While I am by no means an extremist when it comes to libertarianism in such ways as free speech, as a somewhat outspoken and well-traveled writer I am certainly familiar with the awkwardness and unpleasantness that results from living in areas where one simply cannot express one’s thoughts and beliefs and opinions freely.  When we look at the problem of censorship, one of the key aspects of censorship in repressive regimes (and such regimes are not uncommon in our contemporary world) is that of self-censorship, by which people avoid expressing what they believe or think for fear of retribution as a survival instinct in unfriendly territory.  What makes this matter somewhat problematic as both an outspoken writer and someone who tends to think rather seriously about the nature of coercion is that the subjective feeling of being unsafe that leads one to self-censor is not itself a sign of an objectively coercive environment.  It is a sign that creative people of one kind or another feel unsafe, but that feeling may or may not be just.  It is not the end of an investigation of coercive environments, but a beginning, a starting point to an investigation.

Let us therefore begin.  In what kind of environments do generally mild-mannered but expressive and outspoken people feel unsafe?  A conservative young person goes off to college and quickly finds out that the professorial class of most universities is extremely leftist, to the point where that student feels it necessary to tone done his or her own views so as not to suffer penalties for speaking against the professor’s own political worldview.  This is not an uncommon experience, and it is one I have personal experience in (more on that below).  There are other occasions where safety is an even more problematic matter.  As a blogger, for example, I have traveled to a great many countries and written about them.  In some of those occasions I felt particularly unsafe as a blogger with a somewhat acerbic approach to writing about the politics of other countries as well as geopolitics in general.  Two examples should suffice.  In one case, for example, I found myself having a somewhat frosty conversation with a member of the Thai Royal Police who reminded me to obey the law, and it was clear that he was concerned about my writing violating strict Thai laws concerning lese majeste [1].  In another case, my mother was particularly insistent that I not blog while I was in Moscow’s airport for fear of running afoul of Russia’s rather brutal and creative forms of dealing with outspoken independent writers [2].  In both of these situations, self-censorship was a real problem because behaving according to my usual habits of writing prolifically and being observant and somewhat sardonic about what I saw and experienced could be fatal to my freedom and perhaps even my life.

We can see therefore a fairly wide range of situations where self-censorship may be an issue.  On the one hand, we find a case where one’s enjoyment of the privileges of being parts of institutions can lead one to engage in self-censorship because one knows that speaking honestly and openly will result in unpleasant consequences.  This is certainly the case, for example, when dealing with universities or churches, which tend to employ people whose habits of public speaking makes their own views about contentious subjects rather plain and obvious, and is also the case in the corporate world where company rules and regulations often express a distaste of harming corporate profits by propounding unpopular political opinions.  On the other hand, though, we have a case where even the act of being a mostly obscure blogger who is by no means a political radical can be in danger simply for writing about the military and political history of a given area with a critical perspective.  Self-censorship can result from the desire to avoid unpleasant repercussions in institutions one wishes to be a part of for one’s own personal benefit or from the very understandable desire to avoid government harassment up to and including imprisonment, exile, and death.  Let us not forget, after all, that the great Russian writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned for ten years in the Soviet gulag archipelago for writing some sarcastic (and likely entertaining) jokes about the folly of one Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and having these jokes read by some not very appreciative censors.  Likewise, violating lese majeste laws in Thailand (which is not very difficult for a critical writer to do) can lead to jail sentences of up to 15 years.

The sanctions that institutions and governments can theoretically enforce on people who provide unpopular opinions about contentious subjects, even if rarely enforced, serve as a curb on the expressiveness of those who possess unpopular opinions.  I know I do, as my own social media feeds are generally full of witty and somewhat barbed comments that express my own critical attitudes towards conventional folly and my own cynical view about politics, often expressed in meme form.  Subjectively, though, the awareness or fear of such coercion tends to lead to self-censorship as a sign of mistrust.  Someone who engages in self-censorship is telling oneself that the environment is unsafe and that authority figures in government or other institutions simply cannot handle or appreciate the truth about what one thinks or feels or believes.  We may not know this to be the case, but we fear it to be the case and act accordingly.  One time as an undergraduate student, for example, I took a course on Arts & Letters on the literature of Los Angeles that was taught by an obviously leftist professor.  Now, I am not a particularly leftist person (not something that should shock anyone who has read anything I have said anywhere about politics) but I found much to my pleasure that the professor enjoyed opinions that were different than his own as long as they were expressed in a thoughtful and reasonable way, which is not particularly difficult for me to manage.  He simply enjoyed seeing what other people had to say about various questions relating to the literature we were reading.  Had I chosen to self-censor myself, I would have missed a great many opportunities to express my own genuine thoughts and opinions about literature relating to the city where I happened to be living as a college student, and would have been the poorer for having assumed that leftists always engage in coercive censorship, even if they often do.

What is to be done about such a situation though?  If one is a part of an authority in a government or institution that does not want other people to censor themselves out of fear and distrust, one must go out of one’s way to demonstrate an interest in the ideas of others even when they conflict or differ from one’s own.  Additionally, one must be very obvious and open about providing means for anonymous feedback of a critical nature that is to be genuinely respected and even taken to heart.  What other people have to say about us is often painful and unpleasant to hear or read, but it gives us a good understanding of how our behavior affects others who do not have the benefit of knowing our constraints or intentions.  On the other hand, how is one to deal with the risk of coercive behavior on the part of authorities?  One of the ways of testing out whether those who disagree are being coercive or not is for people to band together and to seek out those who are brave among such dissident groups to serve as test cases to determine the existence or extent of repression that will fall upon those who dissent from the views of those in power in a given government or institution.  This provides enough information that the rest can engage in such behavior as is necessary to preserve their own personal integrity, be it exile or underground samizdat writing, or a complex pattern of having some of one’s creativity be in official and some in unofficial channels, depending on the situation.  And if it is our awareness of judgment by God that leads us to censor ourselves and restrain our conduct, is that such a bad thing after all?  Sometimes we do not need to express or act on everything that is inside of us, because not all of those things are in fact good things.  But that is a subject for another time.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012/07/05/please-remember-to-obey-the-law/

[2] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/10/14/into-a-void-of-silence/