Why Free Speech is the Antidote to Ignorance and Corruption | Cambridge | EP 240

If pain is more real than anything else, what's even more real than pain is whatever we have to fight off the pain, and that's free speech. It's identical with freedom of thought. It's associated with this capacity and necessity to listen deeply. Their flip sides of the same coin— to use a terrible cliché.

All the clinical data we have, including the more stringently researched, research-oriented clinical inquiry, indicates quite clearly that the exchange of information like that, the generation of semantic and emotional information in a state of relative freedom, the revelation of those thoughts, and then the discursive analysis of those thoughts, say, and then the implementation into action and the testing of them—that is the pathway to health, insofar as that can be attained by, say, psychological or spiritual means.

And so, that's why free speech is not just another freedom or right among many. It's certainly not viewpoint diversity or anything like that. It's the mechanism by which we generate the conceptions that allow us to organize our experience in the world.

It's that mechanism, and more than that, it's the mechanism that allows us to reformulate and criticize those conceptions when they've become outdated and sterile—to dissolve them into a chaos that we have to contend with while it's occurring, and then to reanimate them in a new form so that we can move into the future.

It's wonderful to be here. This is such a remarkable place for a Canadian in particular with our rather, what would you say, paucity of history. It's really something to come here and see a place that's so saturated with, I would say, beauty and integrity. I hope you know what you have and that you take careful care of it because it certainly deserves it.

I'm going to speak tonight, as a clinician, I would say about free speech. Dr. Orr gave a bit of an account of the battle behind the scenes, so to speak, that took place so that I could come here and talk, and that's much appreciated. A lot of people put a lot on the line to make this possible.

But I find the debate itself somewhat of a mystery. I can't really understand why it's raging precisely the way it is, raging. And I would say that specifically from a clinical perspective. I'm going to tell you a little bit about a clinician named Carl Rogers.

I’ve studied the people I regard as the great clinicians in some detail and learned a lot from all of them, regardless of their particular school of psychotherapeutic endeavor, let's say, or their historical background or their genre. I learned a lot from Freud in psychoanalysis, from Carl Jung, from Rogers who is a humanist, from Maslow who was perhaps equally outstanding as a humanist psychologist, the existential psychologists, and the cognitive behavioral types who are much more cut and dried, let's say, in their approach than, you know, the more mythologically oriented, narrative-oriented psychoanalysts. They all had something to teach me.

And I learned it with great—what would you say?—I was driven by a great need to learn what they had to say, and thank God for that since they were clinicians. You'd hope that reading what they wrote would be helpful, and it certainly was helpful to me personally, practically, in the conduct of my profession, but then also in my interpersonal relationships—unbelievably helpful.

And I would say the most stellar piece of advice that I ever encountered that was actually both, I would say, profound in some sense but also immediately practical came from Carl Rogers. Carl Rogers did an awful lot of clinical research into clinical efficacy, as well as being a rather admirable theorist.

Now, his background is somewhat germane. He was really an evangelical Protestant up until the time he became a young man. He was going to go to China as a missionary and stopped because of his developing agnosticism, and then I would say atheism as a consequence of his inability to reconcile the distinction between science and religion.

But his clinical thinking is saturated with Judeo-Christian suppositions, and foremost upon them, I would say, would be something like respect for the word in capital, as a capitalized phrase—respect for the Divine word, let's say, but in a secularized fashion.

But Rogers was also extraordinarily, I would say, careful to elaborate beyond the word to the act of the exchange of words, let's say. Because for anyone to speak, in some sense, you need a listener.

And what that means is that if you're going to be a participant in a good conversation, or we might even say a therapeutic conversation, not only do you have to be an active speaker, but you have to be, to use a terribly cliched phrase, an active listener.

And it stays a cliché unless you understand what it means. But if you understand what it means, then it can stop being a cliché, and I can tell you that if you take nothing else from this lecture but you practice this, it will completely transform the way that you interact with people. And that's something that's worth noting too, that something like this can, in fact, completely transform the way that you interact with people, and that it's actually something in some sense that's simple enough to learn in a very short period of time.

So Rogers said that he had noted in his interactions with people, and in the clinical domain, that it was very difficult for people to listen. And that most people had never really been listened to at all or that many had not never been listened to at all—never really attended to properly, let's say, by their parents during their course of development—never had a mentor or a teacher who really attended to them and listened.

And Rogers also noted that you, listening, may be thinking that that's not true of you, let's say, as a person. You had people who guided you, or as a listener you're perfectly good at it, and he would say, "No, probably not."

And so he paused a little experiment that you could run, and I would highly recommend that you run this experiment every time you talk to people for the rest of your life because it really works. And it points to something deep that we'll go into after the description of the practicalities.

So Rogers said it was an axiom of his theoretical stance, let's say, and derived it in no small part from the Freudian revelations. I mean, Freud basically what Freud did in his clinical practice was have people come into his office, his clinic, lay down on the couch with him not visible and talk.

And the instruction was, say anything that comes to mind—anything and everything that comes to mind, so completely untrammeled revelatory thought. Now, Freud's observation was that if you let people do that and maintained an active listening environment, even though you were hidden, he didn't want you to be dissuaded or persuaded in your utterances by any reflection of emotion on his face, that you would just have the opportunity to wander haphazardly through your field of thought.

And what Freud came to realize was that the haphazard nature of that tended to transform rather quickly into something that was much more coherent and much less contaminated with excess emotion. And so that if you just let the revelatory process of free speech occur, that that in itself was therapeutic.

And that was a radical claim for its time, but in some sense it's not that radical at all unless you think that speech is divorced entirely from thought, which it certainly is not, although thought cannot be reduced merely to speech, because there are forms of thought that are majestic, let's say.

But certainly much of what goes on in the theaters of our imagination that constitutes thought is in the form of speech. You could say, well, we think with speech, and thought is in many ways internalized speech.

So the notion that allowing yourself to notice what you actually think about things by talking about them might be good for you—if thought is, in some important sense, linked to, well, your bodily incarnation, let's say, and if it's not, well then what good is it?

And so technically speaking, the part of the brain that produces semantic content—the prefrontal cortex, usually in the left, but it depends to some degree on lateralization and handedness—we don't have to get into that— the prefrontal cortex grew out of the motor cortex in the course of evolutionary history.

And so what happens in the theater of thought is that potential actions and perceptions are tried out for potential utility, so they're revealed in a sense, and then potentially criticized out of existence before you implement them stupidly in behavior and die.

And I believe it was Alfred North Whitehead who said, "The purpose of thought is to let our thoughts die instead of us," which is correct, right? It's correct biologically, it's correct technically, it's correct philosophically, and it's worth thinking about.

So, well, Freud let people reveal themselves to themselves. Now later investigations, particularly by James Pennebaker, showed that the Freudian transformation, insofar as it did occur, say, in relationship to trauma, was not a consequence of emotional catharsis, which was part of Freud's essential hypothesis, although he was more sophisticated than that, but actually a consequence of the cognitive reconstruction and reappraisal that occurred attendant upon speech—related, let's say, to trauma—to revelatory speech related to trauma.

Now, there are other ways of engaging in such things; there's the pure revelatory explication. And so one of the things you do, do as a clinician, you try your best. So when someone would come and see me—well, first they were very tentative because who the hell wants to go see a clinical psychologist, right?

I mean, you only do such a thing if you're driven into desperation in some sense. You have to admit to yourself that you're no longer capable of dealing with your own affairs, or that at least something could be improved, and you have to turn to a relative outsider. So it's not—it's a somewhat humiliating initial endeavor.

And I would say if you ever know anyone who needs to be convinced to see a psychologist because things have got out of hand, one way to smooth the way forward to that is just to tell them to try it once, right? Because then it's not a long-term commandment.

I would tell people when they walked in my office, "You know, we'll see how this goes, and I know you're uncomfortable about being here and disoriented and all that, but let's try it out for one session. And if it works, then you could have another one, and then you could decide again then." So you know, it's a gentle introduction.

And I would never assume to begin with that I knew what was wrong with them. I was never striving for a diagnosis, and that was partly because I was formally trained as a cognitive behavioral psychologist. Cognitive behavior psychologists are much more concerned with the particularities of perception and behavior than with such things as psychiatric diagnostic categories.

And so it was a very strategic approach, and one that was really based on a gentle and facilitating inquisition. It's like, well, there must be something wrong in your life, I would presume, because here you are. Or you're trying to make something that isn't so good better—that's another possibility.

I wouldn't presume to know what that is because what do I know about you? Like nothing. And so a lot of the initial discussion was just, well, what's wrong, like as far as you can tell? How would you describe, in as detailed a fashion as possible, what's wrong? And then if things weren't wrong, well, what might they look like?

So, and that's a great thing, by the way, if you're ever arguing with someone in an intimate relationship, right? Because there's some issue on the table, and one of the things you can ask them is, well, what are your conditions for satisfaction? Like, if this was resolved to your satisfaction, what is it that I would have to offer? What is it that would have to change that I could actually practically implement right now?

And one way of doing that, by the way, is sometimes the person wants you to say something—an apology maybe—and you have to agree that perhaps you should utter an apology. But you can say to them, well, what word should I coat this apology? And that would be sufficient as far as you're concerned.

And they're going to say, well, you have to figure that out on your own, or if you loved me, you know? And that's like, no, I'm stupid, and I don't know what would satisfy you, and I'm awkward at these sorts of things, and I could use a hand at practice.

And so maybe if you just let me stumble through this apology in the manner that you see fit as a genuine actor, then maybe the next time I do it, I'd be a little better at it. But don't expect satiating perfection at first utterance because you're not going to get it, because you're likely tangled up with someone who's no more sophisticated or intelligent than you are.

So that's very helpful.

So the clinical sessions were as free an exchange of information as I could manage. And one of the things I did notice consistently in my clinical practice was that if I really, really listened to the person, they were unbelievably interesting.

And so I would say this is rather corrosive bit of self-reflection, but if you're bored in a conversation, you're the boring person, right? Because you're not listening. Because if you were listening, that person is a strange creature, man. And if they told you what you're, they're actually up to, first of all, it would be a shock to them, that's for sure.

But if they were telling you, you would not be bored. And so there's a high probability that you're sitting there thinking what you already know about this person, what you're assuming by the way they're dressed or the way they comport themselves or their class or their social status or their ethnicity or whatever the hell it is—stereotypes that you're using as a replacement for the genuine dialogue.

And then you're also sitting there thinking about what you're going to say next when they're talking, so that you can impress them and so on and so forth, and you're not doing the kind of listening that Rogers suggested at all, because you’re treating the other person as an end to an aprioridefined instrumental means, and that's a big mistake.

And so Rogers thought you could check yourself, and here's the experiment. And this works in a lovely manner, and actually Rogers’ work has been used in conflict management, sociology, and management at fairly high levels of governmental intervention, especially in times of war because it actually does make peace.

And so his rule was, first of all, you're going to be afraid to listen because if you listen to someone who disagrees with you and you really listen, they're going to tell you things that will reveal your errors and make you change.

And now that might be a good thing if you know that you're so damn ignorant that little humility's in order, and that the better you could be given rise to in place of the already totalitarian certainty you know that constitutes you at the moment.

But still, it's especially if you're dealing with someone who truly is different than you, the probability that they'll reveal things in honest dialogue that will shake you to the core is quite high, and that's very common experience in clinical practice.

Well, partly, why else would it possibly work if that wasn't the sort of thing that was happening? And so that was another barrier to listening is you don't want the person to reveal themselves in their complexity to some degree because they shake you to the depths of your core certainties.

And that's actually a great thing unless you're already living in paradise, right? Because since you're not, the probability that you're existing in error is fairly high, and some of those areas are probably pretty severe.

But that doesn't mean it's a particularly really pleasant experience to have them revealed or to stumble upon them. So Rogers suggested this technique, which I said I would get to the technique. He said the next time you find yourself embroiled in an argument with someone that's contentious and uncomfortable, institute the following rule: You don't get to respond to the person's claims until they've exhausted that particular claim.

And this does presume to some degree that you're dealing with a good-faith act, or even if they feel differently than you do, you don't get to respond until you have recapitulated their viewpoint and summarized it in a manner they find acceptable.

That's so treacherously sneaky, that rule, because what it means is you have to demonstrate that you attended to what they say closely enough and carefully enough to first of all act out validation of the idea that they have an opinion worth attending to.

That's a big deal. People really like being paid attention to. There's nothing people like more than that unless they have something to hide, and even then, there’s a part of them that would rather have that paid attention to than fail to pass, what would you say, to go unnoticed.

Every cynic is entirely disappointed when his or her cynicism goes unchallenged because there's a part of them, like a little unwarped part of their soul that's still alive, thinking, "Oh my God, I hope someone calls me on all my foolishness and cynicism, because if they don't, that means that it's valid and generally applicable and I'm in hell, and what good is that?"

And I really mean that. I really mean that. And so, so you’re called upon to first of all summarize what they said, which is not an easy thing, right? Because it means you have to—and sometimes it’s somewhat incoherent and emotional-laden, especially if it’s in the course of an argument.

So you have to sort of strike right to the quick. It sounds to me like this is the point you were making, and then you lay out the point. And then you see they have to be happy with your summary. They have to be pleased with it, which means that you're doing exactly the opposite of straw manning the argument, quite the contrary—and you’re doing them a favor in some sense by reducing it to the gist, because that's actually an incredibly complex cognitive operation.

I had one client who was extraordinarily seriously affected, and in the final analysis, I don't know if I was of any help to her, because the pit of family pathology she was in Wisconsin was so deep that no matter how far we dug, there was always a number, a new layer of lies underneath the lies we had already worked months to uncover. It was just awful—like homicidal level awful. Literally terrible.

But she told me she went on a tangent that lasted for four consecutive day clinical sessions. Like they weren't the whole day, but they were 50 minutes on four consecutive days. I had no idea where she was going; she was wandering all over in this Freudian associational manner.

And she came to the point at the end of it; it was unbelievable. She tied together this—she was a very intelligent woman, she tied together this tremendously long incoherent ramble into a little bow right at the end, like the punchline of a remarkable joke.

And so, and she had extracted, in some sense, the gist of what she was saying as a consequence of the circumambulation, the wandering through all this territory.

And when you listen to someone very, very carefully, and especially if they express themselves for a while, and you say to them, "Well, it sounds to me like this is what you're saying," what you're doing is taking a tremendous amount of emotionally laden material—a lot of it unnecessary in the final analysis because of the ensuing synthesis—and offering them a synthesis, which is a great thing to do, especially if they're happy to accept it, because that also means that you did listen to them.

So you signified that they were worth attending to and then you listened to them enough to actually understand what they were saying, to try to understand it, and then you did understand it, and then they're way happier with you, even if you're arguing with them, because at least now they know they can rely on you to be a reliable listener.

And that you're not trying to—you know how it is when you're arguing with someone, there's a part of you that really wants to win. It's like, "I'm right, you're stupid and wrong." And so the best way for me to demonstrate that is to warp and bend your argument in some—make it trivial in some way it isn't, especially if it’s directed to some degree like elucidating my character flaws—and to minimize you in doing so.

And if you do that, of course, well, that's not a great road to peace unless you're willing to bring a big club to the argument, and many people are. And instead of listening and trying to make peace and sort things out, they'll use all sorts of subtle forms of suppression in their ensuing dialogue just to keep everything, you know, under the rug or in the closet.

I wouldn't recommend that as a medium to long-term strategy, especially if you're trying to bring peace to a household. You have to go through this horribly painful process of listening to the people around you tell you what they think of their lives.

And if you do that, then, well, maybe you can all come to a place that is characterized by something approximating genuine peace. And I would say that even psychophysiologically, you know, I mean when there's tension in a household in multiple, what you say, systems of value operating simultaneously, there's a tremendous confusion about what should reign supreme, right?

And you think, well, nothing has to reign supreme; we can all have our diverse opinions. It's no, you can't! Not if you're going to live together in harmony. There has to be some overarching structure that unites you.

If there—I mean, what else is a family if it's not an overarching structure that unites you? Now, within that, there can be tolerance and even appreciation for necessary individual differences, and obviously there should be, but that doesn't mean there's not a higher unity that the entire organization, let's say, is striving for in some manner.

And not only striving for, but pining for, or even dying for. And I don't use those words lightly; like the absence of that incorporating higher structures is a felt sense of catastrophe on the part of the members of the family.

They're always at each other's throats; they're interfering with each other's goals. They can't listen; they're in a chronic state of hyperarousal because they don't know what to do ever; they're hopeless because no goals have been clearly defined, and we experience almost all our hope in relationship to defined goals.

So this isn't some, what would you say, humanities myth or some reality that isn't as concrete as everything that you see before you—it's quite the contrary.

And as far as Rogers was concerned, well, you had to let people talk to find out what they thought so they could find out what they thought so they could move towards something, so they could move away from hell. Because that's certainly what you see in clinical practice.

I mean, people are suffering in ways you can hardly—well, you can probably imagine because no doubt many of you have either been there or seen people who were there, lived with them. You know, to move away from that is— that's more real than anything else.

If pain is more real than anything else, what's even more real than pain is whatever we have to fight off the pain, and that's free speech. It's identical with freedom of thought. It's associated with this capacity and necessity to listen deeply. Their flip sides of the same coin, to use a terrible cliché.

And all the clinical data we have, including the more stringently researched, research-oriented clinical inquiry, indicates quite clearly that the exchange of information like that, the generation of semantic and emotional information in a state of relative freedom, the revelation of those thoughts and then the discursive analysis of those thoughts, say, and then the implementation into action and the testing of them—that is the pathway to health, insofar as that can be attained by, say, psychological or spiritual means.

And so that's why free speech is not just another freedom or right among many. It's certainly not viewpoint diversity or anything like that. It's the mechanism by which we generate the conceptions that allow us to organize our experience in the world.

It's that mechanism and more than that, it's the mechanism that allows us to reformulate and criticize those conceptions when they've become outdated and sterile—to dissolve them into a chaos that we have to contend with while it's occurring and then to reanimate them in a new form so that we can move into the future.

And so if you're concerned with the oppressed, let's say, why in the world would you oppose free speech? It's the only thing the oppressed have. And if you don't understand that, I would say, well that's either an ignorance that's so deep that you should remediate it as rapidly as possible or a malevolence that's so appalling that you should face it even though you'll face it at your peril.

And so you can't come to a university like this that's been a bastion of free speech in a country that's been a bastion of free speech and a light unto the world in that regard for a thousand years, and all due credit to all of you for that. It's like don't forget this!

This is the fundamental thing. Say the entire Judeo-Christian enterprise to this date has been an attempt in some sense to elevate to the highest place the notion of the Divine redemptive word. And there's no truth that's deeper than that, and that's that.

So thank you very much. Thank you.