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By Graedon H. Zorzi [ [link removed] ]
Free speech is perhaps most commonly defended on the basis made famous in John Stuart Mill’s 1859 book “On Liberty”: Allowing more speech, even expression of seemingly false views, is the surest way to move toward truth. But free speech has also long been defended on a second basis: its distinctive significance for democracy [ [link removed] ] and, in particular, for the intellectual character of the democratic populace.
Democratic populations today, as many have observed (including [ [link removed] ] in these [ [link removed] ] pages), seem to be losing trust in institutions [ [link removed] ] and elites. But a related loss of trust might be similarly disruptive: loss of trust in the common citizen. That distrust gnaws at the heart of democratic society by inadvertently bringing about what it fears. If elites fear that citizens can be easily misled and, on the basis of that fear, succeed in sheltering citizens from information that they suspect will mislead them, citizens will actually become less competent and more easily controlled. This possibility is one philosophers of democracy have been warning us about for several centuries, and now is a relevant time to revisit that warning.
Free interchange of ideas and information shapes the intellectual character of the democratic populace; it’s an indispensable tool for forming the intellectual maturity needed for democratic self-governance.
Trust in the Common Citizen
Trust in the competence of the common citizen has been a distinctive bedrock of Western democracy for centuries. As political theorist Jeremy Waldron has phrased it [ [link removed] ], “a democratic view of the human intellect” was central to John Locke’s profoundly influential argument for limited government and majority rule back in the 17th century. (In fact, Locke aimed his criticisms at the educated intellect: He wrote in “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” that “all-knowing Doctors” and “learned disputants” were often sources of moral corruption [ [link removed] ] and political miscalculation.) After all, why go to the trouble of fighting for popular self-governance if you aren’t convinced that the common person is capable of self-governing?
This theme of the democratic intellect has come to my mind frequently over the past few years as we’ve witnessed increasing concern [ [link removed] ] among elites that the common citizen lacks the sophistication to responsibly sift through information [ [link removed] ] and arrive at decisions. That same concern motivated the recent legislative push [ [link removed] ] in California to address deepfakes and artificial intelligence (AI). Attempts to restrict speech in order to protect people from being misled are multiplying rapidly [ [link removed] ], not least in the United Kingdom [ [link removed] ].
The concern is easy to understand—indeed, it was anticipated by the modern philosopher Immanuel Kant at the end of the 18th century. Kant cautioned [ [link removed] ] that democratic societies would be threatened by elites who “set themselves up” as “guardians” of the people, relieving the people of the trouble of thinking for themselves. These elites seek to filter information for public consumption, similar to the way that legal guardians of minors shelter and direct during that period of youth when children are not yet able to navigate the world and take responsibility for themselves as adults.
Kant’s point was that such elites treat democratic citizens like children—even like cattle. They make “their domestic livestock dumb,” he wrote, by training them to be intellectually dependent, and then they scare them, showing them “the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone.”
The danger that people may be misled by misinformation is certainly real—but Kant also thought it to be less daunting than it might at first appear. The public, Kant admitted, will make mistakes and be led astray, but he argued that the best solution is for the public to “enlighten itself” because only “by falling a few times” will the common people “in the end certainly learn to walk.”
A Step Toward Tyranny
To apply the dilemma Kant suggests to an issue California has recently attempted to tackle: Should elites try to shield us from deepfakes and AI, or should we all learn to navigate them together? Or we could mention the fracas between the U.K. and Elon Musk [ [link removed] ], with some calling for Musk to be arrested and X to be canceled. Should Musk be forced by law to censor disfavored content, or is it the responsibility and prerogative of common citizens both to speak to each other freely and to filter truth from untruth?
Many voices seem to think censorship is the obvious answer. As former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry worried in comments he made at the World Economic Forum [ [link removed] ] in September, “the referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn't a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree.” He could have said “guardians” instead of “referees.” Kerry went on to call for “winning enough votes” to “implement change” to the First Amendment, which, he lamented, currently stands as “a major block” to shutting down problematic voices.
The lesson from Kant is that such thinking is shortsighted. Kant warned that when the elite pass along only carefully curated information in order to pre-select the people’s conclusions for them, the common people begin to become a “great unthinking mass [ [link removed] ],” rather than a competent self-governing citizenry. And that outcome is a harbinger of tyranny, Kant thought, because soon enough some demagogue or other will gain the gullible ear of that unthinking mass and turn it brutal. A public that can be led around like a horse wearing blinders is a dangerous thing.
The shocking arrival of such tyranny preoccupied Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th century’s most astute critics of totalitarianism. Studying the oppressive governments of her era, Arendt concluded [ [link removed] ] that tyranny scrambles into power by putting a chokehold on the free flow of information. Arendt argued that a healthy polity breathes only when people speak together freely; when authorities strangle the free exchange of ideas, the people become intellectually stifled, mutually suspicious and easily manipulable. Arendt warned that those who congratulate themselves on guarding people from disfavored information are holding, perhaps without realizing it, the same sentiments that have been cherished by a “long series of benevolent tyrants and enlightened despots.”
If Kant and Arendt and Locke (and it would be easy in a longer essay to add many more luminaries of modern political thought) are correct, the beating heart of democracy is the competent citizen. We need not have a rosy view of the average person in order to recognize that undermining citizen competence is a dangerous game. We need citizens as capable as possible if they are to resist the benevolent tyrants, the enlightened despots and the demagogues so frequently mentioned [ [link removed] ] by America’s founders at the Constitutional Convention.
The presumption to save the people from having to analyze and think for themselves, as well-intentioned as it may seem, errs by prioritizing (possibly illusory) short-term benefits over long-term political health.
Graedon H. Zorzi is an assistant professor of theology and philosophy at Patrick Henry College. He holds a Ph.D., M.Phil. and M.A. in Political Science and Religious Studies from Yale. His recent work on classical liberalism has been published in The Historical Journal, The Review of Politics, The Wall Street Journal and The Hill.

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