Recently he commented as follows ...
1. Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing
2. But if pushed too far it results in anarchy
3. And anarchy always results in tyranny
This is worth thinking about.
While it seems utterly paradoxical that this should be the case, history bears ample evidence to what Dr McGilchrist is saying.
So, if there were to be boundaries to free speech, what would these be, who would decide them, and who would police them?
I suspect that when the free speech of some, impedes the free speech of others, allowing for only a very few exceptions, and when this becomes a matter of course, the tipping point may have been reached.
Ultimately, in the absence of any sort of recalibration, tyranny is a distinctly likely outcome.
It does seem paradoxical that free speech is self-sustaining only for as long as, in its purest state, the free speech of some is bounded by the free speech of others, and that insight and potential lie only in good faith engagement at the interface between opposing ideas, and not beyond them.
The concept of hate speech, with its pathological preoccupation with the silencing of others, is thus, by its very nature, antithetical to free speech.
Every psychotherapist worth their salt knows that most dysfunction arises, at its root, from a war between two opposing voices, and that only in the integration of both, not anihilation, of one or another of these opposing voices, can a person be reconciled.
Such with society at large.
The price paid when one idea (or set of ideas) can be advanced only at the expense of another idea (or set of ideas) is huge, perhaps immeasurably huge.
When this is standard practice within our universities, as it is, when it is practised by self interested politicians, as it is, and when it is enabled routinely by the mainstream media, as it is, we should be concerned.
And there can be no doubt where this ultimately ends.
Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.
1 comment:
Amokura Kawharu, Claudia Geiringer and Geof Shirtcliffe run the Law Commission, which was once the country’s legal brain.
Now it’s the Ministry of Make-Believe. Their latest project – classing “persistent misgendering” as discrimination – isn’t law reform; it’s a pantomime scripted by Twitter activists and delivered by public-sector mandarins in hemp lanyards.
First they coo that nobody will be criminalised. Then, with the next breath, they hint that repeated refusal to use someone’s “preferred pronouns” could see you up before a tribunal. Translation: if you don’t chant the correct slogans, HR will crush you like a bug. Schools will gag debate, employers will pre-emptively gag staff, and everyone will speak in trembling, focus-grouped euphemisms.
This isn’t anti-discrimination. It’s compelled speech with a smiley face. It takes a belief system – gender identity ideology – and elevates it above biological reality, enforced with civil penalties and career-ending complaints. Parliament junked its hate-speech plan after public backlash; the Commission simply drove a bulldozer through the back fence.
And the consequences? Picture a country where people whisper pronouns like Cold War dissidents and workplace policy reads like a hostage note. Where the law is no longer a referee but a lifestyle coach with a clipboard and a rainbow sticker. Caleb Anderson warned about this tipping point: when free speech becomes one-way traffic, tyranny arrives wearing a diversity lanyard and sipping a flat white.
A serious Law Commission would ask how this affects pluralism, education and workplace sanity. Instead, it’s playing ideological SimCity with the national culture. This isn’t reform – it’s social engineering dressed up as “inclusion,” with ordinary New Zealanders as the guinea pigs.
If this Trojan horse succeeds, we won’t need a hate-speech law as Ani O’Brien notes.
We’ll already have an army of tribunal clerks acting as speech police, punishing heresy and frightening everyone else into obedience. It’s a vibe experiment on a national scale, with our freedoms as the lab rats.
And we’ll have self-identity ruling the roost in women’s sport, and all their safe places.
And when it all collapses under its own absurdity, the Law Commissioners will shrug and move on to the next fashionable crusade – leaving the rest of us trying to glue our liberties back together like a dropped flat-screen TV.
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