The “thought police” doesn’t exist
Having thoughts is so inalienable from human existence that most of us agree it to be a right everyone is entitled to thus no government should be able to keep us from presenting our ideas, a notion we commonly identify as the freedom of speech.
Core fears of our time, at least according to certain people, are “thought policing” and “political correctness” which are considered a violation of the right to free speech and in broader sense are apparently tools of censorship. Regardless of the type of political or social debate one is engaging in these two terms will eventually enter the discourse and so I have been wondering about a couple of points:
Policing something means keeping it to certain standards, regulating it to follow order and supervising — all of which are essential part of our life since our birth. The mere fear of being policed is a misconception based on the subjective belief that we haven’t been and aren’t at the moment regulated. Even Internet boards where language is freely farted on the screen don’t escape policing because contributors consciously and subconsciously know to keep themselves to standards to be accepted.
More importantly, our thoughts have never been controlled. Rather, our ways of expressing them have been. Unless a person has been living under a strict despotic system similar to North Korea nobody has ever policed what they think because nobody could possible be aware unless that person voiced their opinion. “Thought police” as an oppressive authority is very much mere fiction thus the fear of it is unjustified and irrational.
What actually exists is “speech policing”, a thing engraved into our collective consciousness because it’s crucial to peaceful human coexistence. If we all started voicing every single thought on our minds I would give humanity 30 more minutes before we murder each other. The truth is, we are our own “speech police” just by the fact that we all have had unpretty opinions about people we love and care for deeply that either never left our mouth or have been toned down to sound kinder.
If you think your best friend is the dumbest person on Earth in your head you will tell them they should probably focus more on studying. If you think your mother or father is the worst cook in the history of cooking, in your head, you will tell them he/she shouldn’t bother with cooking, you’ll treat him/her to dinner. What we think and what we say naturally aren’t the exact same because we take multiple factors into consideration before voicing a thought — or in short, we naturally police our own speech.
Realizing this is very important because it puts “political correctness” into perspective: did it truly “go wild” or are people simply upset because those protected by political correctness aren’t the people they wish to be kind to? The reality is, if a person feels oppressed by not being able to use a degrading word to refer to another human being, the problem is not the policing of speech, it’s the person’s assumption that they are entitled to behaving this way because a working society cannot be based on disrespect for human life.
Hence why consequences exist when a voiced opinion is disrespectful, it isn’t just the exercising of the entitlement to speech, it’s the normalization of language that historically links to oppression, social stigma and segregation as well as it’s an expression of disregard for human life. Every word that was created and is used to degrade entire groups of people is a step toward destroying the unity within society, something that we actually require for survival.
The thoughts in our heads cannot be changed by policing and the words that leave our mouth have always been under regulation to avoid unnecessary conflicts. We have always been aware that words have consequences and we have never stopped considering that before speaking, let it be for the sake of a peaceful family dinner or the sake of avoiding a political controversy. There’s nothing outrageous about speech policing and political correctness, they are in fact natural to all of us. What differs from person to person is whom we grant our consideration and care to — but that absolutely shouldn’t define the basic respect we show for human life.
