As he recorded himself in his writings on the Gulag Archipelago, when the noted Russian writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about the tenner he had received as a Soviet Army officer for making a joke about the notoriously touchy dictator Josef Stalin, he noted that he and others recognized how foolish it was to make such a joke. Not coming from a tradition where free speech, including the freedom to make critical and even insulting speech of rulers, Solzhenitsyn and his other Russian associates assumed that it was to be expected that a dictator would punish the free speech of those people unfortunate to be under his control. In such circumstances having the voice of a censor can be the difference between living the best life possible under horrible circumstances and a life-changing utterance.

I think, if we look closely, that a great many people are used to needing the voice of a censor, but that such people are likely in what we would consider to be highly abusive situations. We have commented that authoritarian governments and dictatorships–even elected dictatorships like the UK at present–are routinely so insecure about their power and the way that they cannot properly rule for the best interests of their own people that abridgment of the freedom of speech is a routine occurrence. We see the same sort of situation at play in the routine denial of the freedom of speech for unpopular speech within communities where damage to person and property can be the result of political speech that runs hostile to local groupthink, within companies that have draconian speech practices that view true and honest speech as being hateful towards privileged and insecure co-workers, or within schools to students who are not judged as possessing freedom of speech at all, even to the university level where protests and violence can be directed at speech that is hostile to the contemporary anti-white (and especially anti-Semitic) left. One also gets the same sort of treatment in abusive families where speech that is hostile to a violent person can lead to that violence being directed at the offending party. In such situations, having the voice of a censor can be a life and death matter, as far too few people are willing to stand for the right to say things to powerful people that they do not want to hear.

When we think about people having the voice of a censor inside of them, it is worthwhile to consider what exactly the censoring voice is cautioning someone not to speak or write. Some people are governed by rather strict principles as to what sort of speech is proper to say. Such people may, for example, limit their speech to whatever they view as good and noble. In practice, though, it can often be difficult for people to interpret such standards of behavior properly, for a large amount of speech or writing that is critical can be noble and good, so long as it falls into the proper sort of rebuke and correction. It is intensely hypocritical, though, to view oneself as having the right to criticize others but not being able to deal with other people being critical of oneself. In practice, people can be reluctant to say negative things to those who they know are unable to take it well, as casting one’s pearls of wisdom before swine is a useless, unprofitable, and dangerous task that is best to avoid. Sometimes people judge it necessary to remain silent about those things that bother them in order to maintain a relationship just as others may feel it necessary to remain silent in order to preserve a job or preserve one’s freedom in lands where posting or even liking the wrong meme can lead to a jail sentence. Even where speech is free, there are personal consequences for free speech that some people sensibly wish to avoid.

Even where curtailing one’s speech is the sensible thing to do, there are costs for it. Those of us who seek to cultivate our creative abilities often find it very difficult to maintain the flow of words when one is continually having to censor them for various reasons. I recently thought it might be good to discuss the etiology of the diabetic conditions I have had to deal with over the past few years, looking at the origins of such issues long before the blood sugar levels raised to a place of concern. Upon thinking about it, though, I was concerned that in a climate such as our own that such self-disclosure, even if it was meant to provide some sort of anecdotal and qualitative discussion of an important issue, could be a problem of oversharing and that such information as I disclosed could be used by others against me. This sort of analysis can easily expand well-beyond those subjects that are obviously problematic to the point where it becomes difficult to have speech that is beyond requests and bare pleasantries. Let us hope, though, that even if the voice of the censor does reduce the flow of words and the amount that gets written or said, that what is left is worthwhile at least to read and to listen to.