The free speech debate: handling heretics

From Curtis Curtis Yarvin An Open letter to Paul Graham

He talks about writers from the 20-40s being censored about about censorship by Paul Graham at Hacker News. He writes:

Graham created his own new institution: Hacker News. For no doubt excellent and practical business reasons, it took the second path. Hacker News is very much within power’s scope.


Ten years ago you could have a heretical conversation on HN. All the heretics have long since blown up. It remains a relatively permissive space; meta-heresy, like Graham’s essays, remains allowed. You can praise free speech—so long as you do it very politely—and, as the Clash put it, “you’re not dumb enough to actually try it.”

Paul is adhering to the sort of system you yourself in your earlier writings advocate. Everyone wants to believe that their exercise or expression of free speech is ‘good’ and that is it just some bad actors abusing the system, or that exceptions can be made. This is the problem with the free speech debate. There is a sort of cognitive dissonance in simultaneously supporting free speech yet having to reconcile all of the problems that can arise from it. Intellectuals especially have this problem because their entire modus operandi depends on the expression of ideas, so intellectuals having to support or justify censorship is inherently contradictory. We oppose the censorship of heretics if their views are congruent to ours. Yet a society or community of heretics or overly tolerant of them, cannot function or is sub-optimal for functioning. I dunno what the answer is. But I think peer pressure is a useful one. Reality TV , despite being lowbrow, is instructional: The community of participants votes, and contestants who are deemed problematic or useless are voted-off ( for example, failing a challenge and costing one’s team points). It is not quite democratic because the audience is not deciding, but not autocratic either, as it is a group decision. Vetted members of a community or society would periodically vote on who to remove or promote. This creates an an underlying pressure to conform to some sort of community ideal or cohesion, but it is not outright censorship either.

However, the US (and to a lesser extent, the UK and Germany) is an exception to this, being very successful and stable economically and socially in spite of a total lack of political consensus or cohesion. The rise of BLM may seem destabilizing, and it is a problem, but compared to unrest seen in other countries and throughout history, is still insignificant. Just open a history book to any country besides the US or any time before 1990 or so, and you will see. Real political unrest is truly awful to experience. It is not some guys in dreadlocks running around, but military police and tanks rolling up and down the streets. The ’80s were exceptionally bad for developing countries, especially in the Middle East and South America, and many of these countries have never recovered, some examples being Iran and Iraq. The concept of ‘peaceful succession’ is something that Americans take for granted. The US has never had a coup. That is not to say it cannot happen, but at this point is still very improbable. A theory or explanation for America’s persistent success in the face of everything that seems to be going wrong with it it, is a subject that deserves additional attention.