Civil liberties: Freedom of thought and the morality of deceit rhetoric

Emotions in the dark free speech tool box

The issue

In the last few months, freedom of thought as a civil liberty has been mentioned. It is easy to dismiss it as a serious concern. However, it is obviously a serious concern if one has some grasp of things like human cognitive biology, social behavior, perceiving and thinking. Psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones (Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland) summarizes the issue in his 2024 book, FreeThinking: Protecting Freedom Of Thought Amidst The New Battle For The Mind:

Controlling bodies gives power but controlling minds grants dominion. For this reason, there always has been and always will be a battle for our minds. It is a fight we cannot afford to lose.

The 21st century had seen a new combatant in the battle for the mind: social media companies. These companies had not just seized our minds, they had polluted them. .... something had to be done. But what?

The UN journeyed to the land where secular gods reside -- international human rights law. The deity they summoned was the right to freedom of thought, sired in 1948 by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

Human rights law gave [freedom of thought] the status of an absolute right. In contrast, most other rights, such as privacy, free speech and assembly, are qualified rights. .... But absolute rights, such as freedom of thought, can never be violated, under any circumstances, for any reason.

There was, however, a significant problem. The right to free speech had been endlessly debated, discussed and developed in the courts. Free thought -- not so much. .... [quoting Bismark commenting on Napoleon III] “At a distance it is something, but close to it is nothing at all.”

The law had put the cart before the horse by placing speech before thought. .... what good is free speech if you are unable to think? Speech in the absence of free thought is platitude, received wisdom, the party line.

It was beyond bizarre that the international community had not spelt out what the right to freedom of thought meant in practice.

Law review article after law review article, court after court pondered free speech when free thought was clearly the issue. .... There was some scholarly pioneering work on the right to freedom of thought and its potential relevance to technology, neuroscience and the digital world, but this was rare.

On 19 October 2021 the UN finally dusted off this “forgotten freedom” and began to build it a body. .... This was the first attempt, at the level of the UN, to spell out what the right to freedom of thought should involve.

In other words, there is no significant body of law that articulates or defends freedom of thought.

Brief thoughts about free thought & morality 

If one thinks about it a bit, the fact that DFS (dark free speech: lies, slanders, flawed or crackpot logic, fomenting irrational emotions, exclusive tribalism, etc.) is legal and almost always dominant in authoritarian politics and commerce everywhere. But a moral issue jumps right out. When a person who has been deceived or derationalized[1] by DFS acts in ways they would not have acted, their right to free thought has been violated. In the process, power flowed from the deceived or derationalized person to the deceiver-derationalizer. The power flow usually (~99% of the time?) favors the person, group or interest who used DFS. That’s usually the main point of using DFS in the first place. 

In the US, much or most of America’s political right has radicalized and turned authoritarian. Most now openly support a dictator wannabe, making them authoritarians to a non-trivial extent. The rhetoric the authoritarian movement employs relies heavily on DFS to win minds. By doing so, authoritarians violate freedom of thought. 

In my opinion, that amounts to use of tactics that are immoral, or evil when people are actually or foreseeably hurt or killed. It’s not rocket science. Either one can see the immorality-evil or one can’t or won’t. If a person is derationalized, tribal or even cult minded, seeing the immorality-evil of violating freedom of thought is usually almost completely impossible. Sometimes a major shock can restore a reasonable grasp on reality in the mind of the deceived and violated.

Qs: Should freedom of thought get some legal protection, or is it a hopeless endeavor doomed to failure? If so how, e.g., tax businesses and interests for their reliance on DFS? Social protection, e.g., institutionalized bias against politicians, people, groups and interests that use DFS?

Footnote: 

1. Derationalize (apparently a real word, maybe): to deprive of the power of reason or of reasoning; to convert from a mostly rational into a mostly irrational state of mind

If their guard is down, many people, probably most, can be derationalized to a significant extent by a couple of rhetorical DFS tools, usually employed in some combination. One is outright lying via lies of commission or omission (hiding inconvenient fact and truth). Another is fomenting irrational or unwarranted negative emotions. That is usually in the form of irrational, unwarranted fear, anger, bigotry, hate, sadness, moral outrage, racism, disgust, distrust, confusion, etc. Lying and slandering or defaming people or groups (a subset of lies) is a popular way of provoking negative emotions. 

Another is to appeal to flawed reasoning. That usually amounts to using irrationality to foment more irrationality. Crackpot conspiracy theories and logic flaws, often coupled with lies and slanders are popular with the DFS crowd. One example, Hillary was running a child sex-trafficking operation out of the basement of a pizza joint. Some people actually believed that obviously false nonsense. Ditto for COVID vaccines being toxic and/or ineffective. 

The other major DFS tactic is to appeal to human tribal instincts. By creating a tribe (or cult), real or imagined, most people can be derationalized and manipulated more easily. DFS used to foment tribalism is usually a means to exclude others by fomenting a self-righteous “us versus them” mentality. Authoritarian leaders tend to focus on their tribe while slandering or attacking opposition groups and interests. Immigrants, racial minorities, non-heterosexual people and believers in the wrong ideology or religion (or no religion) are perennially popular authoritarian targets.