Barry BrownsteinGeorge Orwell had little hope that the lies of totalitarians would be exposed by a free press. His essay “The Freedom of the Press” was intended as the preface to Animal Farm,
but was not published until 1972. Orwell revealed that the United
Kingdom’s Ministry of Information (MOI) (created during the Second World
War) advised Orwell’s publisher not to publish Animal Farm since it would be offensive to “Russian Soviets.”
Orwell’s thesis was that journalists, not the government, are the biggest censors:
[T]he chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is
not the direct interference of the MOI or any official body. If
publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of
print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because
they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual
cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.
Today’s cowardly journalists have suppressed stories of Hunter
Biden’s laptop, doubts about the efficiency of masks and lockdowns,
questionable safety profiles of vaccines, concerns that vaccines didn’t
prevent transmission, questions about U.S. policy in Ukraine, and
challenges to the global warming orthodoxy.
While the Biden administration did twist the arms of social media
companies to censor ordinary people, it didn’t have to censor
journalists. Orwell wrote: “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and
inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.” He
explained,
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it
is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is
‘not done’ to say it… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy
finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely
unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in
the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
In the following paragraph, Orwell painted a portrait of our time. As
you read, substitute vaccines, gender reassignment surgery for teens,
green energy, etc., for “Soviet Russia”:
At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an
uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly
everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any
disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep
hidden, is next door to unprintable. And this nation-wide conspiracy to
flatter our ally takes place, curiously enough, against a background of
genuine intellectual tolerance. For though you are not allowed to
criticise the Soviet government, at least you are reasonably free to
criticise our own.
Orwell was not surprised by “the servility with which the greater
part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian
propaganda,” even though they had “no direct pressure to falsify their
opinions.”
Big Pharma’s power was already an issue almost eighty years ago.
Orwell observed, “Notoriously, certain topics cannot be discussed
because of ‘vested interests’. The best-known case is the patent
medicine racket.”
Unfortunately, despite raising the alarm, Orwell adds a qualifier to his support for freedom of speech:
If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the
distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it
means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he
believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest
of the community in some quite unmistakable way.
Today, of course, the harm to the community qualifier is used by Google and others to censor legitimate differences of opinion.
Just as Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom,
Orwell warned, “It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary
and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the
guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well
as in practice.”
Today, authoritarians claim they are defending democracy yet do so by
illiberal means. Orwell observed these tactics and reported “a
widespread tendency to argue that one can only defend democracy by
totalitarian methods. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one
must crush its enemies by no matter what means.”
The enemies to be crushed included “those who ‘objectively’ endanger
it by spreading mistaken doctrines.” Today’s censors also use this
misinformation argument.
Worse, Orwell explains intellectuals justified Stalin’s purges by
claiming the victims’ “heretical opinions … ‘objectively’ harmed the
régime, and therefore it was quite right not only to massacre them but
to discredit them by false accusations.”
This is not an essay to consider the cancellation of health professionals, authors, and academics. But if you believe intellectuals oppose “false accusations” in service of their perceived good cause, Orwell would say you are wrong.
Orwell observed great enthusiasm for Stalinist Russia was “only a
symptom of the general weakening of the western liberal tradition.” He
warned, “If you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when
they will be used against you instead of for you.”
Any tribal adoption of an “orthodoxy” is problematic. Orwell
observed, “The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees
with the record that is being played at the moment.”
Can Western civilization survive the illiberalism Orwell observed? Orwell had his doubts:
[I]intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our
characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that
tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have
accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed,
praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political
expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it
from sheer cowardice.
Orwell wrote, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to
tell people what they do not want to hear.” Today, journalists and
intellectuals tell us that freedom of expression is not essential;
rather than being a condition by which civilization progresses, freedom
of expression is a menace to “democracy.” With such beliefs, Orwell would warn, we are creating our own dystopia.
Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership, and his essays have
appeared in publications such as the Foundation for Economic Education
and Intellectual Takeout. To receive Barry’s essays in your inbox, visit mindsetshifts.com
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