I won’t spoil Dune for you, but let me tell you this before we’re spoiled

There exists a contradiction of whether and when censorship is good or bad. Herein and in some following post I shall provide a look into this problem:

The Four Sacred Freedoms enforced in Amendment I of the US constitution are an attempt to guarantee citizens some rights that ought not to be taken from them by the government, or at least so thought the Founding Fathers. But what might have lead them into thinking that way exactly with regards to religion, speech, the press and the right to assemble? Presumably they saw them as the keystones? Yet if so, why should the government never dare to control those aspects of society, when the populace is prone to wrongdoings in either of these domains?

We can infer that it boils down to who should have the word to say what’s right and what’s wrong. Let’s give the word to the government in a mental experiment, or turn our mind’s look to a country where that is or was the reality. Bad case scenario, we have a despotic ruling class that knows no better than to serve its own interest. Case closed; let’s observe what happens in the idealistic scenario: the ruler wisely discerns on every matter what activities lead all to welfare and which ones would bring about calamity, so he forbids the latter. Like during the rule of Leto II in the Dune universe, where the author tried to envision the paradoxically dystopian nature of such a world – people live in outward peace and prosperity, but never fully at ease, many times agitated or distressed by what would seem to be an inherent inner impetus towards disharmony. To estimate the extent to which this can be true of your own self, put yourself in the shoes of your thirties and imagine being parented just as if you were three years old instead – parented by the very best parents that can inhabit the earth, just somehow they never see you as a grown-up and still perceive you as a toddler, so whatever you start doing, you’re met with restrictions to make sure you are safe. And don’t you think of reaching for the knife or scissors! There are people wiser than you, who have the sovereign responsibility to operate with those. Would you comply with all regulations and suppress your sense of dignity or will you revolt in defense of your status? As for Dune, there the submitted are left with just the first option because of being powerless and each one’s suppressed self-hood causes the disheartening uneasiness. And the way out of this situation was, in the context of that fictional universe, <slight spoiler alert> to allow for the existence of causes with unforeseeable outcomes.

You may have thought such parent measures are excessive for a person in his or her thirties. Yeah, well, if we hand a knife to every sane grown-up on the planet I bet you someone will be stabbed in no time, no doubt about it. Hence where do we place the boundary?

Back to inspecting the human nature, what I might have provoked you to feel is that you deserve by the fact of your very existence to be independent. You’d have felt that your self could never possibly realise itself fully if it’s always held in check by another. You’d be right, as genius is always unique and individual, and also always genuinely impulse-driven, so it behaves by definition outside of the scope of what has previously been considered the correct way, setting instead an original more correct way of its own. If the overseer (e.g. parent, wise ruler) would allow the overseen (e.g. child, society) to undertake endeavours with unforeseeable outcome, he would occasionally find out that the results are pleasing. Just so often as the overseen is able to comprehend and harness his impulse of ingeniousness, that is. And here’s the turning point when we see the full advantage of the permissive method: when the impulse for acting is disingenuous (i.e. not the genuine bloom of self), mistakes are made and the consequences occur as unfavourable, but what really matters is that they are witnessed – they are experienced by the actor – first on the delivering end and later, often naturally or sometimes forcibly – on the receiving end. Same applies to good deeds and their outcomes; also often the actor is one’s own sole immediate victim or beneficiary.

Now the role of the sovereign can crystallize in our mind as the one who makes sure that deeds are duly and respectably paid for, rather than the one who’s job is to indefinitely restrict action and activities to what can be perceived, based on past experience, to be of benefit. When the rule of Kronos is no longer befitting, we need a Zeus in his place. (No man was castrated in the writing of this article.)

In a free society it is normally the case that people are allowed to contact each other as they wish, in the trust that harming another person would be unthinkable to most and avoided by the dangerous few in fear of retaliation and punishment.

As soon as great harm is visibly on its way, it is the right time to prevent it. When it’s on its course – to stop it. But only in modern times has it become truly possible to install the measures that can prevent any potential cause of harm from ever occurring and there are people who firmly believe it is entirely correct to do so, even viewing it as a route to perfect society. Whether there is or isn’t a perceived danger, they’ll be on that route, like onto a conveyor line.

For these either deny the goal of the genuinely unique and freely expressing self’s flourishing, or downplay it’s importance, or see it as something achievable by means of a mechanical process.

Do you deny or accept your free self and that of all people, is what I’m urging you to answer yourself this day and night. Farewell.