You may have seen this cartoon circulating about a year ago:

When I first saw this, I remember feeling relieved. Finally, a justification for stifling the free speech of some of the worst and least tolerant members of society, those who are doing tangible harm. It felt good. But my relief was short-lived, because it did not take long for me to realize the error in this line of reasoning, and I began to worry that so many people I deeply respect and admire were sharing this. That is why I want to take a minute to defend free speech as the master value, a value that needs to be held so highly that it cannot be infringed upon, even in the face of intolerance and hatred.

Freedom of speech is the error correction mechanism for bad ideas. Not a mechanism, but the mechanism. Free speech allows societies to defend people’s right to say anything, except for the important exceptions that cause clear, immediate harm, like yelling fire in a crowded theater, inciting a riot, or threatening violence. This value is so necessary because when ideas get set in motion, they have consequences. Good ideas often have good consequences, and bad ideas often have bad consequences. We need to have a mechanism for correcting bad ideas before they can lead to bad consequences. This fact becomes even more important when you realize that many of the worst ideas came about in conjunction with totalitarian governments that restricted free speech, allowing the ideas to grow and spread and lead to some of the worst consequences in human history. When we talk about ideas, it is easy to write them off because they are so intangible and numerous. But ideas have power and consequences. Correcting bad ideas is one of the most important efforts we can make in society.

I do not believe there are good or bad people. I think there are good and bad ideas. Those ideas infect people, like a virus. Let me explain.

A person is just the sum of the interactions between their genetics and their environment (family, friends, experiences, chemicals, etc) throughout their life. Those factors will determine which ideas stick with a person, or infect them, and which ideas slide right off. Each person is immune to some ideas and susceptible to others. Once ideas infect someone, the ideas can turn into action. The idea that it is good to help others can lead one to lend a hand to a neighbor or to volunteer at a homeless shelter. The idea that some races are inferior to others can lead one to incite hatred and violence. People do not choose which ideas stick in their mind. People don’t choose to be ignorant or kind. People are the sum of their influences, and ideas guide their actions. Ideas are like viruses: they can mutate and change, they can spread between people, they can kill their host, and they can fester and lie dormant for years before coming back.

When you view the situation we are in through this lens, it becomes clear that we should try to promote good ideas and prevent bad ones. At the very least, we should try to prevent the worst ideas from spreading. How do we do this?

Some people, like the above cartoon recommends, say you need to ban certain types of speech. Quarantine the virus. This tactic is problematic for a number of reasons. The first question that comes to mind is, “Who decides what gets banned?”. As mentioned earlier, the worst ideas in history were spread through the silencing of dissident opinions. In a society run by Nazis, the view that all ethnicities should be treated equally would be labeled a dangerous idea and suppressed, leading to the Nazi agenda spreading unopposed. The lines may not always be so clear. In any society on earth today, a bad idea could start spreading, infecting minds. This idea may seem harmless, or even beneficial, but could lead to terrible consequences down the line. Maybe only a few people would see the dangers in this idea. It is of vital importance that those people be allowed to speak out against the bad idea. Their counterpoint may seem intolerant, ignorant, and offensive to the people who are infected with the bad idea. The dissidents cannot be silenced, because shutting them up would defeat possibly the only chance at correcting the bad idea before it can lead to even worse consequences.

Another problem with censorship is that when you ban discussion of an idea, the idea does not disappear. In the dark, ideas grow stronger. Censorship can unite people who are similarly infected with the idea, those who feel oppressed for losing their ability to express it freely. With no opposing ideas, a bad idea can mutate and grow, becoming more extreme and dangerous than before. And it will almost certainly re-emerge, perhaps in a much more destructive form. The best way to combat a bad idea is through open discourse. Trying to convince people of another way with the use of logic and reason. To go back to the virus analogy, if you have a treatable virus (a bad idea) you would not want to quarantine it, to let it mutate and grow stronger unmonitored. You would want to treat it (with discourse, with reason) and monitor it, create better therapies for it, figure out why people are susceptible to it, and deal with it together as a society.

At first I agreed with the cartoon because it felt good. It was incredible to think for a second that I could live in a world where I could silence racists and homophobes and make the world a better place. I understand why so many wonderful, intelligent people shared it. Unfortunately, reality is not that easy. At this point in time, we have to live in a world where we allow horrible organizations like the KKK to spread horrible ideas. We can’t silence them, but we can fight them. We can try to show them reason, we can try to show them the humanity of all people. We can inoculate others to their hateful ideas by spreading the ideas of tolerance, of equality, and by living each day by the values we preach. We can win the war of ideas, but not if we sacrifice our greatest resource: free speech.