Hate Speech is not Free, Someone Pays
the power of creation comes with a cost
Note: FYI because it’s stupid + pointless + quite random + demonstrates a particularly arrogant + hyper-masculine vision of humanity and G-d to presume to exclusively use male pronouns to describe the Divine, I have decided to defy convention and begin using female pronouns for G-d. Your discomfort with the way I choose to anthropomorphise G-d in my relationship with Her that differs from your way in your relationship with the Divine is a you problem not a me problem. In case you wonder why the Divine now has a She pronoun in my writing, that’s why. Cope and seethe. G-d is not a man.
Milton Friedman said there's no such thing as a free lunch, he called it The Free Lunch Myth. Economists think in terms of opportunity cost, meaning what you could have done with your time or money or energy. What did you give up to do the thing? That’s opportunity cost. I think of hate speech like this, as having a cost that’s similar to an opportunity cost, in that it’s latent. However, in the case of hate speech, the person creating the speech does not pay the cost, s/he receives subsidy from society and groups therein. Speech that dehumanises1, ie makes humans into monsters for political sport with the objective of their mass eradication, extorts subsidies in the form of human costs. Hate speech extorts from the entire society, and then again from the societal group it targets. In extreme cases the bodies of hundreds or thousands or millions pay the tab that a handful of tongues and lips have charged recklessly and foolishly.
I wanted to continue with the concept of speech that I wrote about on Monday, in connection with my study of Psalm 34. Monday’s teaching points to speech as our most Divine faculty in the following ways:
the way we are made in g-d’s image
a sacred faculty g-d chose to give only to humans
not a commodity or currency
a means to continue creating with g-d.
This reframes the conversation about free speech because it puts the onus on each of us to budget our own speech rather than demand subsidies from others for our reckless way with words. It leads me to question what it means to debase the power of creation by making it cheap and free.
Ahem, a brief word before I continue.
Note: Free Speech Fundamentalists — I’m not willing to engage any discussion of constitutional rights etc etc. I’m not American and talking about your First Amendment right doesn’t interest me.
I encourage you to learn what other countries have wrt to regulating speech. In Canada we have reasonable limits on freedom of expression written in the Charter, and we have criminal hatred, built into Section 319 of the Criminal Code itself, and we have the crime of inciting genocide, built into Section 318. Canada has gone overboard and over governed itself with human rights tribunals whose oversight now resembles a woke caliphate. Nonetheless all these laws may not prove enough to protect the us from Hamasnicks.
Note, I’m doubtful Big Brother will save us, tbh—not a big fan of statism, however speech requires regulation at some level. Anyway this post has nothing to do with constitutional rights and legalese. I’m speaking about the value we attach to speech, the values underlying our societal rules about freedom of expression and what motivates us to create things we do with our words. Note, when I use the word speech I mean any spoken or written content created, ie words sent out to the human universe, so that includes emails and social media posts and the like. Theoretically it could extend to thoughts, words we tell our Self. I do strongly think we must remove religious protection for hate from Section 319, I think this would go a long way to addressing our problems in Canada. Being a religious person, ie someone who loves G-d, I deeply resent it when anyone uses G-d to dehumanise or threaten or call for the destruction of others.
How can hate be free?
Someone pays with their nervous system for the hate that someone else manufactures with their vocal box, tongue and mouth. Hate has a human cost, dehumanisation. For my purposes hate speech refers to speech which creates dehumanising rhetoric about any societal group, ie castigating them as human monsters, with a view to their mass eradication. Note, being Canadian I have a specific and rigorous application in mind, the bar has historically proved quite high to meet. We have a famous case in our judicial history, see Keegstra. I will not regurgitate that stuff here, please go read up on it if you want to know more. Supreme Court Decisions from that era contain well written and clear judicial reasoning underlying the interpretation of 319, knock yourself out on CanLii.
Anyway.
Hate is not free, someone pays. We tend to think, we create hate freely with our mouths, so it’s free, right? Wrong. Someone else’s body has to cover the cheque our mouths wrote in a moment of emotional intensity when the amygdala hijacked the bus. Making hate speech free means implementing a human subsidy system. It means expecting people to subsidise our dehumanisation with their well being and even their lives or the lives of their spouses, parents, kids, loved ones. Hate costs in human terms means that someone pays for the dehumanising things another individual speaks into creation. By definition the person who spoke the dehumanisation into existence does not pay the cost. Dehumanisation extorts humanity and even life from its the targets.
To rephrase, hate speech has no cost for the speaker because the bodies and psyches of targeted and scapegoated human beings, along with the psyche of collective society, end up subsidizing the mouth run amok of an extremist or group of extremists. Think about the high price of dehumanising speech in 1930s/40s Germany. Speech isn’t free. We speak things into existence and we cannot unspeak them from existence. Words spoken into existence by Nazis continue to carry weight today, long after the deaths of those who did the speaking. These words travelled across continents to remain alive today. Speech is not free. We speak things into creation and we cannot un-speak them out of creation. There is no speech UNDO button.
No other creatures speak. Only human beings make things with words via speech. Therefore speech isn’t free. On the contrary, it’s precious.
Pick one, you can’t have both.
G-d created the universe by speaking it into existence—Be and it is, kun faya kun
Speech is cheap because talk is cheap and words mean nothing
If you believe g-d spoke the world into being and only gave humans that divine power of creation thru speech, then you have described speech as a precious faculty given us directly by G-d, something sacred to be guarded and not exploited or abused or broken. I would think the view of speech as a sacred gift from G-d would invite a new relationship with speech, wanting to limit and ponder and examine one’s own speech rather than wanting to control others’. It would encourage and invite self examination because speech is from and for G-d not ego.
This seems incompatible with the view of speech as a cheap and ample currency of ideation, of which you should have/make as much as you want gratuitously and without checks + balances and accountability or any regulations. In this approach to human interaction, the human nervous system serves as an autobahn, a highway we can drive on without any speed limits. Meaning, we have given ourselves permission to barrage the collective nervous system with all the distorted and dystopian ideas we decide to speak into being, to the point of institutionalising the dementedness of our bad ideas in the collective’s social DNA itself.
Everything has limits, the value of anything depends on its limit. In fact the integrity and safety of things depend on the strength and consistency of their limits, for example in the human body. Cell growth has limits and when these limits are glitched we get cell growth run amok, cells that belong to a breakaway colony (tumour) and that don’t follow the rules of replication and have their own agenda, so to speak—redirecting blood supply and creating lymphatic and endocrine imbalance—in an effort to dominate the body systems, sometimes to death. This is called cancer and it makes us very sick and can kill us. The physiology of cancer as I just described it can maybe help you understand the harm of words + speech run amok.
I guess I wanted readers to step outside the box and think about speech in a way they haven’t by conceptualising it from a different vantage point. Can we create a society that prioritises and normalises taking responsibly for things we speak into being? Can we make speech sacred again? Can we imagine ourselves a sacred rugged cave of raw Divine creative potential which we mine for word gems with our minds + our hearts? To carry the gemstone analogy further, let’s use corundum rock as an example. Exposure to repeated and extreme heat over a long period of time causes the formation of ruby. Imagine wisdom required for the cultivation of prudent speech akin to rubies that form from corundum rock over time. Then words come from mining that wisdom, this requires patience, a technique, and some skill/thought/strategy. Each stone has value, each word means something. Those who mine for rubies by hand carefully select the valuable stones from the gravel. Maybe we could take similar care choosing our words. Can we think of speech as a vocal meditation on the universe and how we would like to add to it, rather than a weapon to aggressively inflict our ideas on others like we’re at war?
What if we shifted from feeling entitled and pressured to create speech toward feeling privileged and grateful to speak? What if we shifted from the need to control others toward the need to engage in rigourous self examination? What if free expression became expression freely given under no compulsion or manipulation or emotional duress or desire to compel or manipulate others? Can we create a social atmosphere where discourse happens this way? Social media can hinder communication. It can help also, however only when we come to respect the sacred awe and power of words and speech. Words carry weight, we speak things into being with our words.
I think we have reached a point of inflection in society regarding the way we use speech to create our human world. I think hate has a human cost and many expect others to subsidise that cost so they can keep flapping their gums and making Melkor’s discord for ego masturbation sport. Why have we come to feel so free to be mean and nasty to others? Maybe we forgot that any behaviour we do to others we first do to ourselves by the act of doing the behaviour.
I use the David Livingstone Smith definition of dehumanisation.