#readwise # Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech  ## Metadata - Author: [[Lex Fridman Podcast]], [[Greg Lukianoff]] - Full Title: Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/cc1ef275-4ad1-4342-a33c-7fea48439c50 ## Highlights ### Cancel Culture Definition - Cancel culture is defined as the act of getting people fired or deplatformed for speech normally protected by the First Amendment. - A climate of fear has resulted from this, especially on campuses from 2014, where one can lose their job for having the wrong opinion. Transcript Lex Fridman Let's start with the big question. What is cancel culture? Now, you've said that you don't like the term as it's been, quote, dragged through the mud and abused endlessly by a whole host of controversial figures. Nevertheless, we have the term. What is it? Greg Lukianoff Cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns, especially successful campaigns, starting around 2014 to get people fired, expelled, deplatformed, etc., for speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment. And I say 'would be protected' because we're talking about circumstances in which it isn't necessarily where the First Amendment applies, i.e. things you couldn't lose your job as a public employee for. And also the climate of fear that's resulted from that phenomena, the fact that you can lose your job for having the wrong opinion. ^nrft8z And it wasn't subtle that there was an uptick in this, particularly on campus around 2014. John Ronson wrote a book called So You've Been Publicly Shamed. It came out in 2015, already documenting this phenomena. I wrote a book called Freedom from Speech in 2014. But it really was in 2017 when you started seeing this be directed at professors. And when it comes to the number of professors that we've seen, you know, be targeted and lose their jobs, I've been doing this for 22 years and I've seen nothing like it. ([Time 0:10:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c8b86d27-4ee0-4a44-bc22-107720007cff)) --- ### Freedom of Speech and Ignorance - Freedom of speech is tied to epistemology, acknowledging our limited knowledge and self-deception. - The enlightenment was the discovery of ignorance, essential for the scientific revolution and political developments. Transcript Greg Lukianoff I think that for those of us who are really, you know, who've devoted our lives to freedom of speech, one thing that we are into, whether we know it or not, is epistemology, you know, the study and philosophy of knowledge. Freedom of speech has lots of moral and philosophical dimensions, but from a pragmatic standpoint, it is necessary because we're creatures of incredibly limited knowledge. We are incredibly self-deceiving. I always love the fact that Yuval Harari refers to the enlightenment as the discovery of ignorance, because that's exactly what it was. It was suddenly being like, wow, hold on a second. All this incredibly interesting folk wisdom we got, which by the way, can be surprisingly reliable here and there, when you start testing a lot of it is nonsense and it doesn't hold up. Even our ideas about the way things fall, you know, as Galileo established, like even our intuitions, they're just wrong. And so a lot of the early history of freedom of speech, it was happening at the same time as sort of the scientific revolution. So a lot of the early debates about freedom of speech were tied in. So certainly Galileo, you know, I always point out like Kepler was probably like the even more radical idea that there weren't even perfect spheres. But at the same time, largely because of the invention of the printing press, you also had all these political developments. And, you know, I always talk about Jan Hus, you know, from the famous Czech hero who was burned at the stake and I think in 1419. But he was basically Luther before the printing press. Before Luther could get his word out, he didn't stand a chance, and that was exactly what Jan Hus was. But a century later, thanks to the printing press, everyone could know what Luther thought, and boy, did they. But it led to, of course, this completely crazy, hyper-disrupted period in European history. ([Time 0:13:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/39db37fd-172b-4fda-ba9e-110c42d5d239)) --- ### Expressive Association - Consider the societal implications if every business becomes an expressive association. This could lead to self-censorship for fear of job loss. - Initial reactions to cancel culture often stop at acknowledging employers' rights, but a deeper, more serious consideration is needed. Transcript Greg Lukianoff If someone loses their job simply for their political opinion, even if that employer has every right in the world to fire you. I'm not making a legal case that maybe you shouldn't fire someone for their political opinion. But think that through. Like, what kind of society do we want to live in? Yes, I will defend business', First Amendment rights of association to be able to have the legal right to decide who works for them, but from a moral or philosophical matter, if you think through the implications of if every business in America becomes an expressive association in addition to being a profit-maximizing organization, that would be a disaster for democracy because you would end up in a situation where people would actually be saying to themselves 'I don't think I can actually say what I really think and still believe I can keep my job.' ^2ulujm And that's where I was worried. I felt like we were headed because a lot of the initial response to people getting canceled was very simply, you know, oh, but they have the right to get rid of this person. And that's the beginning and end of the discussion. And I thought that was a dodge. I thought that wasn't actually a very serious way that if you care about both the First Amendment and freedom of speech of thinking it through. ([Time 0:19:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d17a1f12-c63f-4402-9ed9-647aa43137f7)) --- ### Free Speech Culture - Free speech law reflects cultural norms, particularly in common law countries. - A culture that doesn't value free speech philosophically cannot protect it legally in the long term. Transcript Greg Lukianoff I talk about countries that have good free speech law, but not necessarily great free speech culture. **And I talk about how when we sometimes make this distinction between free speech law and free speech culture, we're thinking in a very cloudy kind of way. And what I mean by that is that law is generally – particularly in a common law country, it's the reflection of norms. Those judges are people too and in a lot of cases, common law is supposed to actually take our intuitive ideas of fairness and place them into the law. So if you actually have a culture that doesn't appreciate free speech from a philosophical standpoint, it's not going to be able to protect free speech for the long haul even in the law.** Because eventually – that's one of the reasons why I worry so much about some of these terrible cases coming out of law schools. Because I fear that even though, sure, American First Amendment law is very strongly protective of First Amendment, for now, it's not going to stay that way if you have generations of law students graduating who actually think there's nothing, there's no higher goal than shouting down you're an opponent. ([Time 0:21:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a3b59451-8068-44f3-9bc5-c496ca5ac761)) ^j7du6n --- ### Administrator's Role in Campus Shout-Downs - Student shout-downs are often supported or coordinated by university administrators. Investigate administrative involvement whenever campus shout-downs occur. Transcript Greg Lukianoff Well, here's the dirty little secret about the big change in 2014. And Fire and me and Haidt have been very clear that the big change that we saw on campus was that for most of my career, students were great on freedom of speech. They were the best constituency for free speech absolutely unambiguously until about 2013, 2014. Kind of sad for us experience where suddenly students were the ones advocating for deplatforming and new speech codes, kind of in a similar way that they had been doing in, say, like the mid-80s, for example. But here's the dirty little secret. It's not just the students. It's students and administrators, sometimes only a handful of them, though, working together to create some of these problems. ^rt2e56 And this was exactly what happened at Stanford when Kyle Duncan, a Fifth Circuit judge, tried to speak at my alma mater and a fifth of the class showed up to shout him down. It was a real showing of what was going on that 10 minutes into the shout down of a Fifth Circuit judge – and I keep on emphasizing that because I'm a constitutional lawyer. Fifth Circuit judges are big deals. They're one level below the Supreme Court. About a fifth of the school shows up to shout him down. After 10 minutes of shouting him down, an administrator, a DEI administrator gets up with a prepared speech that she's written. That's a seven-minute long speech where she talks about free speech, maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And we were at this law school where people could learn to challenge these norms. So it's clear that there was coordination, you know, amongst some of these administrators. And from talking to students there, they were in meetings, extensive meetings for a long time. They show up, do a shout down, then they take an additional seven minutes to lecture the speaker on free speech not being – the juice of free speech not being worth the squeeze. And then for the rest of it, it's just constant heckling after she leaves. Something very similar happened a number of times at Yale where it was very clearly administrators were helping along with a lot of these disruptions. So I think every time there is a shout down at a university, the investigation should be first and foremost, did administrators help create this problem? Did they do anything to stop it? Because I think a lot of what's really going on here is the hyper-bureaucratation of universities with a lot more ideological people who think of their primary job as basically like policing speech more or less. They're encouraging students who have opinions they like to do shout-downs. And that's why they really need to investigate this. And it is at Stanford, the administrator who gave the prepared remarks about the juice not being worth the squeeze, she has not been invited back to Stanford. But she's one of the only examples I can think of when these things happen a lot, where an administrator clearly facilitated something that was a shout down or deplatforming or resulted In a professor getting fired or resulted in a student getting expelled, where the administrator has got off scot-free or probably in some cases even gotten a promotion. ([Time 0:43:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fe7dd1d6-3af7-4dbe-801f-80cb2fe7167a)) --- ### Self-Censorship Among Professors - 90% of professors self-censor due to fear of expressing controversial views. This chilling effect on speech is historically significant, potentially exceeding the Red Scare era. Transcript Greg Lukianoff Yeah, I mean, when you ask professors about, you know, are they intimidated under the current environment, the answer is yes. And particularly conservative professors, you know, already, you know, reporting that they're, you know, afraid for their jobs in a lot of different cases. ^y29cmw Lex Fridman You have a lot of good statistics in the book, things like self-censorship. When provided with the definition of self-censorship, at least a quarter of students said they self-censor fairly often or very often during conversations with other students, With professors, and during classroom discussions. 25%, 27%, and 28% respectively. A quarter of students also said that they are more likely to self-censor on campus now at the time they were surveyed than they were when they first started college. So college is of instilling this idea of censorship, self-censorship. Greg Lukianoff And back to the Red Scare comparison, and this is one of the interesting things about the data as well, is that that same study that I was talking about, the most comprehensive study of The Red Scare, there was polling about whether or not professors were self-censoring due to the fear of the environment. And 9% of professors said that they were self-censoring their research and what they were saying. 9% is really bad. That's almost a tenth of professors saying that their speech was chilled. When we did this question for professors on our latest faculty survey, when you factor together, if they're self-censoring in their research, are they self-censoring in class? Are they self-censoring online, etc.? It's 90% of professors. So the idea that we're actually in an environment that is historic in terms of how scared people are actually of expressing controversial views, I think that it's the reason why we're going to actually be studying this in 50 years, the same way we study the Red Scare. The idea that this isn't happening will just be correctly viewed as insane. ^agnvch ([Time 1:30:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dcf9d479-af3d-4077-baa8-44b3b2d98a39)) --- ### The Illusion of Banning Hate Speech - Banning speech because it is offensive is too subjective and gives the government a vast weapon to use against its citizens. - Censoring people only encourages them to share their opinions with like-minded individuals, leading to group polarization and radicalization. Transcript Greg Lukianoff Hate speech is the best marketing campaign for censorship. And it came from academia of the 20th century. And that when I talked about the anti-free speech movement, that was one of their first inventions. There was a lot of talk about critical race theory and being against critical race theory. And FIRE will sue if you say that people can't advocate for it or teach it or research it, because you do absolutely have the right to pursue it academically. However, every time someone mentions CRT, they should also say the very first project of the people who founded CRT, Richard Delgado, Mary Matsuda, et cetera, was to create this new category of unprotected speech called hate speech and to get it banned. The person who enabled this drift, of course, was Herbert Marcuse in 1965, you know, basically questioning whether or not free speech should be a sacred value on the left. And he was on the losing side for a really long time. The liberals, you know, the way I grew up, that was basically being pro-free speech was synonymous with being a liberal. But that started to be etched away on campus. And the way it was, was with the idea of hate speech, that essentially, oh, but we can designate particularly bad speech as not protected. And who's going to enforce it? Who's going to decide what hate speech actually is? Well, it's usually overwhelmingly can only happen in an environment of really low viewpoint diversity because you have to actually agree on what the most hateful and wrong things Are. And there's a bedrock principle. It's referred to this in a great case about flag burning in the First Amendment that I think all the world could benefit from. You can't ban speech just because it's offensive. It's too subjective. It basically, it's one of the reasons why these kind of codes have been more happily adopted in places like Europe where they have a sense that there's like a modal German or a modal Englishman. I think this is offensive, and therefore, I can say that this is wrong. In a more multicultural, in a genuinely more diverse country that's never actually had an honest thought that there is a single kind of American, there's never been – like we had the Idea of Uncle Sam, but that was always kind of a joke. Boston always knew it wasn't. Richmond always knew it wasn't. Georgia always knew it wasn't Alaska. Like we've always been a hodgepodge. And we get in a society that diverse that you can't ban things simply because they're offensive. And that's one of the reasons why hate speech is not an unprotected category of speech. My theory on freedom of speech is slightly different than most other constitutional lawyers. And I think that's partially because some of the ways, some of these theories, although a lot of them are really good, are inadequate. They're not expansive enough. And I sometimes call my theory the pure informational theory of freedom of speech. Or sometimes when I want to be fancy, the lab and the looking glass theory. And its most important tenet is that if the goal is the project of human knowledge, which is to know the world as it is, you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think. And what people really think is an incredibly important fact to know. So every time you're actually saying 'you can't say that,' you're actually depriving yourself of the knowledge of what people really think. ^bv23wu You're causing what Timur Karan, who's on our board of advisors, calls preference falsification. You end up with an inaccurate picture of the world. Which by the way, in a lot of cases, because there are activists who want to restrict more speech, they actually tend to think that people are more prejudiced than they might be. And actually, these kind of restrictions, there was a book called Racial Paranoia that came out about 15 years ago that was making the point that the imposition of some of these codes can sometimes make people think that the only thing holding you back from being a raging racist are these codes. So it must be really, really bad. It can actually make all these things worse. One very real practical way it makes things worse is when you censor people, it doesn't change their opinion. It just encourages them to not share it with people who will get them in trouble. So it leads them to talk to people who they already agree with, and group polarization takes off. Driving people off of Twitter, for example in 2017, and then again in 2020, led to greater radicalization among those people. It's a very predictable force. Censorship doesn't actually change people's minds and it pushes them in directions that will actually make them more radicalized. ^r1becp So, yeah, I think that the attempt to ban hate speech, it doesn't really protect us from it, but it gives the government such a vast weapon to use against us that we will regret giving them. ([Time 1:45:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c7156e74-191e-4e71-9386-c6d4d21ec5cd)) ---