The First Amendment, we know it, we love it, it’s one of the cornerstones of our democratic world, the belief rooted in every individual’s heart that “I have a voice” and “I deserve to be heard,” but if we reflect on the miserable day to day life that so many of us reportedly experience, it might be fitting to reassess how deeply this desire to speak and the misery by dissatisfaction with the status quo are connected, and if it’s worth it, discomfort-wise, to want to speak in the first place.
Speaking up (or the desire to do so) is almost always accompanied by expectations of reaction, which can often be unrealistic. We spend time and energy preparing to speak. From rehearsing speeches to texting messages, a non-negligible sum of resources goes into preparing the expression. Thus, referring to commitment bias and similar theories, human naturally expect responses to speech, and since the illusion of unity stemming from egocentric bias, humans are terribly likely to use how they themselves would have reacted to the expression and assign it directly to their fellows who aren’t them, conjuring an expectation too grand, one that is likely never going to get fulfilled, leading to disappointment and dissatisfaction. Though this flaw can be alleviated or even remedied by sincerely acknowledging the fact that expression might be met with misunderstanding, backlash, or worse responses, putting in the work to get the message out inevitably primes the speaker to think that they are entitled to something from the audience, an unwarranted entitlement that is more often dismissed without notice than getting marginally fulfilled, causing dissatisfaction and dissonance all along the way.
Much of our frustration is caused by other people expressing. Fox News, at they put it, is expression; Russia disinformation campaigns, to an extent, is expression; DPRK propaganda, technically, is expression. Now some people might object by pointing out that “they know that it is wrong/biased and they are spreading it on purpose,” but one can never prove that other people genuinely did things in bad faith (one can never see inside another’s mind): they could have believed it from the bottom of their hearts and spread the information like any other person would. People value different things: some journalists value facts, some patriots value their national spirit, some influencers value the heat of the moment, some religious follower value what their deity decrees, and some anti-vaxxers value whatever they think is not poisonous. These beliefs, however ungrounded in the eyes of a bystander, all have legitimate reasons for being the person’s mind (or else it will not be strong enough to manifest through action/expression). A mother who lost one of her two children in an air incident would understandably boycott plane tickets for the rest of her life in favor of trains or other alternatives. It does not matter if any “sensible person” explains to her what statistics means and what the fatality rates are for each mode of transport. Every time she sees an airplane she continues to mourn her lost child; every time she talks about not traveling on planes she is sweeping the moss and vines off of that child’s grave; every time she refuses to buy a plane ticket she is doing all that she can to take what she subtract from the revenue of the aviation industry, an incomparable amount to what the industry subtracted from her. People have different reasons, all of which are convincing to the person in question, to value different things, and other people expressing contrary beliefs generally make us frustrated because we have an egocentric bias that makes us think everybody is like me. Hence when watching the news, you hear “How can this be” and similar exclamations: we are doing a terrible job at understanding each other and radically overestimating our similarities, and I wonder if it’s worthwhile to speak if the words were to be met with hatred, I wonder if it’s worthwhile to listen if all we get is frustration. Until we are willing to look behind the anger and antagonizing mask of the rhetoric and examine the values powering them, and why these values came to be, it is more unworthy than not to speak, to listen, and to interpret.
Speaking of interpretation, it is very very likely that our message get misinterpreted on the way out. Quotes get taken out of context all the time, and there is pretty much nothing the speaker can do about it. Other people naturally take what they like to hear from the quotes and disregard the others: you are not so much speaking for yourself as you are speaking for the people who take your quotes out of context. Worse off, you still have your name attached to it. Then there’s people framing social activists as communists, and pro-Palestinians as terrorists. Your message ultimately does not belong to you, it belongs to whoever has the resources to frame it and deliver it to the general public. A press can gild a sentence in gold, it can just as well defame every essence of good will out of that sentence by how they talk about it, and with such a media-gullible public, I doubt if the situation will get better. We could educate the entire population of more than eight billion to have enough sense to exercise evidence-based-reasoning and be less susceptible to being flash-banged by information taken out of context, or we could choose to wear slippers instead of covering the earth with carpet and simply shut up to in front of the ignorant crowd, most of whom have more interest in TikTok opposed to figuring out the sincerity of messages.
It is true that many people have the faith of freedom at heart when crying out, when rallying a seemingly large crowd. They have a reason to speak up. They do, and they think it comes from the goodness of their heart, but if we look at those who put them in the place to speak, those who fund the spread of their word, the good faith erodes, and the contaminated world of money takes over. In this world, information needs money to spread, and money being incredibly scarce, the sponsors are going to be awfully selective in who they choose in endorse. In the end, however amounts of good faith all in the speaker, the corporate structure behind them and the financial or political strings attached really invites us to ask a question: who are you speaking for, yourself, or your sponsors? If speaking out in good faith means speaking for nobody but yourself, and requiring sponsors to transit means the entire thing being contaminated by money and thus no longer sincere, what is all of this for?
There is a case against speaking up, or at least wanting to do so, in specific circumstances. In favor of mental comfort and peace of the mind, it can be more convenient to refrain, and forgo one’s voice in this chaotic world, and dedicate the energy to self-improvement or other causes.
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