Against the Liberal Dialectic
Why must we take for granted that, in order to know truth, we must freely embrace the peddling of lies?
Freedom of speech has been a never-ending point of discussion for as long as I can remember, and well before that. It is as old as liberalism and its foundations.
I observe two sides to the argument for it:
The quasi-libertarian sense that everyone has ‘the right to speak their mind’
In his famous 1859 essay ‘On Liberty’, seminal liberal J.S. Mill (a heavy influence of many a left-leaning libertarian) summarised the liberal-utilitarian stance on freedom of speech in the following quote:
“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
Phrased in this way or another, it is a statement with an air of defiance and rigidity in truth, facing off against a misguided mob. But it is an idea thwarted by the libertarian’s deeply-loved institution of private property, as Hans Hermann Hoppe has shown.1 His argument is, in a way, not unlike what we would repeatedly hear from gloating leftists when their hold on social media was absolute:
“It’s a private company, they can do whatever they want”
That is true - but wait, don’t roll your eyes and leave just yet, because nothing about that actually implies passivity.
We’re currently witnessing the fallout (or lack thereof) of Elon Musk taking over Twitter and flipping the table.2 Blue-check journalists revelled in their role as overseers for the crushing of tiny dissident accounts, and have now been delivered a sudden taste of their own medicine. A year ago this would have been unthinkable, and as a result, any mention of it being a private company was seen as a subversive ploy. Well, it turns out that was right all along, and the lesson to be learned is that you should be using these private companies as weapons against your enemies - just as they have been using them against you for years.
Hoppe’s thesis goes as follows: there is no “right to free speech” in a world where private property rights exist. Private property rights exist, therefore, there is no right to free speech. If there were, then any person should be able to walk into your home and preach any ideas they please, as after all, if you stop them or kick them out then you’re censoring them, surely making you the bad guy. But no, that is not how it should work, and as he is most famous for saying: at the very least, communists and (d)emocrats should be censored, excluded, and forced out of society.3 Nobody has any absolute right to preach their ideas in any place that is not exclusively theirs, and on top of that, no person who cares about peace and prosperity should allow the lies and falsehoods of leftism to be spread on their property.
But this brings us onto the next point in the argument:
Free speech brings us closer to truth
This is what you might call the “deeper” side of the coin, as it is really an epistemological claim, and the true reason why I wanted to write this article. (Sometimes I do have thoughts of my own, and don’t just want to cite Hoppe and Aquinas perpetually).
I will call this the ‘Liberal Dialectic’. I haven’t heard this name given before and can’t find it from searching online, so I reserve the right to feel a bit chuffed if it is something I can both coin and diagnose at once.
Defining dialectic as: discussion and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation4, and keeping J.S. Mill as our representative of liberalism, who said the following:
“… the opinion which is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility. Its condemnation may be allowed to rest on this common argument, not the worse for being common.”
I can see why this at first may seem innocuous, reasonable, fair, and maybe an opinion that holds truth in high regard. But if we probe into this a bit more, all of that falls away like a tacky veneer, and we can see the roots of perhaps the greatest plague of our time: relativism.
Mill’s concern in regard to the truth of the matter comes second to a person’s ability to determine the truth of the matter. If truth is the main (really, only) concern of the philosopher, why would it play second fiddle to the matter of how other people come to believe, or not believe, the truth? This is of course not an inconsequential aspect, but one that Mill, who wrote extensively and complexly on logic, should not so lightly leave up to a coin toss in other people’s minds, or be content to twiddle his thumbs and shrug his shoulders in the presence of a person unjustly denying the result of logic.
The philosopher is in love with truth, that is, not with the changing world of sensation, which is the object of opinion, but with the unchanging reality which is the object of knowledge. He will never willingly tolerate an untruth, but will hate it as much as he loves truth. (Plato)
The matter of truth
The Liberal Dialectic, taken from the prior quote of Mill’s and many others from Chapter 2 of On Liberty, can be phrased in the most concise form as:
In order to know truth, a person must hear both the correct and incorrect side of the matter, in order to decide the validity for themselves.
This contains a fatal error - that truth is a matter of personal decision. You can come to the right or wrong conclusion about truth, but not the decision. Truth is true no matter what you think of it, and your goal should be to come to truthful conclusions on truth. Why would you need to hear lies or falsehoods to know it?
Formal logic is a complicated and expanded process of saying “2 + 2 = 4” on any topic. In order for us to know that this equation is true, do we need to witness the statement “2 + 2 = 5” and decide that it is false? No, 2 + 2 = 4 regardless of what anybody thinks on the matter, and we don’t need a preacher of falsehood to exist in order for us to know the correct answer. Again, Mill’s limp-wristedness in the conclusion-making process is bizarre for a logician. Something which can be demonstrated as true via logic can only be resisted through grievous personal error, such as an emotional refusal to accept a given truth. These subjective qualities within an incorrect person’s mind do not entitle falsehood to take precedence over truth outside of that person’s mind - which is where truth exists.
The Liberal Dialectic places truth in individual minds, making truth itself individualised, and if that sounds similar to postmodernism, that’s because it IS postmodernism: the claim that no ultimate or indisputable truth either exists, or at least, can be known. The postmodernist line of reasoning for this is that, as social constructs are subjective, no objective truth can be known by them. Language is a social construct, and is therefore subjective; therefore no objective truth can be found through it. Language is the only tool we have at our disposal to learn and convey truth, therefore, no objective truth claim and be known or conveyed. Except that one, right?
Such is how quickly postmodernism, and any form of relativism, can be debunked. Blink and you’ll miss it. Is the claim that truth doesn’t exist/can’t be known, true? If yes, it self-defeats. If no, it is a claim so meaningless it can’t be called a claim at all, and can just be discarded as white noise. Relativism holds water as effectively as a sieve. Yet the Liberal Dialectic, so often espoused by people who very clearly should know better, at best lends itself towards tolerating relativism, and at worst, can only result in relativism.
Yet liberalism and its foundations define the enlightenment, the modern era, and most dangerously, even the counter-currents to those epochs. Tragically for many a current dissident right-winger, you can even catch Thomas Carlyle espousing the Liberal Dialectic on the matter of religion5, the most horrifying field to introduce relativism into as it is the culmination of all truth, accessible by human reason and even that beyond it which is revealed.
To be a true dissident in the modern age therefore means to dissent against relativism in any form, and as viciously as you can. A fire must live within you, yearning for ultimate truth, motivating the flow of the blood in your veins. Turn from the Liberal Dialectic which pervades almost everything you’ve been taught, and reject the spirit of the age for the eternal. Become a warrior and fight for it. It is right and just.
References
Hoppe, H.H. (2018) Getting Libertarianism Right. Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Ceadda, (2022). Behold, a disappointing horse. Now get over it. Letters from Mercia. https://lettersfrommercia.substack.com/p/behold-a-disappointing-horse-now [Accessed 17/12/2022]
Hoppe, H. (2011). Democracy - The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order. United States: Transaction Publishers.
Merriam-Webster (2022) Dialectic Definition & Meaning, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dialectic [Accessed 17/22/2022]
Carlyle, T. (1841) On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History, by Thomas Carlyle (gutenberg.org) https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1091/1091-h/1091-h.htm#link2H_4_0005 [Accessed 14/03/2023]