We’re told that the United States is a bastion of free speech.

We have lots of that, in the same way that the Soviet people had the freedom to vote for Stalin or Stalin.

Perhaps a mild exaggeration. But in practice, enormous quantities of public funds go towards pushing the progressive line. The financial bloodlines of what Mencius Moldbug calls the Cathedral provides enormous advantages to the organized left. These advantages include enormous tax breaks accorded to a dazzling array of ‘nonprofits’ and other foundations, which occupy the position that would otherwise be held by a state religion.

While a man may have freedom to speak, doing so may result in ostracism, unemployment, and all the associated misfortunes that comes with that.

This is all to be expected under a democracy, which must enforce a measure of conformity to ensure political stability, but it isn’t itself conducive to freedom of speech.

The principle justifying freedom of speech is supposed to encourage good-faith civil debate in order to discover the truth behind the natural world, behind human actions, and teasing out which actions are good, and which are bad. Without open debate, falsehoods can remain in place, and catastrophes can creep up upon the civilization long before they can be corrected.

Saying instead that freedom of speech exists to allow everyone to ‘express themselves’ is to ignore the real philosophical basis behind the legal principle, which is that it is supposed to make good government possible. That everyone is free to speak, even to criticize the sovereign, without being imprisoned or tortured for it, is supposed to in turn enhance the legitimacy of that government.

When mobs rather than a star chamber enforce the official narrative, the impact upon the legitimacy of the government is rather similar. The mob would not need to do what it does if exposure of lies and faulty reasoning did not threaten the seat of the state. If the state were secure in this way, it would not need to blot out and intimidate critics.

The more bloated and overweening the state, the more it must stoop to these techniques. What would otherwise be a matter for foreign relations (discussions between people separated by borders) becomes a matter of internal security. An empire frightened of permitting subsidiarity within its territory must blot it out through intimidation, blackmail, the occasional violent act, and the occasional looting of dissenting parties.

Political decentralization makes freedom of speech more feasible. When exit from the polity is easy, and entrance difficult, speech itself becomes less politically dangerous. Mere talking becomes less an occasion for disorder and revolution, and more a case for peaceful discussion, persuasion, and debate.

The suppressive actions are, then, a demonstration of weakness, rather than of strength. If everything might be undone through words alone, then the state is weak, and disorder can become unmanageable among its people —  given the right combination of words, spoken in the right order, at the right time, in the right place.

The original Soap Jackal left a comment worth reproducing in full:

The primary question is “How do we maintain order?”

The libertarians have terrible answers to this as most arguments are predicated on Anarcho Capitalism being enforced. You cant use utopian style arguments in order to propose anything that needs a pragmatic answer.

Most of these ‘libertarians have a confusion around :

Law Generation and Law Enforcement

and end up blaming men who have no control over the laws content because they enforced it.

We have a system of legislative law in which laws are produced ex nihlo and agents of the state are assigned to enforce these edicts. Thats the formal legal concept that the supreme court has enforced.

The assumption by those arguing against libertarian anti-cop rhetoric is that legislative law enforced by state agents is the only way to maintain order. I can see why you would want order but arguing that The State is responsible for applying Justice really seems like a terrible idea.

I notice that everyone seems to be arguing propositions as a result which drift quite far from pragmatic or realistic solutions.

Virtue. Order. Justice.

The anti-cop groups and the police/courts as an institution do very little to deal with these 3 concepts. They all want their own special brands of chaos.

The only answer I have to the cop debate is:

“There should be much more effort spent on helping moral men be able to commit acts of violence when it is Just and only when necessary. To not be afraid of the act but to have it in context with virtue and objective morality.”

Now a polycentric legal structure maintained by organized gangs and local power structures seems, historically, to be quite capable of doing this as long as the population can defend morality.

The benefit of this observation is that you don’t need a revolution to apply it. All you need is the counter-revolution of local groups of men banding together and protecting their communities and sustaining courts who are actually about Justice rather than ‘The Law’

Violence, Power, and Morality are the founts of politics. This debate can quickly escalate to the very heads of state and the power structures of the whole planet. Do not fall into the trap of planning the global counter revolution. Just try to figure out how to make orderly communities anti-fragile.

What generates the law? Who enforces the law? How is it enforced? Who writes the law? How can we ensure that the laws are just? How can we encourage people to obey just laws? Should the agents of the state be the only people obligated and to enforce the law?

These are difficult, unsettled questions that tend to be ignored. How do you ensure that the people are predisposed towards good behavior? The contemporary crisis seems to be around the failure of the notion that laws can themselves generate order, and that endless new laws can be written and enforced, in a tyrannical fashion.

Following the long trend of attacks by Muslims upon French Jews, Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel has called for all French Jews to relocate to Israel, and has called for an alteration of his country’s immigration policies to permit the migration.

In response, PM Hollande of France has promised to defend Jewish property with the French army if necessary, and has opposed Netanyahu’s proposal, which would have the same impact as exile from France. It would affect the 500,000 Jews still living in France.

By comparison, there are roughly 4.1 million Muslims in the country, out of a total population of about 66 million, of which roughly 45 million are Catholic.

In this way, small networks of Islamic guerrillas operating across national borders will have achieved at least some of their strategic objectives. Netanyahu’s statement is also an embarrassment to the might of the French state, which has proven itself incapable of deterring spectacular attacks of this nature, and has, indeed, encouraged these attacks by encouraging Islamic migration to France in enormous numbers.

It is quite difficult, perhaps impossible to determine what the French government actually wants to achieve. As far as the administrators of the government are concerned, the more occasions that it has to spend more money on extravagances like military guards for delis and synagogues along with more welfare offices to tend to Islamic immigrants, the better for them.

The suffering caused to the people by misgovernment, on the other hand, is not something that Prime Ministers, taken as a class, seems to barely factor into the decisions that they make.

The irony here is that it would be the left who would be responsible for the exile of the Jews from France, and not the right. The right wing parties are often likened to the Nazis for their opposition to open immigration. Hollande may achieve what Hitler could not, largely because of their support for open immigration, which has made formerly tolerable living arrangements intolerable.