Found While Looking for Something Else

A post from Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor from four years ago:

As Fred observed some time ago, free speech is a myth. We all know what we can't say and who we can't say it about.

I suppose it's inevitable. Once you decide that all communities have to be diverse, and begin enforcing that with fines and jail terms, you will find that you must then regulate who says what and about whom, lest someone be upset. Well, it's all right if they're upset, but if they then set fire to cars and riot in the streets, that has to stop. The way to stop it is not to offend the rioters. Of course that kind of Danegeld never works, but our rulers usually try it.

Democracy works in a context of the rule of law, and a certain civility, and a fair degree of homogeneity in the communities where democracy rules. It worked pretty well in the Old South so long as you weren't black: that is, the political community was relatively homogeneous. And perhaps that's what we should learn from studying history, only no one studies history any longer: often the way to make democracy work is to reduce the diversity of the elements participating in the political decisions. That can be done by excluding some people, through legal segregation, through ethnic cleansing, or through federalism and voluntary emigration. Anything that can be called ethnic cleansing is taboo now, but it was done quite successfully in Switzerland about 1875, when one canton was forcibly divided in half and the Catholics were required to move to one half and the Protestants to the other. That stopped the conflicts. Of course they took their religious confession more seriously in this days. Now we don't, I mean no one takes religion seriously. And if you believe that, look into the modern history of Beirut. Then look where many of the refugees went.

We will continue to run the experiments in diversity with democracy. Our public schools, far from generating any sense of citizenship and community, promote the self esteem of the mass man, and denigrate any traditions and history we once had as being stories about dead white males. Far better to learn that Heather Has Two Mommies, than about the militia and King's Mountain.

But that's part of the remedy, you see. In order to have our diversity we must produce the New American Man, who, unlike Soviet New Man, will not be flawed with residual loyalties and ethnicities and nationalities problems.

And the highly self esteemed mass man marches on. It's glorious. What's a little free speech compared to that. Recall the judge in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. "God, it'll be glorious."