Don’t think has gone away in the least was the transformation of airports into microf fascist States and I thought that was a really bad idea because by treating everyone like a potential perpetrator which is exactly what’s happened in the airports and has never gone away you essentially train people
To adopt that mindset because everybody goes through airports and once it’s okay there well then why isn’t it okay everywhere I mean there’s lots of buildings in the UK now where you basically have to undergo an airport style search before you go into the building and of course you have to do
That in the many of the government buildings in Washington which I also think is an appalling idea but but so so is there an addition thread that’s promoting this top down clamp down that do you think is a consequence of what occurred after 911 yeah I think it’s a really important
Observation I was in Manhattan on 911 I lived and worked in in New York at the time I remember as well as anybody the vividness of that trauma it was a very traumatic event it was frightening it was terrible I understand that people’s fears were activated in a way that made
Them be willing to support things they never would have supported otherwise I ended up supporting things that I ordinarily would have recoiled from like most people in the United States did it’s just that even with the war on teror even with an attack that cataclysmic that just wiped out 3,000
Lives in one of the most horrible ways imaginable I think while the extremism that emerged from that I remember nuke ingr wrote an article in 2006 advocating the First Amendment be amended to constrict free speech in the name of stopping Muslim extremism or whatever he was calling it um jihadism or Sharia
Law those ideas ultimately didn’t go as far as they might have because the sense of what American democracy means kind of got reawakened and I think people did start drawing lines and President Obama ended up winning in 2008 on a pledge to close Guantanamo Anders the kind of more
Extremist measures of the war on terror even though he did none of that that was what his campaign that was successful was based on but I think what you’re saying about the airport is exactly right if you go look at the debates in the 90s after the Oklahoma City bombing
The bombing at the Oklahoma City Courthouse that Timothy McVey was convicted of perpetrating there was an attempt by the Clinton Administration to usher in a lot of these same extremism measures that ended up being implemented after 911 they wanted for example the keys to the internet a back door to all of the
Encryption used by the internet and the Republican party including people like John Ashcraft who became George Bush’s attorney general in the wake of 911 and the champion a lot of a lot of these civil arities assaults led the way and said we’re not giving the federal government the ability to read our
Communications to spy on our conversations this is too anathema to the American way of life and so quickly after 911 the exact same faction in the Republican party and American conservatism traumatized by the attack on 911 again for understandable reasons but ultimately went so far in implementing what became an
Authoritarian mentality and if you go to the airport of course all of us now are so acclimated to it it seems normal but the idea that everybody just so dutifully takes off their shoes and takes off their belt and the climate there is you just do what you’re told
You know it’s kind of it seems trivial and it’s the form of it’s a kind of petty authoritarianism no one’s being imprisoned for no one’s being shot but what it is is it’s almost more Insidious because of that because exactly as you say it started conditioning people that
In the name of safety we need to unquestioningly obey Authority kind of submit to whatever humiliations whatever orders were told to do and to watch the american conservative movement that was so steadfast in their opposition to the idea of federal government power in the 1990s immediately turn around and start
Meekly taking off their shoes at airports and doing everything that they were told and going through these machines in the name of safety I think was was quite transformative and I do think it started training Americans to accept the kinds of infringements on their autonomy in the name of safety
That even just a couple of years earlier would have been Unthinkable well you you know what I think maybe the Critics on the left um I’ll specify them to begin with have always been concerned that the fundamental threats to Liberty and let’s say equality would emerge as a
Consequence of greed and the desire for power you know and it’s obviously the case that there are valid criticisms that can be levied against gigantic organizations that tilt towards regulatory capture with regards both to their greed and their desire for undeserved power but I think that the left has radically underestimated the
Threat that fear poses to Liberty and I guess that’s probably true of the right as well and and what what you’re laying out is a a case where the excuse for interfering with fundamental Liberties is always something like a higher or is very frequently something like um a
Compassionate concern for safety and so maybe it’s the neo-nazis that we have to be afraid of or maybe maybe it’s the Muslim jihadists and or maybe it’s the bloody pandemic or maybe it’s the looming environmental apocalypse but there’s always some terrible catastrophe that’s looming so intently that this is
Finally the time when an assault on our civil liberties to be can be justified and my sense of that is that the reason we made these rights axiomatic or actually the reason they are axiomatic not that we made them that way is because there isn’t any circumstances under which there’s a better approach
Than to leave people the hell alone to let them say what they need to say and that’s partly because you know one of the things I think conservatives do extremely badly is to try to protect Free Speech as if it’s just another Freedom you know it’s like a honic
Freedom well of course you get to say what you want to say because you want to say it and it’s you know you enjoy it and it’s annoying not to be allowed to say it and that’s not really the issue here at all the issue is that for most people there’s no difference
Between speaking and thinking so and Mo and even for those that small number of people who can in fact think and that’s actually quite rare most of those people think by speaking they just speak internally I mean you can speak you can think in images too but really detailed thought
Really requires words and so freedom of speech is exactly equivalent to freedom of thought and the reason that you think is so that you don’t do stupid things um carelessly right so there’s this great it was Alfred North Whitehead who famously said that we think so that our thoughts can
Die instead of us and if thought is the process by which we re renew our misapprehensions and adapt to the World At Large and transform our institutions if you interfere with free speech you doom your institutions to stagnation and and uh corruption and so and so and so
Then you have to say well if you’re going to be afraid let’s say you’re afraid of the coming environmental apocalypse you might want to be equally afraid of the measures that people take to deal with that apocalypse that are going to interfere with freedom of speech because that’ll interfere with
Our ability to adapt and that’ll be far worse than anything we can conjure up on the environmental front and so I think that’s part of the reason that these rights are self-evident right is that the whole bloody game will grind to a halt if we ever allow them to be
Interfered with and that means ever and that basically means your neurotic catastrophe is not sufficient justification for your desire to infringe on my free speech I don’t care what your bloody emergency is you know I think this is something I’ve come to conceptualize better over the years and
It’s very much based in the psychological Dynamic you’re describing George orbal has this preface I believe it was 1984 I’m going to I don’t remember the exact details now and originally when the book was published where this preface that the preface was intended for the preface ended up not
Being published it was right around the time of World War II and it was kind of considered heretical because its argument was that we think about tyranny in these melodramatic terms that suppression that despotism means that if you say something against the government armed men in black suits
Black costumes show up at your house and put guns to your head and Har haul you off to prison when in reality the much more effective kind of despotism is not the use of brute force in that way it’s really the transformation of the Mind the prison ends up being something
That’s constructed inside of your brain through extremely effective propaganda which in turn requires that that propaganda never be questioned if you can control a population based on how they think you essentially eliminate the possibility of desent so you can make descent on paper legally permissible but anyone who does descent
Will be so instantaneously marginalized because of the efficacy of propaganda that it’s a much more effective way of controlling human beings because you’re controlling the thoughts that they Have
