- Evolution refutes PC-speak as justified belief. There is no royal road to truth or virtue. PC-speak, a product of evolved minds, is as fallible as a tree root in the desert sand. Unlike the tree, we can discuss ideas within free speech.
- PC-Speak and Identity Politics are the Enemies of Civilisation.
Reason and Liberty and the advance of civilization, what Karl Popper called the "Open Society", are under threat from the mental and legal straight-jackets of PC-Speak and Identity Politics. This Medusa of delusional leftism presumes a special status as a source of knowledge. Fundamentally justified, outside discussion, it turns even ordinary conversation into paranoid timidity or stone-cold silence.
All progress depends on competing theories and therefore disagreement. But we cannot know in advance where the next good idea will come from, and hence disagreement - offensive or not - must be completely free to grow spontaneously. To do otherwise is like stamping on a flower because one is offended by its intermediate form. Some marvelous destinations of thought might be reached only via paths with unpleasant sections. To enjoy the fruits of untrammeled progress - in the arts, engineering, science, technology and ethics - we must throw off the shackles of PC-Thought control and embrace full free speech. (Of course, free speech doesn't mean we've forgotten about tact or politeness - something that the SJWs, perhaps obsessed with hair-trigger-happy social-media apps and the precept that all social life is political, do indeed seem to have forgotten.)
But to abandon these partly self-imposed constraints of PC-Speak we need a powerful new way of conceiving the growth of knowledge: critical rationalism. This shows us that our knowledge is a form of fallible evolutionary adaptation continuous with that observable in all life.
Critical rationalism is the best frame of argumentation to defend civilization and progress because, unlike coercion, it can only be used optimally in a peaceful, cooperative and libertarian context, and because it presupposes not only that argument may be valid, but that it can make a difference precisely because it is valid.
Popper stressed that with language, we can place our theories outside of our biology and our minds - they have a life of their own and can die in our stead. We can discuss our proposals theories etc independently of questions of identity. This extends beyond theories to all our creations. They all have an alienated aspect to them once we give birth to them. Popper uses the example of music to explore this. His position (see Unended Quest) is that music, even though it is an expression of the composer's condition (psychology, feelings etc), is also an autonomous structure that may, at least to some degree and more interestingly, be analyzed and evaluated independently of the composer's biography.
Popper is also famous for having killed the idea that we can prove or justify our positions, first in science by trouncing the method of induction and then, with William Warren Bartley, David Miller, his students, and others, more broadly by showing that justification is a self-undermining chimera. All knowledge is produced by a process of conjecture and refutation, seen in a rudimentary form in all life, but refined in science by this alienating use of language.
I emphasized in the documentary that this perspective undermines the fashion of placing sensitive discussions within the frame of group identity also - races, national, religious, and other types of collectives. It's important to emphasize this as such framing is bound to aggravate tensions and conflict unnecessarily.
Perhaps the four urgent and important points of Liberty Loves Reason are:
1. "Identity Politics" confuses people and their ideas, and aggravates tensions and conflict, while retarding the fruitful critical discussion that promises at least the possibility of more peaceful and productive cooperation between people in the long-run.
2. "Political Correctness" is a stealth tactic to suppress free speech about issues of great sensitivity, but that is exactly where one needs free speech the most.
3. There are no (justified) systematic criteria for distinguishing between fake news and real news, just as there is no such justified method (or even fallible general criterion) for distinguishing truth and falsity in general. What I'm saying is that you cannot entrust this to a set of rules and a specific institution or ministry. Any alleged definitions of such can only be opportunistic and special-interest guided. They are thus perfect tools for, as you say, "taking unfair advantage of people." And to "disrespect those who have less power."
4. Similarly, there is no (justified) systematic criteria for identifying what is "politically correct" or "hate speech".
For me, these are immediate ramifications of Critical Rationalism, a refreshingly new way of looking at the growth of knowledge and progress.
(By the way, if you have worked or lived in communities outside of the political elite, you will know that most people think of free speech as "ordinary conversation.", and never think of consulting a politician on how to be polite or tactful.)
Let's give truth a chance in the peaceful, but ruthlessly critical competition of ideas. All progress depends on the growth of knowledge; all growth of knowledge depends on spontaneous disagreement; spontaneous disagreement requires free speech. Let the flowers and weeds of thought grow. We can only tell which is which after they have grown. We can then choose the flowers.
"Truth has not so little light as not to be perceived through the darkness of falsehoods."
Galileo Galilei. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.
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