The Costs of Suppressing Free Thought

Qian Yin

Dr. Hélène Landemore

POLS0820D: Freedom

7 November 2008

 

Thoughts are powerful. Individuals act upon their opinions; countries are designed according to political theories – thoughts shape the world. Theoretically, if we can all be guided by truths and abstain from the damage that a blinded opinion does to both the society and our mental well being, we would all be better off. Consequently some people think that thoughts should be controlled; by prohibiting the false opinions and protecting the true ones, we live a better life. John Stuart Mill does not agree, evidenced by his claim that “suppressing free thought often hurts the suppressors more than the suppressed”. It is not possible to accurately measure whether the suppressor or the suppressed is more severely hurt, but Mill’s argument shows that the negative effect of suppressing free thought is so great to the suppressor that it does the opposite of fulfilling the suppressor’s primary goal – it does not promote the truths, and also impairs the suppressor’s mental well being.

As is presented above, the act of suppressing certain thoughts is based upon the judgment that some beliefs are true and do not need to be contested. Yet according to Mill, this is a judgment never to be made. History has seen too many examples of once widely accepted and firmly insisted beliefs later proved wrong. For example, ancient people understood the earth to be the center of the universe, and the sun as another moon, until the establishment and prevalence of the heliocentric theory. During the thousands of years when China was under a despotic monarchy, every subject accepted that the rule of a monarch was absolute and supreme, until the light of the modern era revealed that a people have the right to rule themselves. An opinion, however firmly believed, is based on what men know about the world at a certain point of time. Yet as the world changes, and people’s knowledge of the world increases, an opinion safely held today can be shaken tomorrow because of a new discovery or a new situation that people find themselves in. So long as we cannot claim that we know every single fact about the world and can correctly predict its move, we are not in the position to assume any belief infallible. Mill claims that, “the beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded” (23). It is only when a belief is examined with all the current knowledge and contested by everything that can be said against it, yet still remain standing, that we can rely on it. Therefore, the suppressors of free thought, holding certain beliefs unchallengeable, are not protecting the truths, but damaging the ground on which they can be regarded as truths. As they silence their opponents, they silence those who are most likely to point out the possible mistakes of the theory, or the possible improvements that can be made. If their belief is false, no one is allowed to tell them so. What can be more dangerous than putting oneself under the guide of a false judgment? The suppressors of free thought take a high risk of doing that.

But apart from the harm that the suppressors may do to themselves when they are directed by a false belief, suppressing free thought harms them even if the belief they hold is “true”. One thing to be noticed here is that, simply claiming to hold a belief does not necessarily mean understanding it. For instance, people may claim that the international community should intervene in genocides happening in other countries; however, what they mean with this opinion is very different from the same belief of a scholar who has spent twenty years studying the legitimacy of humanitarian intervention. People often state things that they hear as their own opinion before even comprehending the full meanings. And establishing certain beliefs as infallible truths and prohibiting any opinion made against them will encourage such behavior, because in order to be right, people do not even need to think about what is right. Mill points out that “he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that” (38). Being confronted with an opponent’s opinion is an indispensible part of the process of understanding a belief. As an example, consider an opinion about lying. Suppose that as a child, a man is told that he should never lie. For either the reason that it is stated by his parents – the supreme authorities who are never wrong about anything – or that he fears the possible punishment following a transgression of the statement, he abides by it and adopts it as his belief. Suppose the doctrine that people should never lie is established as infallible, and there’s no room for contradiction against it. He will then never need to think about the grounds for such a doctrine. But if he is exposed to the utilitarian view that under certain circumstances, when a lie can save a person’s life for example, lying is acceptable, can he still firmly insist in his belief? He cannot, until he comes up with an argument to rebut the view. He may draw on Kant’s theory and claim that lying is unacceptable because it cannot be universally applicable and results in contradiction in conceivability. When he does so, the belief that people should never lie has a completely different meaning for him. As Mill points out, it is when he tries to rebut a contradiction that he “possess[es] himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty” (38). Therefore, when supporters of a certain belief manage to eliminate all the contradicting opinions, by doing so they impair their own understanding of it.

One may claim that as long as everyone holds the truth, it does not seem to matter whether they understand it or not. Mill argues, however, “not only the grounds of the opinion are forgotten in the absence of discussion, but too often the meaning of the opinion itself” (40), and thus the opinion cannot effectively guide people’s actions. As has been argued above, the process of understanding an opinion is a process of being challenged by contradictions and rebutting them. People who are against an opinion have their reasons for being so: they know the difficulties of carrying out the opinion and the negative effects that follow. A man who is never exposed to these reasons is thus ignorant of the obstacles. When he encounters these obstacles in experience, he either insists on his belief and goes through the painful process of finding ways to overcome the obstacles, or in many cases, is overcome by the obstacles and though not allowed to deny the belief expressively, gives it up in practice. In modern China, it is printed in the middle school textbooks that “China is a democratic country”, but both in and beyond the school, a thorough discussion of this topic is officially prohibited. As the word “democracy” prevails in official or unofficial talks concerning politics, it is in effect equated with being “good” and “right” whenever spoken of. But can we say the country is democratic because of the universal “belief” in democracy? It is hard to give an affirmative answer if we consider the fact that many citizens do not even know when the election day comes. Without discussion, people are deprived of the essential means of understanding the meaning of democracy. How can they possibly carry out its principles in practice? To believe in a creed is to believe its validity in the context of its possible difficulties, otherwise it is easily abandoned in the face of reality. Opposing opinions, which point out the underlying problems of a creed, are thus desirable. By suppressing free thought, supporters of a belief harm themselves most severely in that they tend to “forget all of the belief except the formularies” (41), and the belief they try to protect loses its value in that it does not serve as a guide of people’s behavior.

Mill discusses one more kind of harm, less obvious but by no means insignificant – the harm done “to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy” (34-35). An unchallengeable belief established is like a dictated answer to a math problem, and not necessarily a true one. With it, the process of working out the problem is no longer a journey of free exploration, but a struggle of fitting into the existing answer. Most unfortunate are those who, given a wrong answer, work out the right one using their intelligence. The inconsistency between the natural outcome of their thinking and the sacred belief that must be true causes confusion and pain. To solve this problem, they either spend endless effort looking for a way to reconcile these incompatible two, or beaten by the great pain, deny the validity of their reasoning and refrain from the use of their mind. This is when, as Mill points out, “the entire moral courage of the human mind” (34) is sacrificed.

Suppressors of free thought do harm to themselves in more than one sense: they take higher risk of insisting on mistakes; they move away from their initial goal of promoting a certain belief; and they impair their mental well being, including both intellectual development and moral courage. Mill’s argument reveals that, a genuine belief is never generated in a state of pacification and non-conflict; it comes into being along a man’s way of encountering the difficulties of life and looking for solutions to them. Discussion is valuable, because it allows us to share our experiences and ideas with each other, making it possible for us to consider the difficulties without paying the prices encountering them in practice.

Works Cited

Mill, John Stuart. The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill. New York: Modern Library,

2002.