Much has been said about public censorship, not enough about self-censorship. We veil our thoughts from ourselves. We censor our true feelings about the outrages of our day. We accept a great deal of lies from the powers that be. We swallow whole what we are fed in the various media of information and misinformation.
We are easy to manipulate because we absorb without thinking. And when we do think, we think what we have thought before. We do not question enough. We do not apply sufficient rigour to the information we receive and the conclusions that can be drawn from it. We collude in the great follies and injustices of our age by censoring our minds.
They do things in our name, with our votes, using our silent consent. Then much later our children are horrified to learn that we were present and adult when unacceptable outrages against humanity were perpetrated under our very noses, and that we did nothing. And so we implicate a whole generation; and, in extreme cases, a whole nation.
It is only by being free in ourselves that we can extend the freedom of others. It is only by being free that we can guarantee clean hands for the next generation to fight the good fight of their era.
It is time we considered the bedrock of censorship – and this is the censorship that takes place within.
We stifle our most humane thoughts. We silence our impulses to translate our sense of injustice into action. We sense something is wrong but we choose to be silent. Sometimes we do this just to have a quiet life. Sometimes we are silent because it has always been some kind of national characteristic. Embarrassment, not wanting to be different, not wanting to be the only one voicing dissent are kinds of self-censorship. Traditional modes of behaviour are internalised forms that become part of the matrix of self-censorship.
We are victims of censorship within when we do not let ourselves think the thoughts which our flesh recoils from, or let conscience speak that which the heart feels to be unacceptable, or when we give ourselves excellent reasons for not participating in this grand drama of our interconnected lives. Then we make it possible for governments to censor all those who speak out when they find our freedoms being crushed, visibly or invisibly.
There are many nations across the world where great works could be created, but are not. Generations have come and gone and there have been no works of significant creativity amongst them. Didn’t the people suffer, dream, love, or endure oppression? Didn’t history, with its trap-doors, its earthquakes, its upheavals, happen to them? Was there no evil, no failure, no loss, no rage, no quests, no doubts, no yearning for something undefinable? Then why so little to show for all that perplexity of living and dying, of loving and weeping, of betrayals and forgiveness? Why nothing to show for all that fire? The reason may just be censorship within.
They dared not think that which they should think. They dared not differ. They dared not step outside the prevailing orthodoxies. There are, maybe, other reasons. That under fear of death, exile, torture, the murder of loved ones, the threat to their livelihood, their government drives into silence the conscience that could express itself through the oblique forms of the imagination. In short, the artists censor themselves. The forces that be kill creativity at the very place of conception, in the heart, before inspiration can hover over the mind like that dove of the holy spirit.
And then we say the people were without genius. They lived as if they didn’t live. They gave us no sign that they were here. They added nothing to the ongoing battle for the higher civilisation of humanity. They bequeathed us nothing, not even hope. They might as well have sunk to the bottom of the sea, or vanished without a trace.
So it will be of us, if we are not mindful. We live in an age of monstrosities. We fiddle while the last days of the earth draw closer, thanks to our mindlessness. Wars rage under our eyes. Famines and plagues devour our neighbours across the seas. Next door someone is dying for want of care. Our children, with insufficient moral guidance, are burning up the tattered bible of tolerance, patience, and understanding. Anomie and indifference take on glamorous names.
How can we care about big things afar when big things nearby are not seen, even as they consume us? The true issue of our age is not terrorism or religion. The great issue of our age is freedom.
We need to de-censor our minds. Much has been said about the damage done to all when our freedom of expression is destroyed. Now it is time to speak of the more insidious censorship upon which rest the more sensational censorships.
O fellow members of the human race, de-censor your minds. The mind is the only true place of freedom. Let’s protect that freedom within by constantly asking questions, by thinking clearly, by transcending our traditional and habitual modes of thought. That way we will better protect one another from having our world ruined by those who rule in our name, who sometimes have no idea of the catastrophic effects of what they are doing. Let’s raise our voices when our consciences are choked. Only free people can make a free world.