The Psychological Need for Free Speech
“What is to give light must endure burning.”
-Viktor Frankl
What is your favorite story? Don’t toil over this too much, you don’t have to be certain of the answer - I suspect most people would find it very difficult to pick just one story out of the thousands they’ve likely heard in their life to claim as their singular favorite. But think of at least one story you are especially fond of, if you would kindly entertain me. There must be one thing about this story that is meaningful to you in the personal sense of the word. It doesn't matter if anyone else agrees that this story is worthwhile, nor does it matter if it is humorous or serious, abstract or concrete, long or short, fiction or nonfiction. It is among your favorites, and therefore it stands out among the rest in your memory. You have kept it with you. And there is a reason why.
Do you care at all about the author of this story or what their personal journey reveals? Does the story even have an author? Or is it a myth, a fable with mysterious origins which represents ideas that were never contained within the mind of a single person at the time of the story’s conception? Despite their mysterious roots, stories like these retain something so familiar they seem to emanate from somewhere inside the collective human soul. If this sounds like what you have in mind, perhaps the human spirit is itself your story's author and your appreciation for the story represents a bond you feel with your fellow man and the universe we inhabit together through all the unseen and unknowable. But even if the identity of the author who penned your favorite story is irrelevant or unknowable to you, a connection to the story itself and the ideas contained within was made.
Why? Why is this story meaningful to you? What is it about its contribution to your inner world that makes such a difference in your life? Why do you have this intimate connection with this particular arrangement of words and events? What ultimate purpose does it fulfill?
An Essential Right
As you reflect upon the answers to these questions, does the natural right to free expression as outlined in the 1st amendment to the U.S. Constitution come to mind?
I’m willing to bet that, for most, the answer is no. I could be wrong, but when I reflect on the stories that are special to me, and the reasons why, I seldom, if ever, consider that without the freedom of expression promised by the Constitution, I may never have heard these stories I so cherish. Not to say the story behind how this document came to be isn’t among the greats itself, I think it is. Rather, I never think that the spirit of the connections I have made with people I care about during heart-to-heart exchanges of lived history or the deeply personal meaning I glean from a particularly resonant book comes anywhere close to being summarized by my fundamental right to access these blessings.
Yes, we have natural rights that our founding documents reflect in their language. But these rights are self-evident, organic, and obviously not the product of a document. The document is a product of these rights. I like the document very much and appreciate when it is referenced towards safeguarding our natural rights, but it is not wholly representative of our human need for free speech. This is quite impossible, I argue. For the first amendment merely describes the unassailable right to access and practice a function of the human condition, it does not describe the natural function that is fulfilled by free speech itself.
I believe censorship starves us of the essential neurological need for narrative1 and, as a direct and unavoidable consequence, it stymies the same need for connection and purpose. And, since we connect to others through stories, any constraints placed on speech are a poison to our minds and hearts. In short, the neurological need for narrative is a logical stepping stone to the human need for free speech.
The powers that be routinely assure us that they are not interested in censoring stories, but rather nasty things like hate-speech and misinformation. And as censorship advocates struggle to meaningfully, consistently, and empirically define what hate-speech is (all the while exempting themselves from any definitions they do proffer), they provide us with “information” regarding the harms they say unregulated speech can inflict on others. But this information is itself a form of self-censorship. It is the party line which never contains the full spectrum of reality, if any at all. These are not stories intended to convey an earnest understanding of the truth, but rather to ready the minds of their consumers for their rightful subjugation by their betters. Stories that speak with the clarity and candor of one without fear of censorship glory in the dimension of mental and spiritual motility. Censored “information” is the wretched inhabitant of the barren wasteland where spiritual stagnation and mental infertility reign.
As the bold playwright David Mamet says in his book Three Uses of the Knife,
As our Western-American world culture completes its manifest destiny, we see literacy, colloquy, education eroding, just as in another form of totalitarian state.
The Germans created and accepted Nazi domination in the name of self-determination; we create and accept ignorance and illiteracy in the name of information.
A television with seven hundred channels of “choice” is not freedom but coercion. The machine we have created demands to be watched; it bleats at us, “There is nothing I will not do to hold your attention.” We vote for lobotomized immobility and call it entertainment. Why? It is as illogical as the Vietnam War, the Belgian Orphans, Supply-Side Economics, “Happenings.”
That we call our intellectual and cultural impoverishment reasonable is mysterious. It must therefore cloak a deeper necessity.
For this censorship-through-information seems to be, like war, an intellectual hibernation, the mass equivalent of an antipsychotic drug, the exercise wheel in the hamster cage - a self-administered anesthesia.
Stories foster connection
It’s well established that humans are social animals that have a psychological need for connection with others. The pyramid above illustrates distinctive areas of need, but they are all supported by the connections we make within our communities. From our most basic physiological needs to spiritual self-transcendence, these cooperative bonds heighten our performance and help us cultivate personal strength against a wide variety of environmental factors.
We learn from one another through all of our senses. We share stories that inform our spiritual and moral awareness as well as our practical know-how. Some of the most effective communicators make enchanting use of sensory description to expand the range of experience we draw from as we form an understanding of the stories they tell. Good stories are emotive, detailed, and relatable, not numb, apprehensive, and detached. In response to a particularly effective story, we practically feel how it energizes our minds. In a sense, that’s exactly what seems to be happening.
When we hear a story, the neurons in our brains begin to fire in the same pattern as the speaker’s through a process defined as neural coupling2. On one hand, the speaker’s brain is spatially and temporally aligned with the neuronal activity of the listener. On the other, the listener mirrors the speaker’s neuronal patterns and, throughout the delay in this process, the listener forms anticipatory predictions to fill the gap. Remarkably, the entirety of this connection is lost when subjects fail to communicate. It’s like a biological ‘no signal area.’
When I first learned of this anticipatory response to narratives, I immediately wondered if it might explain the effectiveness of satire and irony in the context of simulating a discordant environmental condition through storytelling. This type of ridicule exposes the stark juxtaposition between the expected and the unexpected, the sound and the unsound, and when effective storytellers implement this technique to expose an observation of reality, the result is a comical disconnect between what the listener expects and what the storyteller describes. Laughter ensues, and connections are made. Humor is an immensely powerful means of building connection with others. With respect to stories, effective humor is emotional, it is relatable, and it can be detailed or vague; but in either case, it contains the scope of recognizable insight. It is medicine. It produces endorphins which increase pain tolerance by 15% as well as dopamine and oxytocin,3 which support attention, memory, learning, and empathy. Is it really any surprise that the censorship crowd, the crowd most antagonistic to the human need for connection, is often mocked by the free speech camp for its humorlessness and inability to meme?
What Else is New?
From the Bishop’s Ban of 1599 to the current intellectual flatulence heard all over Substack, demands for censorship can never produce permanent outcomes. The human need for connection and the desire to understand our world is simply too strong. Stories inevitably find their way between individuals despite censorship attempts. And humor is only one mode of transport.
Is it possible to live under conditions in which one’s neurological need for stories is deprived of supportive free speech? Yes, absolutely. It is completely possible to live with a mind so atrophied it has forgotten its own purpose. But thriving under such conditions is impossible. I like to think that spiritual enlightenment can override all environmental handicaps, but since it is impossible to know the precise experiences that will induce such a state of enlightenment in a given individual, imposing any limits whatsoever on freedom of expression amounts to blatant hubris at one extreme and crimes against humanity at the other.
Indeed, through the very hindrances imposed by censorship it is still possible to acquire spiritual insight. But individual performance and well-being will not be optimized this way, and those resilient individuals who manage to evade total spiritual capture while under such duress will be vastly out numbered by those whose inner world is dominated because their access to life-saving stories had been previously restricted. Free speech is essential for the salvation of countless souls.
In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl describes various differences between Holocaust survivors who were relatively resilient to the horrors they endured within the walls of concentration camps and those whose spirits faltered under the load of suffering. Frankl, who was himself imprisoned for roughly three years, was a psychiatrist who carefully observed how the ability to find meaning in this most unfortunate experience was greatly predictive of one’s survival. In Frankl’s case, he set his mind to fulfilling the task of rewriting a manuscript of his which had been confiscated upon arrival at Auschwitz to help motivate him towards sustained purposeful action. In other words, he kept moving forward because he had a story to tell.
If there is a single sanguine thread to find in the dense fabric of terror endured by Frankl and his fellow prisoners, it is perhaps in the gift of insight he left to his fellow man in the aftermath of this atrocity. If you have any doubt of the impact Frankl has had on the helping profession, take a closer look at the top section of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs depicted in the above pyramid; self-transcendence was directly influenced by this same Viktor Frankl. Part two of Man’s Search for Meaning is dedicated to describing logotherapy, a term derived from the Greek word logos which translates to “meaning” and therapy which is concerned with the treatment of maladjustment. Logotherapy is considered the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy alongside Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology; and is yet another contribution of Dr. Frankl’s to the discipline of psychology.
Legacy of Resilience
Dr. Frankl characterizes the progression of the psychological reaction to internment thus: 1. Admission/Shock, 2. Entrenchment in camp routine/Apathy, 3. Liberation/Disillusionment. Of particular importance to the discussion at hand is the third category. Frankl observed that a prominent distinction between the prisoners who either achieved personal liberation or succumbed to disillusionment and despair was the ability to retreat to one’s inner world - to, essentially, immerse oneself in the comforting memory of rich experience and prior knowledge to find solace and luminescence in devouring darkness. The richer the inner-world, the more pronounced was this ability. Many would sing, some would dance, others would organize plays and perform for one another by depicting widely beloved stories, some would even work together to write new ones. In times of shared reflection, the prisoners would recount the events of their lives describing personally significant memories. Often, and very importantly as Dr. Frankl would come to find, prisoners would cling to these memories for a sense of purpose amid so much tragedy. And when they sat silently alone, they daydreamed.
But Frankl said nothing, to my knowledge, of how the stories shared among prisoners were all cautiously inoffensive or curated with the interests of camp attendants in mind…
I wonder how total restricted access to information leading up to the barbarity Frankl suffered might have stifled his ability to reach the very state of self-transcendence he experienced while imprisoned and later came to define and pass on to others. What was it in Frankl’s life before his imprisonment that laid the foundation for his structurally adaptable inner-world? What message did he encounter? Which lines of text or moments of tender exchange with his wife informed his resilience? Which experience prepared him to be burned but not consumed by flame; to instead become an incandescent source of soulful wisdom for all who would be fortunate enough to open the pages of his diary? Without the stories he smuggled into the camp hidden within the recesses of his mind, would he have been able to produce such wisdom, let alone survive?
“My mind still clung to the image of my wife. A thought crossed my mind: I didn't even know if she were still alive. I knew only one thing-which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thought, and the image of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversations with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. 'Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”
The quote Frankl recalls here is from the Song of Solomon 8:6. In other words, just more unacceptable extremist noise.
When all else had been taken, stories were perhaps the last source of dignity for the many souls who endured the Holocaust. The stories that survived the censorship attempts of 1930s Germany helped many of these people go on with their inner-worlds intact. For others, fear and the effects of insufficient exposure to live-saving stories won out. This greatly increased the risk of death for these people, but among those who survived, once they left camp, many never again truly lived.
The Insidious Temptation to Silence
And what of preventing these horrors from reoccurring? Don’t we have a duty to leverage censorship in order to prevent another Holocaust in the future? Such a loaded question, and so understandably easy to get lost in the emotion of it.
Let’s leave aside for a moment that no human being is lofty enough to understand the true consequences of censorship at a national or global level let alone be trusted to apply it in a manner so just and fair as to produce for us a brighter future without human tragedy. Similarly, let’s leave aside the fact that the Nazis were pro-censorship4 and instead observe the reasoning of a couple of minds who sadly internalized imprisonment for good; minds that, perhaps as a direct consequence of the indoctrination and censorship they experienced, could see no other way to protect themselves from their fear of bring caged again than to become the jailer themselves.
From CBS news, an interview featuring Holocaust survivors Hanna Kovanic and Julius Eisenstein displays the result of this troubling phenomenon:
"As much as I am grateful for the liberties and freedoms we have in the United States, I still feel tremendously strong we have to have limitations," said Hanna Kovanic. "Other people take example from those incidents and things tend to repeat themselves."
Kovanic is concerned that hateful messages lead to hateful acts. As for freedom of speech, she says accommodating it comes with a cost.
"We have to spend all this money on police and guards and you name it," she said. "Freedoms, to some extent, being taken away from decent people because they cannot do what they do before."
Survivor Julius Eisenstein is "sick and tired" of the hateful speech.
"I respect the United States. That's the only free country I can say whatever I want to say. But I should not be allowed to lies and hate. It's unbelievable," he said. "I don't want you to like me. If you don't like me, I have no problem with that. But why do you have to hate me?"
These people saw first hand how censorship knows no limits. One day acceptable speech encompasses everything you’d like to say and hear. The next there is little assurance you will be so lucky. Yet, because their spirits were able to be corrupted by fear, they lived out their lives believing that it could somehow be used for good. They, like many today, were convinced that if they possessed the ring of power, they could remake the world in their own perfect vision. What stories did they never hear that might have changed their mindset?
But besides this, where is the irrefutable evidence that anything resembling a hate crime since the war ended happened as a direct result of too much freedom? Where is the irrefutable evidence that this same freedom has not prevented more hate crimes than it has supposedly caused? It’s conveniently impossible to parse out from all of the challenges wracking the post-West.
“Just look at us. Everything is upside-down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religion destroys spirituality.”
― Michael Ellner
Is it really too hard for the commissars of cancellation and censorship to realize that this inversion necessarily flows from their perverse ethic? As they call for ‘unity’ and ‘democracy’ out of one side of their mouth, they say, “censor yourself, or we’ll do it for you!” out of the other. Meanwhile, as these calls rise in pitch and volume to resemble the cries of spoiled children, so too does the palpable polarization of our society.
While I wholeheartedly disagree with them, I’m not upset with Eisenstein or Kovanic or other survivors who share their ideas on limiting speech. They likely suffered much and deserve empathy and understanding - their stories are important too. I assume they are consistent in that they would be willing to give up some of their own freedoms under the false notion that doing so would somehow guarantee safety. In my experience, most people who advocate for censorship normally say they are willing to make such trades. Whether they are sincere is another matter entirely. They may not see it this way, but such people are effectively real life examples of the character Parsons from George Orwell’s 1984.
'Of course I'm guilty!' cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen. 'You don't think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?' His frog-like face grew calmer, and even took on a slightly sanctimonious expression. 'Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,' he said sententiously. 'It's insidious. It can get hold of you without your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep! Yes, that's a fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my bit -- never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying?'
He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical reasons to utter an obscenity.
"Down with Big Brother!" Yes, I said that! Said it over and over again, it seems. Between you and me, old man, I'm glad they got me before it went any further. Do you know what I'm going to say to them when I go up before the tribunal? "Thank you," I'm going to say, "thank you for saving me before it was too late."
Of course, it didn’t go as Parsons had hoped…
Censorship on its face does not sound as bad as what was done to the victims of the Holocaust until you realize that it was an integral part of its making. The Nazis controlled the press, controlled what soldiers wrote to their families during the war, and on May 10, 1933, Nazi student organizations, librarians, and professors burned over 25,000 books they deemed ‘un-German.’ They were fixated on controlling stories.
But Holocaust victims were separated from their families, tortured, and, many, killed. Anti-hate speech regulations would aim to prevent tragedies like this, so they couldn’t possibly cause them, right? Right?
Aside from the obvious problems in determining what even constitutes hate speech, there is something troubling yet critically important to remember: it’s not even necessary to invoke Orwell and the warning he put forth in 1984 to make the case that censorship incites violence. The censorship work-hens of the big government/longhouse union is a toxically feminized group who hides behind propaganda to create the illusion that they want the marginalized to be safe. In truth, this union wants itself to be safe, and it relies on government intervention, which is all necessarily backed by violence, to enforce its desired self-serving end state. They do not directly say they want to kill dissidents, just as they don’t say anything to acknowledge the untimely and mysterious deaths of people like Michael Hastings. They don’t say they’re making an example out of Julian Assange as a warning to those who will not bend the knee to false kings, they just ensure he continues to endure the most inhumane form of torture available to them. They don’t say what they’d really like to see happen to Alex Jones, they just weaponize the legal system against him, luxuriating in a verdict that could only be produced by a kangaroo court. What they say is that they want censorship because it is for our own good. But we all know what they really mean. We all know the direction those trains are headed.
Incite Freedom
Many on the left believe unrestricted speech can incite violence. This is most certainly true. No one has made the claim that free speech is necessarily tranquilizing speech. But strong resilient people are not defenseless against violence, which, I’m sorry to say, is a part of this world. Perhaps there is a path to a nonviolent world, but it is not through restricting speech. For restricted speech prevents access to stories and the connections they foster both with people and with ideas, and these connections are powerful ammunition against violent threats. We have a neurological need for stories as a modality for learning and strengthening our bonds with others and must therefore acknowledge the existence of free speech as a logical and natural byproduct of this condition of the human mind. To advocate for censorship is to condone a principle mechanism by which all autocratic regimes rise, from the Nazis to the one relentlessly targeting any and all challenges to its power as it rules over us today.
I believe the war for censorship can never be won. Free speech will prevail because of the human need for stories. As much as the attempt to control the press might occasionally frustrate those of us who believe in open discourse as a means of developing an understanding of our world in good-faith, it will only ultimately result in the concentration of such into parallel systems. But that doesn’t mean that all attempts to deny the reality of the human psychological need for free speech do not incur a debt to the truth.5 The degree to which the force of reality will be tempted to the fate of 1930s Germany and similar horrors will be determined by the extent to which we peacefully exercise our natural right to free speech.
This includes you, Substack. With every cry for censorship that reaches your awareness, you are being offered the ring of power. What will you do with this chance to show your quality?
Thanks for rucking with me. Please enjoy the music as you exit.
I first heard the phrase “neurological need for narrative” from the great attorney Robert Barnes as he was discussing the importance of storytelling in the context of the courtroom.
Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies successful communication, Stephens, Silbert, Hasson https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1008662107
Hmm…did you know that the word oxytocin comes up underlined in red when I type it here? And when I right click it, this software wants to correct it to the drug name “Oxycontin”…
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-propaganda-and-censorship
This line adapted from a scene from the HBO series “Chernobly” in which the character Valery Legasov says, “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth.” If you haven’t seen this series yet, I highly recommend it.
This is the first time I've read an argument where free speech framed as a psychological need, instead of a right, or just a plain societal necessity. Kudos for providing a new perspective!