Aug. 3, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
03:31
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| So what's the reason why they're not getting on this and banning them? | |
| Is this this PC? | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Yeah, without a doubt. | |
| I mean, people outside of Britain don't seem to understand the depth by which political correctness has infected the public life in this country. | |
| The fear of being called a racist has, or a xenophobe or an Islamophobe, any variant of that term, has absolutely crippled the police departments in some ways and the judiciary in some ways. | |
| Well, these terms are being thrown around so often, it's amazing that they hold any weight anymore at all. | |
| You would think that, wouldn't you? | |
| But for some reason, people are still afraid of losing their jobs. | |
| They're still afraid of losing their friends. | |
| I mean, and honestly, I mean, you could find yourself committing a hate crime and you could actually go to jail. | |
| Yeah. | |
| We don't have free speech in this country, I'm afraid. | |
| Yeah, I was just going to jump into free speech. | |
| So a lot of people always are confused with what the dangers are of losing the ability to exercise your free speech. | |
| I mean, to me, this is simple. | |
| It's fundamental in being a thinking, critically thinking human being. | |
| And what are the dangers in losing your ability to exercise this? | |
| Well, I mean, you're exactly right. | |
| You can't be a critical thinker if you don't have the ability to freely express yourself. | |
| Because if you have an idea that you can't express, you can't develop that idea by speaking to someone else and getting their opinion on it. | |
| And, you know, adding that to your own and gradually forming an informed worldview. | |
| So you become myopic and anti-intellectual. | |
| But more importantly, I think, is the fundamental necessity of free speech to a liberal democracy. | |
| And this is something that goes right back to the very roots of liberal political theory. | |
| If we agree that violence does not a civil society make, then we agree that the state has to be invested with the monopoly on force. | |
| It has to be. | |
| So we can live our lives in peace, so we don't fight with each other. | |
| So we don't need feudal laws. | |
| This is the whole point. | |
| And if you say there are certain things you cannot talk about, if you restrict people's speech on certain subjects, then what you are doing is saying that these subjects will never become a public problem. | |
| If these subjects do become a public problem, and you still prevent people from speaking on them, then the only recourse people who have a problem with these subjects have is violence. | |
| Because they can't be solved with debate, dialogue, a cultural change, and then a change in the laws, which is normally how a problem is solved within a democracy. | |
| And this is why the parliamentary system doesn't tend towards revolution. | |
| In a country where you have free speech, you can change the culture by simply speaking about your problems. | |
| And culture influences the laws that are made. | |
| The laws that are made then tend to reflect the culture and it becomes a cycle, sort of an evolutionary Darwinian cycle, rather than what becomes instead a Hegelian cycle, where you get the thesis that represses its antithesis and eventually they come into violent conflict. | |
| I don't think that's a good idea. | |
| I prefer the Darwinian model. | |
| And I think that this is what free speech does. |
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