Preserving the Freedoms of Speech and Religion
The wisdom of the crowd prevails over the tyranny of the elite
As we continue to build the next generation of technological capabilities over the coming decade, the essential choice facing the West, in general, and the American people, in particular, is how will we continue to organize our governmental structures. Will they be centralized top-down hierarchies where the elite few leverage new technologies to exercise coercive power over the masses, or will they be distributed peer-to-peer networks where the aggregated intelligence of the people, combined with the capabilities of artificial intelligence, enable the synergistic power of the governed? In other words, will they be authoritarian or democratic entities? Interestingly, while it may not be immediately apparent, the most important dynamic determining this choice has less to do with technology and more to do with the shape of the relationship between religion and state. If these two institutions are fused, the government is likely to be authoritarian. On the other hand, if a society does not embrace one official religion and supports the freedom of its citizens to choose whether or not they want to follow a spiritual creed, the government is likely to be more democratic.
At the heart of the difference between these two social structures is their disparate views on inalienable rights. Centralized top-down governments view community rights as being sacrosanct and believe individuals derive their rights from the community. Thus, for example, during Covid, authoritarian leaders mandated experimental biogenetic inoculations for entire populations, despite the fact that these shots would likely result in the injury or deaths of some proportion of the populace. These mandates clearly placed the rights of the community over the rights of the individual and were often intolerant to those requesting exemptions for medical or religious reasons. In addition, those in authority went to great lengths to silence individuals—no matter how learned—whose views and opinions challenged the Covid mandates. Dissenting views were often labelled misinformation that needed to be censored because they were seen as harmful to the health of communities, even though time has demonstrated that the dissenting views were far more correct and the official guidance was far more likely to be actual misinformation.
We see similar dynamics regarding critical race theory and gender ideology. Once again, authoritarian leaders have placed a communal ideology over the rights of individuals. Rather than individuals having the freedom to choose what they believe, elite leaders have been doing everything in their power to mandate preferred beliefs upon an entire population. Consequently, large numbers of the populace have been hesitant to express their true beliefs for fear of the social repercussions of being labelled racist or transphobic if they don’t agree with the notion that members of a certain race are stained by a form of original sin or that people can change their biological sex at will. The growing hesitancy for people to express their support of meritocracy as the best way to fill positions or to refer to a man claiming to be a woman as “he”—which would be more biologically correct—rather than “she” is evidence of the use of language as a tool to force religious beliefs upon a whole population. The idea is, if enough people express a belief often enough, it’s just a matter of time before that belief—whether true or not—is taken for granted.
Authoritarian governments always suppress freedom of speech and freedom of religion because these two freedoms are the greatest impediments to their attempts to control the thinking of the population. Authoritarian leaders believe, if they can control the language, they can control the people. This is why autocratic leaders often put people in prison for expressing dissenting views and why they propagate one creed across a population, even if that creed is the expulsion of all religions, which happens in communist countries. Insofar as communism is an ideological belief system, it functions as a form of social religion, replacing the notion of a deity with the state.
The effort to cement a top-down hierarchical government by controlling the language of whole populations seems to be the conscious strategy of a zealous elite determined to solidify the new religion of Wokeism as the governing creed of the Western world. Toward this end, Wokeism has made rapid progress in capturing the media, the academy, and government bureaucrats, providing the elite leaders of this new religion with the opportunity to attempt to squelch the First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
Distributed peer-to-peer networks, on the other hand, regard individual rights as inalienable and believe governments derive their rights from the consent of the governed. Accordingly, networks welcome diversity of opinion because they recognize that the pursuit of truth is best accomplished when all information is considered in solving the complex problems that inevitably happen in the course of communities living together. Freedom of speech and independent thinking are seen as assets rather than liabilities in making intelligent decisions that affect whole communities. If the Covid dissenters had been embraced rather than demonized, it is unlikely that authorities would have ever had the coercive power to impose mass mandates that deprived individuals of the right to make personal health decisions that we now understand carried a risk of injury or death for those who complied.
The social management of Covid was a wake-up call. For the first time in any of our lifetimes, Americans experienced what it was like to live in an authoritarian state where community rights, at the expense of individual rights, became inalienable. There was no challenging the mandates, as due process was abandoned and those who chose not to be vaccinated with a novel gene therapy lost jobs, friends, and family. Many of us were surprised at how readily so many people complied with arbitrary and, as we now know, unfounded directives. This apparent docility of the population was not lost on the Woke hierarchy, who became more emboldened in using their prominence in both government and education to accelerate their campaign to force their faith upon the American population.
However, a wake-up call is exactly that, and the American people have woken up. The November elections were a clear acknowledgment from the collective wisdom of the American citizenry that they prefer to live in societies that are designed as peer-to-peer networks where individuals are guaranteed the freedoms of speech and religion. They have told us loudly and clearly that, while they have been silenced in many public forums, they are no longer docile. They have made their voices heard in the one public forum where their opinions cannot be ignored—the polling booth. And, in so doing, they have thwarted the Woke creed’s attempt to ensconce its faith across the Western world and accomplish the full integration of religion and state. This is good news as we continue to build new and far reaching technologies.
The foundational principle that has preserved the world’s longest lasting democratic republic is: Nobody is smarter than everybody. Someday the elites may come to appreciate both the wisdom behind this principle and the fact that they are nowhere near as smart as they think they are. Thankfully, we won’t have to depend upon their getting there because the Founders left us with a government that guarantees the freedoms of speech and religion and assures that, ultimately, the wisdom of the crowd prevails over the tyranny of the elite.