You can't stop fascism by becoming fascist and you can't beat hate with a ban hammer
There are many protests currently going on around the "free speech" vs "hate speech" debate. Generally there are different sides in the debate on both the left and the right. On the left you have Antifa which is a group which is set up specifically to confront and stop fascists. On the right you have some actual fascists and white supremacist racists who like to call themselves identitarians.
To make it known and clear, I do not support fascist policies. It does not matter to me which side or tribe the policy is coming from or whether we call it left or right or up or down or blue or red or whatever else. The simple fact is, there are policies on all sides in all tribes which are fascist policies and there are policies which are anti-fascist policies. Free speech is a principle which is anti-fascist because if we look at the history of free speech under any dictatorship, totalitarian or fascist regime, it is always suppressed.
Fascism is about promoting conformity to a group identity and about requiring the service of the citizen to the state. So to put it in a simple to understand way, under fascism the citizen exists to serve the state. Free speech protects individual liberty and while there has to be some balance between protecting individual liberty and the right to life of other people, we have to in my opinion be very careful about giving up liberty under the context of fear, hysteria, anger, or any other popular emotionally driven situation.
When emotions are driving the agenda such as fear, disgust, anger, then often people will give up their liberty so as to feel better in the moment without understanding the long term consequences both strategic and personal. Free speech can be abused and is abused, but so are bans, so is law, so is the mechanisms of the state. So when people are upset that Nazis are saying stuff which is spreading racist propaganda and growing fascism to the point of demanding a ban on the speech then a question I would ask is what would actual Nazi's do to communists who expressed their opinions?
The truth is, whomever or whatever is in power has control of the ban hammer. The ban hammer is almost always abused by whomever has control of it at the time. For this specific reason I would recommend we avoid using the ban hammer, and put a focus on ways to enable the kind of speech we want while discouraging the kind we don't want. For example when it comes to private companies, private property, your personal property, your home, your sphere of influence, then you do have every right to ban any kind of speech you want. Nazis can be banned from your platform, can be not welcome in your home, as there is no reason why you have to be nice to people who speak hatefully toward you.
At the same time the answer is not to use the government to ban speech nation wide specifically because that is a game which strategically only empowers the government itself. Whomever and whatever happens to be in control of the government is usually going to be the most authoritarian tribe of the day, but there is no guarantee that the speech being banned today in 2017 will not evolve into a different set of words, under a different standard, with different feelings associated. Using the government to police speech with the full force of law and police in my opinion will lead to a future dystopia.
The reasons listed below and this is to contribute to a debate as I don't have the answers:
- Obscene or hate speech is determined by community standards which are not static and which change over time.
- Because the standards change over time, the very definition of what is or isn't hate speech is not fixed.
- Because the definition of what is and is not hate speech is not fixed, it's not clear if what you say today is going to or is not going to offend someone in a future time where your speech is reinterpreted.
- Because speech is being saved for all eternity on the Internet to be continuously reinterpreted by future generations and cultures, we have no way of knowing really what we are saying. It is obvious right now that racists are spreading hate but it's not entirely clear whether some innocuous looking speech can be reinterpreted 10 years down the line to be hate speech.
A good example would be to look at Pizzagate. It is very possible that Pizzagate is a real conspiracy or it is possible that it's simply innocuous speech which has been reinterpreted to look like a conspiracy. It is just as possible that hate can evolve into innocuous looking speech which then reinterprets and drags in many conversations which might not even truly be involved. It is this and also the possibility that emojis and other memes being shared can be interpreted in the future as hate speech and banned, and there appears to be no clear end to it.
At what point would the people who support banning words for example decide there is no more hate? Since all words originate at the point of thoughts and the technology may evolve into a brain to computer interface then at what point does policing speech as words become policing thoughts as electrical impulses? Is that not more scary than what Hitler himself wanted to do with racial purity?
I only have a moment to respond so i'll keep it short.
Appreciate you creating thought provoking questions. The problem with your premise is that hate speech is also a policing of peoples thoughts as electrical impulses. Any brain only has so much capacity for attention, and when people are exposed to the same impulses (any propaganda) over and over again, those thoughts become apart of a brains programing.
Your question still leads back to where is the line drawn in the cultural curation of language, not ultimately whether language is curated or not, because people yelling hate is forcing their curation upon others.
This is why I said people have a right to ban speech from their environment or sphere of influence on a personal and professional level. I am speaking on the idea of national level or state level bans of community defined hate speech. There was a time when certain words, books, etc, were banned even in the United States from being sold and or aired on television.
People who spread hate speech don't have to be given an audience. And if they can force an audience then fix the goddamn platforms which are designed to steal eyeballs instead of required to pay for attention. If attention is scarce we need an attention economy, not national level curation.
All you need to counter this kind of thing is recognize a proper counter argument. No matter how many times a person looks at a dog and tries to convince me that it is a cat it will never work. I have information that says otherwise as well as common sense.
The argument that you are posing is very similar to the old debate that says people who watch too many violent movies become desensitized to using violence in real life.
It's proven to not be the case. If anything, free speech is the most important tool for preventing mind control propaganda tactics.
One large reason: Black and White thinking. There is no grey area anymore with A LOT of people. If it feels bad, then it is bad to the max and must be dealt full consequence. Or if it feels good, it must be amazing and needs to be idolized. You see it everywhere that the many shades of grey in between no longer exist. BPD is a good example of extreme black and white thinking. (Not saying every person who thinks BaW has BPD)
I agree with that statement. Main Stream Media is a big culprit of that...they sensationalize stories and create a huge divide. They make the masses pick a side. People are told what to believe instead of deciding for themselves. Facebook is also pretty notorious for that as well. And then people ban other people who don't see things the way they do, and it limits critical thinking. Kinda sad if you think about it...
Most people don't have enough information to decide anyway. Disinformation doesn't really count.
I really don't know why they say fascism is far right if it is clearly a collectivist regime, with no respect to individual liberties. Evething is done in the name of the State. To me it resembles the communist regimes.
Exactly! If people actually understood this then we would understand exactly the problem with some of the "left solutions" to hate speech. Sometimes the solutions being put forward as policies on the left are as bad strategically as the solutions we saw under Stalin in Communism. Sure under Stalin the Nazis were beaten and fascists kicked out of the Soviet Union and most of the world, but it doesn't change the fact that life wasn't so great under those policies. At the end of the day it's about the quality of life and while it makes sense to let people determine what speech they don't want around them personally (or professionally), it's a completely different agenda to set the tone nationally for people everywhere.
In your home, in your environment, you and your shareholders set the tone. In another home and environment the tone can be different. But there is great danger in giving the power to police speech to any government. We can look at the 1950s to see how the US was prior to free speech, plenty of hate existed.
And think of Steemit, if you post on Steemit and people like your speech then it's more profitable. If you post on Steemit racist hateful speech then for sure it will get flagged into oblivion. If social media were more like Steemit then there would be economic incentives for people to care about producing quality speech because they would be rewarded (encouraged) to do so. People who would produce hate speech would be punished (discouraged) from doing so.
On Facebook and other social media, because it is almost entirely demonitized or the rewards are indirect, there isn't a feedback loop. People on social media posting hate speech don't have any economic or financial skin in the game. In fact, it might even be the cast that these are astroturf campaigns where because people can't get paid to post on Facebook by the platform itself, that a lot of posters get paid undercover by furtive methods to post the hate content and generate the hate memes.
Once again, when people post positive memes they get nothing from Facebook or most social media platforms as a reward. People posting hateful memes on the other hand don't get rewarded from the platform itself but might get rewarded by various communities which want to promote hate and for that reason it's hard to even know if there are economic benefits which outweigh the risks for the hate content generator.
Don't get me wrong. I really love steemit and the concept of rewarding good and positive content but actually I don't like the general idea of steering behavior with rewards and punishments. This means that there is still an external motivation for the behavior which is often bad. But to change another persons intrinsic motivation is unfortunately near to impossible. Giving a fascist the opportunity to earn money by promoting equality and respect for the different... won't make him a better person. He would rather refuse the reward than doing something that doesn't correlate with his mindset. Which is also true for the other side of course.
The only way to steer behavior is with reinforcement of desired behavior. You can avoid punishment but you still have to encourage the desirable behavior with rewards of some kind or why do you expect it to happen?
You can't change people. You can encourage behaviors.
There is no best person. There is a better world though and the way to have a better world is to encourage people to act better. It does not matter if people change internally or if fascists are acting nice because it's profitable. Adam Smith and capitalism itself is built on the fact that the butcher or baker doesn't have to care about you personally to do the service. If you started trying to focus on getting people to enjoy serving you then you'll quickly find that it's not ever going to be the case that everyone is going to like you or like serving you.
But at least if they get their just rewards then at least they are encouraged to do quality service. So I don't think it's important to care what others believe. I think it's important to focus on how others act and how they treat us more than what they believe or what goes on in their head.
They don't have to promote equality or respect for the different. They simply have to not discourage, interfere with, or spread memes which hurt other people. They don't have to believe in equality to determine it's more wise economically to not dedicate themselves and a lot of time creating anti-equality or anti-diversity content. Of course there are true believers in the world who will not care about their own future or how much money they lose but these people are irrational.
Maybe education and appreciation are the best ways to "steer" behavior. Because most bad behavior has it's roots in bad education and bad self esteem.
But my point was just that I like it more when people find their way to enlightenment instead of chasing a carrot in front of their nose. If people don't understand why certain behavior is bad or good they might always return to that bad behavior once the incentives change.
Education is the use of reinforcement mechanisms like reward to promote learning of desirable behavior. In school you get good and bad grades, rewarded and punished.
But education does not equal school. Especially in school this system of reward and punishment does not work very well. 80 % of what you learn in school will be gone a few month later because in school most of the time you don't learn because you're interested in something but because you're forced to. Real education is nothing you will experience in an average school. Schools don't educate, they recruit. IMHO
Even outside of school, reinforcement is the core behind all behavioral changes. Education is a result of that reinforcement.
If you are talking the "real world" it's all about reward and punishment. A lot of people in life want to get the most rewards for the least punishment.
The problem about Steemit model is that rewards are based on Steem Power, which is essentially money.
According to the conspiration theory of the New World Order, world richest families controls public opinion by owning the mass media. If that were the case, they could take over the platform by infiltrating a few users with big amounts of Steem Power. I really do not believe in that conspiration, but that shows the vulnerability of current Steemit system.
So build another platform.
You are absolutely correct! We are as humans think it's an obligation sometimes to just hammer one side to the point of no return which is not true. Making a good point towards an argument can be equally effective but the at least the other party will listen calm fully and possible think about the situation.
I think it would be more accurate to say that Antifa purports to be set up to confront and stop fascists. The Euromaidan began as protests calling for more integration with the West but ended up with Neo-nazis influencing a large part of the "reformed" government. Movements can (and have been) hijacked by people with less than pure intentions in the past.
I think it's also important to first determine who is actually in control of the US government at this point. Congress has taken steps that I feel would not pass the scrutiny of the Supreme Court, yet the Supreme Court will never take up these very actions to deliberate their constitutionality.
I personally don't have enough direct information to make an informed decision as to who is right or wrong here but I'm certainly dis-inclined to believe the narrative coming out of the MSM, especially when I've seen police agencies stand by and watch Antifa destroy property.
I believe there is a concerted effort being made to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
I completely agree with the reasons you have provided.
Some ideas I want to say about that topic:
Because the definition of hate speech is not fixed, is important to set an expiry time for the regulations. You cannot fine or fire someboday for what he said ten years ago if he retracted.
Hate speech tries to reduce the freedom speech or rights of other people. I think this is required but not enough for determining what is a hate speech and what is not.
Hate speech definition should not be created neither by the offended nor by the government. Allowing private companies to ban whatever they want will give the control of the ban hammer to the lobbies and big companies, so I think this is not a good option either. I think the best option would be to let the judges to choose, supported by sociologists.
In my opinion banning words is a quite dystopian measure but I do not think it will work, new words and set phrases will be made to avoid the censorship. Censorship is a powerful tool for attacking some ideas, but it is not enough for destroying them. For changing an idea it is necessary to convince majority of the people.
People do get punished for stuff they said years ago though. When companies have control it is actually shareholders and lobbies yes.
But that is better than to have it in the hands of politicians. If fewer people choose then fewer people have more power over many people.
I think on the contrary. If fewer people choose then this people has much more power over much more people. The more cruel regimes were the most centralized ones.
I believe at separation of powers. It is quite dificult because the holders of different powers tend to collaborate, but I think it is the best we can do. Individual freedom is important too, of course.
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"On the right you have some actual fascists".
True. But the Anitfa is as fascist as anyone, so your statement should have said that on both the left and on the right, there are some actual fascists.
The so-called Antifa want to use violence to shut down speech, that according to their personal standards is not acceptable.
That's not fascism?? Of course it is.
And that is as deplorable as the fascists from the right.