The Dangers of Free speech in a Democracy
When not everyone is free to speak the information provided to us becomes skewed in favor of those who silence us.
The Women’s March was a tremendous event that took place a few weeks ago but people are still talking about it. They praise the celebrities who took to the stage and spoke out about the injustices women, POC, and immigrants are facing under Trump’s rule but how much of what they said did we actually hear?
Michel Foucault wrote a piece called Fearless Speech in which he describes in detail the meaning of parrhesia (free speech), and how it is shaped and affected by democracy. He cites arguments that say parrhesia in democracy is problematic because there are many factors that can affect what we’re actually hearing. He gives an example from Isocrates and states that in Greece, the Athenians will listen to whoever supports their desires but turn a blind eye to those who don’t. Sound familiar?
It should, because the exact same thing happened at the women’s march. Madonna, a well known artist, attended the march in D.C. and while giving a fiery speech, she was taken off air by several news channels. This is where things start to get a little dicey. These news outlets say they took her off air because she was using expletives but they continued to show coverage of the marchers, whose signs and chants could be construed as equally vulgar. So while other people got to speak and share their wisdom on stage, Madonna was cut short presumably because these networks did not want her comments reaching their audiences.
This is the problem that Foucault tries to address in Fearless Speech. You can’t have parrhesia in democracy because not every one is free to speak and those who are may not speak as freely as you think. He brings up a category of “flatterers”, which are people who say what you want to hear and those are the kind of people Trump surrounds himself with. Those who oppose him get the boot.
Just recently, Sally Yates was fired from being Trump’s acting attorney because she defied his executive order to ban refugees from Muslim countries. So how free is free speech? For Yates, the cost was her job. Foucault might argue that this was not parrhesia because, in order to be a parrhesiastes, one must have no power and risk themselves to speak to a person of power (i.e. a peasant to a king). However I’d argue that despite the power she held over someone like myself, Trump still held a higher position over her and ultimately, the risk she faced was her job. She opposed a higher power and he took away her position in government. All over a disagreement.
However, it doesn’t stop there. Trump also put a gag order on the EPA and tried to ban agencies from talking about climate change as well as other scientific facts simply because he does not believe in it. He is a prime example of someone who only hears what they want and bans what they don’t. That kind of thinking is extremely harmful because the everyday people are not getting the information they need. Trump managed to delete the pages on climate control from the White House website, as well as have National Parks facts deleted from their twitter accounts. Fortunately for us, that didn’t stop the science side of Twitter from coming together and creating alternate accounts to continue posting facts.
So who can speak freely?
Foucault believes that male citizens who have no power and are visible or considered human are the ones who can speak true parrhesia so where does that leave women? Obviously that theory of free speech is far outdated but the sexism isn’t. Even today, we see this kind of sexist thinking in places like the Senate. For example, Elizabeth Warren was silenced on the Senate floor after attempting to read a letter by Coretta Scott King. She was citing the letter to argue why she felt Jeff Sessions should not be nominated. After being silenced, Warren went to say that she was considered a “non-person” on the Senate floor. However, Bernie Sanders defended Warren and was allowed to uninterruptedly read the same letter by King. So Warren, who was speaking her mind was silenced but Sanders, a man, spoke the same opinion yet he was allowed to.
Where is the freedom in that?
The reality of using parrhesia in the modern world seems impossible when you consider all the restrictions it puts on people, especially women. If even those in power have no authority to express their opinions then what will become of the everyday person who attempts to speak their mind? In other words, if the risk people like Yates face is getting fired then what dangers await an ordinary person?
In some cases, it’s death. In April of 2016, an editor for a Bangladesh LGBT magazine, along with his friend, were stabbed to death for the opinions they expressed in said magazine. Foucault argues that those are the types of risks a true parrhesiastes faces but if death is a consequence of free speech then it costs much more than people think.
While the idea of free speech in a democracy seems ideal, it’s almost too utopic. Not everyone gets a say and those who do are limited. Parrhesia is not a concept that can thrive in today’s democracy for it is far too limiting. Free speech should be available to anyone and there should not have to be such dire consequences for speaking out. We should not have to be a society whose citizens fear for their life over a simple opinion.
