The Demise of Free Speech and the Implications for Society: A Post-Enlightenment Perspective
The Complexities of Realpolitik, Narcissism, and Technological Advancements in a Changing World
It was this week that the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, resigned over her statement to Congress that campus protests calling for the genocide of Jews would not necessarily violate the university’s code of conduct, equivocating with an "it depends on the context." Meanwhile, strangely enough, Greg Lukianoff, a champion for free speech on equally sympathetic Bill Maher's show, Real Time with Bill Maher on December 8, managed to share a sentiment that sounded roughly analogous or in tandem with the maligned ex-president. Lukianoff said of her statement, “merely expressive, offensive expression, like saying intifada, that is absolutely protected. But can saying things like that be part of a pattern of threats or harassment? Of course, it can be. And it was kind of embarrassing to watch these university presidents of the top institutions in the country not being able to answer that clearly.” It appears that the demarcation line in the sand between protected speech (intifada?) and hate speech (genocide?) is as clear as mud. This kind of ambiguity around free speech lends itself to social unrest, legal and otherwise.
Therein lies the rub that free speech is not straightforward as far as when it crosses the line into hate speech and violence, whether speech acts or the old-fashioned physical kind. Free speech as a concept and right can be weaponized as a double standard, convenient when defending your speech, but not the other. Rules for thee, but not for me.
Author and anti-DEI conservative activist, Chris Rufo does not support Lukianoff’s organization, FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression which champions free speech. Rufo gives voice to his disdain for this organization in an interview with Lukianoff’s friend, American philosopher and author, Peter Boghossian, “If you look at FIRE, an organization that I do not like, I think that they are actually a net negative force in American society, but suspending my judgment there.”
Flying in the face of the prevailing notion that it is exclusively the left that peddles in cancel culture, Lukianoff and co-author Rikki Schlott of the Canceling of the American Mind; Cancel Culture Undermines Trust, Destroys Institutions and Threatens Us All- but There is a Solution, outline in chapter 8 that conservatives are increasingly abandoning an adherence to the principle of free speech in pursuit of their conservative agenda.
Both the left and the right are increasingly jettisoning free speech in favor of pursuing more illiberal and narcissistic aims. The student bases at elite colleges are entitled and therefore narcissistic; with their narcissism comes illiberalism and authoritarianism inconducive to the “adulting” requisite for free speech. Faith in political goodwill and good faith argument is atrophying in an increasingly narcissistic culture. These self-focused societal changes come at the expense of free speech.
Free speech is a product of the Enlightenment project. Now that both free speech and the Enlightenment’s values in general are hanging on by a thread from both the left and the right, it's worthwhile to look at the implications of their impending demise.
The transition from modernism to postmodernism hasn't been a mistake. What may be correct about the Enlightenment’s successor of postmodernism is its pivots around axes of power and crucially, an appreciation for perspectives from a multitude of demographics. This kaleidoscopic view of the world rather than tunnel vision, is inclusive along some lines, if not chaotic. Much like viewing the facets of a diamond on a swivel, it depends on who's looking and through what prism on what kind of sense-making and order we can assume about life.
That being said, amongst other problems, it is chiefly the illiberalism of postmodernism and its identitarian whinging about victimization for not having been heard all along that is destructive and a turn-off for a full-throated adoption of the tenets of postmodernism.
Maintaining an adherence to free speech necessitates putting on blinders to the realities of an increasingly narcissistic society to be mature enough to suspend this reality and pretend that we can countenance the other’s side when it's truly getting existential with what the other side is advocating. Author/journalist Douglas Murray emphasizes that survival is more important than ideology so in effect free speech, such as holding pro-Hamas views that are antithetical to Western values, must be chucked out the window, as an antiquated relic from a kinder, more compassionate era. During the age of the Enlightenment and its aftermath of coasting on the fumes of yesterday’s premium put on rationality, we were all on the same page and now we are functionally a bifurcated half Enlightenment/half postmodern society. As such, the vestiges of the Enlightenment, such as adherence to free speech, are breaking down and disintegrating.
Now we have a pushing of wills, Realpolitik. Israel may be a bellwether, on the brink, a symbol of the deteriorating liberal world order.
In no uncertain terms about the crossroads at which we find ourselves, Sam Vaknin wrote an op-ed, December 7, for Brussels Morning:
It is time to give up on the failing liberal democracy project and its attendant ideologies: human rights, the sanctity of life, the rule of law, civic engagement, the international community, and other such infantile inanities.
Liberal democracy is fading everywhere because exactly like Communism it is founded on a counterfactual view of human psychology and a fallacious reframing of human history.
Ideologies are inflexible and self-defeating straightjackets. Adherence to such fantasies ineluctably and inexorably leads to conflict and mayhem.
As the USA’s Founding Fathers knew, universal franchise democracy is a dangerously flawed idea. It empowers the nescient and the dumb, gives rise to demagogues, and elevates ruthless, populist antisocial leaders.
Similarly, the human and civil rights agendas are totalitarian victimhood doctrines that abrogate the inalienable and primordial right for self-defense and the meritocratic allocation of resources, among many other consequent distortions.
We need to get rid of all this delusional enlightenment baggage and revert to Realpolitik: the consummate use of power, hard and soft, to create and maintain peace and to regulate conflict.
Contrary to deliberate misrepresentations by bleeding heart acolytes of the liberal democracy religion, Realpolitik does not equate might with right nor does it do away with a civil discourse among interest-holders. It merely recognizes reality, adapts to it transigently, on the fly, without preconceptions, and aspires to optimize outcomes in a game-theoretical manner.
Where is the place of existing structures in a Realpolitik world?
Human institutions are founded on the preservation of the utilization of power: its dissemination, its management, and its maintenance. Realpolitik is about honestly admitting to this fact, not about instigating a revolution.
What about the rule of law? It is a natural derivative of Realpolitik because the state possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
But will not Realpolitik sacrifice niceties such as human and civil rights? Not necessarily and not always. But it will dispense summarily with the self-imputed right to intervene in the internal affairs of sovereigns. Let domestic power matrices within polities determine the local admixtures of the rights and obligations of the populace and the shape and functioning of their institutions.
By far the greatest impact of Realpolitik will be the pacification of international affairs. In a Realpolitik world, powers – global and regional – would recognize each other’s spheres of influence and rarely trespass for as long as overt, unambiguously signaled might be the regulating and organizing principle of international affairs.
Time to resurrect Henry Kissinger and the long line of wise statesmen who preceded him throughout history and who served as his intellectual inspiration.
Running parallel to a Realpolitik pragmatic philosophical makeover which is divorced from problematic notions of hoping for unifying morality or ideology as makeshift charters, is the advent of not just AI, but quantum computing, which may help us navigate tight quarters to truth. If technology advanced the end of the Enlightenment by revealing further social complexities, it's incumbent on it to chart our new path.
Current digital computer models simulate a mouse solving a maze out to the other side painstakingly and laboriously with trial and error in one-by-one scenarios. Quantum computing can solve the maze in the blink of an eye, simulating every trajectory virtually simultaneously to get to the correct escape from the maze. Accordingly, an emphasis put on the Enlightenment value of truth would still be critical for the very function of said technological progress.
Just as our current computer models are relatively primitive, human comprehension of the scale and magnitude of human and artificial perspectives is disorienting and discombobulating, as our collective ability to synthesize and make sense of information from multi-faceted perspectives is currently limited.
On December 8 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first CRISPR treatment for sickle cell disease. Perhaps with advances such as CRISPR and gene editing, we will be able to comprehend the incomprehensible and other vantage points for more empathy going forward if being empathetic continues to be upheld as a desirable value. If empathy is considered a drag and a drain on life force energy, we will double down on transactional interfaces with one another on an ad hoc basis, instead preferring fantastic spaces in the potentially more controllable and less demanding and draining cyber world — think video games meets the Metaverse.
The more alienated we are from each other and ourselves, the more empathy doesn't matter and a robotic lifestyle fits. The technological age lends itself to the solipsism of narcissism. By some measures, resistance is futile.
“The power of quantum computers compute on parallel universes. That's why they are so powerful.”
Michio Kaku, author of Quantum Supremacy: How the Quantum Computer Revolution Will Change Everything and renowned theoretical physicist, on tracking the computer revolution from analog to digital to the quantum era. Quantum computers hold immense promise because of their ability to tap into parallel universes, which boosts their computational power exponentially.
Quantum computing could revolutionize agriculture (creating efficient fertilizers), energy (achieving fusion energy), and medicine (modeling diseases at the molecular level). Last week, 60 Minutes reported, “The race between major tech companies and intelligence agencies to actualize this power is intense, as they could redefine industries and even global power structures if they succeed.”
Notwithstanding cybersecurity concerns, quantum computing may be illuminating a path forward for how our modern (Enlightenment-based) and postmodern mash-ups/paradigms aren't serving us any longer. Religion has failed us; the Age of Reason has failed us. Neither morality nor ideology are stable enough for a civilization to be perennial. The information age and the democratization of the Internet have transmogrified the social and cultural milieu. We are breaking at the seams of increasingly antiquated notions of reality.
Our new societal reality involves an artificial component that is also real, whether it's narcissistic abuse (shared fantasy), artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and beyond. We are conditioning ourselves to be more comfortable with hybrid reality and fantastic spaces. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. These computers will do computations that are inconceivable to us now and in hindsight will make the Enlightenment look 1950s quaint. The age of narcissism, as a liminal stage, is helping us acclimate to pseudo-realities or artificial realities.
Enlightenment-based, binary digital choices of ones and zeros are increasingly outdated. The world is more accurately reflected in quantum’s qubits. Instead of a circular object being viewed in a flat plain as a zero or one, up or down, qubits see objects more like a globe that spins all around in different directions. Qubits move our understanding of the dimensionality of problems to a heightened awareness.
In the meantime, darkness always precedes the light. Short of technology imminently intervening in a race against time, we are headed to a dark age where it's a battle of the wills of narcissistic collectives and next-stop psychopathic collectives.
For the time being, if we transition to a Realpolitik i.e., a pragmatic world that does not prioritize morality or ideology as a be-all and end-all, we would still be in the realm of rationality.
The idea of impending autocracy may provide an island of stability around which the culture wars and actual flesh and blood wars swirl. Autocracy holds appeal and suits a narcissistic populace of regressed masses embedded in a shared fantasy/psychosis. America is on the long march to autocracy with Trump as the narcissistic demigod for his childishly regressed flock. Ninety-one counts against him, two impeachments, an insurrection, and still he is the front runner for the Republican party to be the leader of the “free” world. There is no political will to pursue the ends of the Enlightenment’s justice; he has us in his cult leader's clutches of narcissistic abuse.
In this muddled modern/postmodern, post-truth world:
Diversity is Conformity. Equity is Inequity. Inclusion is Exclusion. “Anti-Racism” is Racism. “Anti-Fascism” is Fascism.
Author and Former Professor, Jed Rubenfeld
The liberal world order as a manifestation of the Enlightenment looks to be drawing to a close as predicated on our collective vulnerabilities to narcissism (and its accompaniment, techno-artifice) as outlined below in the six profiles of the types of people who gravitate to narcissists. These profiles are expanded upon here.
Six profiles of people who gravitate to narcissists:
Masochists— people who regard pain as desirable.
People with self-love deficiency or lack of self-love who experience vicarious self-love through the narcissist's gaze.
People who have had conflicted relationships with their, especially mother, but not only, mother or father, parental figure, who try to reenact the parental environment with the narcissist. Narcissists are great at being daddies, because they project authority, confidence, and trust, and so they're very misleading. Narcissism is false advertising.
People who prefer fantasy to reality and gravitate to the narcissist's offering of fantasy.
Someone who is himself or herself, narcissistic, grandiose, and garners narcissistic supply vicariously by proxy through the narcissist.
Codependents would be attracted to narcissists because narcissists are easily controlled from the bottom. Codependency is a control disorder; it's about controlling. It's about securing your needs, emotional and otherwise, by feigning or faking helplessness and neediness on a permanent basis. It's a form of emotional blackmail. Narcissists are easily emotionally blackmailed or manipulated. Narcissists are gullible as long as you offer them narcissistic supply. Narcissists are junkies.
Sam Vaknin goes on to say, “These six profiles cover 80 percent of it. But let it be clear, many healthy, balanced people are attracted to narcissists. It's not true that healthy, balanced people who are boundaried, strong, and resilient would never be attracted to narcissists. That's rank nonsense.”
It may just be that we retreat into the narcissistic womb, protected by the advances of quantum computing from the worst of what humanity has to offer. We've already been steadily outsourcing our humanity through technological and (anti)social change. Our narcissistic defenses have flared in the face of a technological revolution that threatens our collective sense of omnipotence and omniscience as superior primates. In many respects, narcissists, lacking the warm-blooded empathy that characterizes humans, are prototypes of artificial intelligence. We are well on our way to the future.
Resources:
Dave Rubin of “The Rubin Report talks to Bret Weinstein about the decline of enlightenment liberalism; if tribalism is Western Civilization’s future; why Western Civilization has been reversing course on racial equality; the missteps of the New Atheists and the challenge of reconciling past wisdom with modern problems; the societal consequences of rapid progressivism; the arbitrary nature and pointlessness of a lot of our education; the unintended impacts of discarding established norms; the human tendency to focus on immediate problems while avoiding thoughtful analysis to avoid unintended chaos; the need for a balanced approach that respects both conservative and progressive instincts in societal evolution; Elon Musk's unexpected role in the Twitter free speech battle; his personal meeting with Musk and Musk’s subsequent blocking him; the challenges faced by individuals with strengths like courage and insight but who struggle to collaborate effectively; and much more.
FIRE president Greg Lukianoff joins Bill Maher to discuss the standard for free expression on college campuses.
Companies and countries are in a race to develop quantum computers. The machines could revolutionize problem-solving in medicine, physics, chemistry and engineering.
Excellent, full of interesting ideas. I need to read it several times.
Not a fan of Rick Rubin or Brett Weinstein’s pontificating. I say this because near the beginning, Rick Rubin had interrupted a crucial inspired moment where Weinstein was touching on something really poignant but was shut down and the opportunity to say whatever it was that he was developing, was then gone.