aka Ken Smith: One value at a time

Sunday December 1, 2024; 6:16 AM EST

One value at a time#

If all you can hold in your billionaire head is one value at a time, then maybe you clutch onto an idea that you're calling free speech, say. Speech is good, free speech is better. The freer the speech, the more of it, the better. Flood the zone with free speech.#
But a lowly millionaire might easily know that (for better or worse) an idea grows more powerful when it is linked to a second and a third idea. Free speech, the first value, is transformed when combined with a second idea: a space where you can flood the zone with an irresistible torrent of relevant, irrelevant, dogmatic, irreverent, fervent, high-pitched, sometimes even barely coherent speech. This serves as a shortcut through the concerns and objections of other human beings. No need to respect their sorry souls, no need to listen. You can't even tell if they're speaking, the din around them, around us all, is so loud. Still, if you want power, something you want to call free speech plus a place for a million voices to all call out at once leaves the side door to the power dashboard less guarded than it should be.#
But if there really is a value that deserves the venerated name free speech, and a space to practice this value, and a group of other people not scorned but perhaps accepted and respected for what they've witnessed in life, a place where people can for a time, for a project, affiliate with each other and get some thinking and then some work done, well, then the idea of speech in a social space where decency has a chance to prevail starts to make sense. The linked chain of values, speech-place-civil audience, makes free speech more meaningful. The billionaire might not get that, the one-idea-at-a-time billionaire, or his distracted-by-thoughts-of-power millionaire buddy neither. But we can see it, and maybe even achieve it sometimes, here and there. We can remember times when it happened. We can recall the circumstances, the necessary layers of precondition that made it possible. That still make it possible.#

Sunday December 1, 2024; 6:16 AM EST

One value at a time#

If all you can hold in your billionaire head is one value at a time, then maybe you clutch onto an idea that you're calling free speech, say. Speech is good, free speech is better. The freer the speech, the more of it, the better. Flood the zone with free speech.#
But a lowly millionaire might easily know that (for better or worse) an idea grows more powerful when it is linked to a second and a third idea. Free speech, the first value, is transformed when combined with a second idea: a space where you can flood the zone with an irresistible torrent of relevant, irrelevant, dogmatic, irreverent, fervent, high-pitched, sometimes even barely coherent speech. This serves as a shortcut through the concerns and objections of other human beings. No need to respect their sorry souls, no need to listen. You can't even tell if they're speaking, the din around them, around us all, is so loud. Still, if you want power, something you want to call free speech plus a place for a million voices to all call out at once leaves the side door to the power dashboard less guarded than it should be.#
But if there really is a value that deserves the venerated name free speech, and a space to practice this value, and a group of other people not scorned but perhaps accepted and respected for what they've witnessed in life, a place where people can for a time, for a project, affiliate with each other and get some thinking and then some work done, well, then the idea of speech in a social space where decency has a chance to prevail starts to make sense. The linked chain of values, speech-place-civil audience, makes free speech more meaningful. The billionaire might not get that, the one-idea-at-a-time billionaire, or his distracted-by-thoughts-of-power millionaire buddy neither. But we can see it, and maybe even achieve it sometimes, here and there. We can remember times when it happened. We can recall the circumstances, the necessary layers of precondition that made it possible. That still make it possible.#

Last update: Monday December 2, 2024; 7:58 AM EST.