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He didn’t call it that, writing 38 years before Stoker’s classic. But open societies are a gigantic wager that sunlight destroys evil, that truth has nothing to fear in a contest of ideas. The great danger of censorship in tyrannies is that it drives truth underground. But its great danger in democracies is that it drives nasty ideas underground, into dank basements and ugly chat rooms where they breed and multiply unchecked. It even allows haters to appropriate the mantle of martyrdom. So censorship is not effective in practice against bad ideas, though it can harm good ones.

Which brings me to Mill’s third point. If we accept orthodox opinions without ever hearing them challenged, even when they are correct we tend to accept them as stale dogmas not living truths. But when we hear them defended, or defend them ourselves, we develop a deeper and more lively appreciation of their meaning which then informs and enlarges our lives as well as preparing us better to refute them when we do hear them.

Censorship is not effective in practice against bad ideas, though it can harm good ones

If you censor speech, you break faith with Canadians because you say we are not to be trusted with dangerous ideas and your job is to save us from ourselves. In which case it is impossible to understand why we should be trusted with ballots.

It is a perilous thing to arrogate to yourself the power to silence ideas you find disagreeable. And the appetite grows with the eating.

We already have too many restrictions on free speech in this country, including the outrageous rule that during elections a free people may not communicate freely with their fellows about issues under debate. And to say that certain kinds of speech are so hurtful as to constitute assault is to infantilize us, saying we can neither tell right from wrong nor withstand an insult.