of urgency that it alone can summon in us. Sayings like: ““The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don’t believe in is propaganda.” which was said by one of the forefathers of the public relations industry, Edward Bernays, are dripping with contempt for the freedom of speech on exactly this point. They work from the assumption that people don’t know what they’re looking at, and that they’ll never figure it out unless some clandestined asshole tells them first. This is a man who sees nothing about human nature worth improving and that’s the difference between popular speech as development and popular speech as a weapon.
“No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.”
-Edward Bernays. Fun guy.
The problem here is that freedom is something unmeditated, and we even the guys who wrote the first amendment couldn’t make it to the end without talking about the media. In their time that was the freedom of the press, as a literal set of presses that created a literal set of newspapers, but it’s not exactly a backflip to realize they were speaking more directly about the right we have to access the speech of other people and then make up our own minds about it. Really the freedoms to speak, to publish and to assemble are the same thing. They’re what the right for us to decide what we’re going to do with our lives together looks like if we accept that right as a permanent part of a group of people too big to all be doing the same thing at once at any given time. You reading this is you and me getting together split up, with the me part at one time and the you part at another. It’s a fun size assembly in that way, and denying you access to it would be the same thing as enforcing a curfew that kept us from meeting face to face.
Self important little nitwits like Bernays are basically saying that there’s no difference between enforcing this curfew and speaking up yourself. To be in public relations is to take your control of the media for granted, which is the same thing as taking the ability to determine which assemblies will happen for granted, which is what it looks like to put a wolf pack in sheep’s clothing. I can’t emphasize enough how much guys like Bernays are a huge part of the conversations we have with each other. He’s barely a hundred years into our history, and he’s taught in public relations like Geroge Washington is taught in American history. If you’ve ever seen a commercial, you’ve seen the work of someone who read Bernays and took him seriously. We’re talking about books that are just barely pulled back from being called: “They’re All a Bunch of Mouth Breathers Who Are Too Dumb to Know They Should Worship Us.” Titles like: Engineering Consent, Crystalizing Public Opinion, Propaganda, and of course simply: Public Relations. Faithfully improving on Bernays’ techniques and making a lot of money have gone hand in hand for so long that it’s easy to think that the media he’s talking about and the press that the guys who wrote the first amendment are talking about are two different things. The first amendment says that the government can make no law that abridges the freedom of the press, but the assumption there was that anything that wasn’t the government was simply another press that people could access by simply picking up a different newspaper. The concept that the presses themselves could be controlled by a group of people that was neither the formal government nor the people being spoken to through the press was unthinkable, because society hadn’t yet industrialized. But in an era when even our crime is professionally organized, the weaponized gray area between a press and a government that can censor it, is the freedom of the press holding the freedom of speech for ransom. It’s an ambiguity that needs to be dealt with like that guy needs to know he’s going to fall off the cliff.
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …” –Edward Bernays
This thing about the number of people we have to see gathering around something before we go to look for ourselves is just that; it’s a number. It’s not a quality of what’s being looked at. It’s the simple fact that there’s a gathering. The effect is an interplay between speech and the press that shows it to us. As the popularity of the media showing us the speech increases, our standards for evaluating that speech lower. If some guy rolls up on us on the street and says: “Hey check out this song…” That song had better be fantastic or we’ll treat it like trash. On the other hand we’ll listen to music we feel nothing especially fantastic about all day long if it’s coming out of the radio, even though if someone walked through the door with one of the same songs and asked us to turn the radio off so they could play it in the background, we’d probably tell them to take a hike.
Public relations plays to us in this gray area where our standards for evaluating speech can be turned up and down. Whatever we see on tv or hear on the radio is never just presenting us with an idea, it’s also asking us to turn our standards-dial to a certain position. What’s important here is that the medium says something that’s independent of the message that comes across it, which is that as a society we’ve already prioritized this message as worth gathering around to make up our minds about. The person holding the microphone doesn’t just have a message, they have the authority to captivate the audience, and it’s that authority that lowers our standards. “Shhh!” We say to the person talking next to us. Not because what they say is necessarily a lower quality thing than what the guy with the microphone is saying, but because of where they’re saying it from. We’ve decided to give our attention to him, and because we only have so much attention to give, we automatically decide that whoever doesn’t have the microphone isn’t worth listening to.
So without the freedom of the press, the freedom of speech would presuppose an equality of speaking positions that doesn’t exist in the real world. Saying whatever you want to the people you meet personally and saying whatever you want on television are not the same thing. One of them is more importantly controlled by economic interests but even if it wasn’t, the simple fact that it’s intrinsically rarer than interpersonal speech puts an unspoken statement of priority into any voice that comes across it which is an act of speech in its own right, one that’s given to the speaker by the medium as much as a microphone gives volume to any voice that uses it.
So to really get to the heart of the freedom of speech in a world full of modern media, we need equal access to the choices that elevate some speech over others. We typically call that equality of access to our priority choices a free market, since we make a priority choice any time we spend our money. But there’s a difference between this free market and the one that people with nothing but contempt for the freedom of speech are talking about, and again, I can’t emphasize enough how much that’s what these Bernays disciples are, no matter what other brand packaging they’ve tried to put on themselves.
“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.” – Edward Bernays
“One of the admirers of his books turned out to be Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. According to Bernays himself, Goebbels had Bernays’ books in his library and used them “as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany, which shocked me.”
-Taken from the article Edward Bernays, Prophet of Spin.
It’s a difference in who has to listen to the silent message. If the assembly begins because of quality, that’s a free market. If an assembly begins because of a staged quantity of onlookers, that’s a manipulated market, and the only reason to not let that market manipulate itself is to try and do damage to its consumers. Now we can simply come running to an assembly that began because of quality, and we can see quality products that were simply shoved in front of our faces because powerful people wanted them there. The grayness of the area is exactly what makes it so dangerous to the reliable, permanent practice of democratic discourse. But we can’t deny the fact that this grayness is created by the blending of these two primary colors: people prioritizing a message and people prioritizing the need to know what messages are being discussed.
The catch here is that there’s no way that speech by itself is going to push this over the top. What I believe I’ve shown here is that free speech and free markets are inseparable phenomena. What I think that means is that we have to not simply say that we need to diversify ownership of the media, we have to insist on it, to demand it. It’s going to be an awkward thing to do, like prying the microphone out of anyone’s hands is an awkward thing to do. But it’s something we need to do, because by sitting in the audience we don’t just agree to listen, we agree to sit down about what deserves to be listened to. That agreement is power traveling through us, not power beginning at us. What you and I are doing right now is something like whispering to each other while some jagoff has the microphone. What we have the power to do, is grab a hold of our standards-dial and turn up the volume on fun size assemblies like these. It’s a revolutionary thing to do, but that’s where we come from. That’s what this piece of writing is about, because that’s what it looks like we need from here.
People try to talk about this but for some reason their voices aren’t so loud.
Princess Fantastic 