Freedom of Thought - Suppression

Suppression

The obvious impediment to censoring thought is that it is impossible to know with certainty what another person is thinking, and harder to regulate it. Many famous historical works recognize this. The Bible summarizes in Ecclesiastes 8:8: "There is no man that has power over the spirit, to retain it; neither has he power in the day of death." A similar sentiment is expressed in the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, where he likens those who attempt to control the emotions of their neighbours to "the children in the marketplace" who try to produce dancing with a happy song and mourning with a dirge, and then express frustration at their futility in trying to do so (Matthew 11:16). The concept is developed more specifically in the writings of Paul ("For why should my freedom be judged by another's conscience ?" 1 Corinthians 10:29.)

Queen Elizabeth I revoked a thought censorship law in the late sixteenth century, because, according to Sir Francis Bacon, she did "'not to make windows into men's souls and secret thoughts".

However, freedom of expression can be limited through censorship, arrests, book burning, or propaganda, and this tends to discourage freedom of thought. Examples of effective campaigns against freedom of expression are the Soviet suppression of genetics research in favor of a theory known as Lysenkoism, the book burning campaigns of Nazi Germany, the Slovakian law to sentence anyone who denies Armenian genocide up to 5 years in prison, the radical anti-intellectualism enforced in Cambodia under Pol Pot, the strict limits on freedom of expression imposed by the Communist governments of the Peoples Republic of China and Cuba or by right wing authoritarian dictatorships such as those of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Francisco Franco in Spain.

Freedom of expression can also be stifled without institutional interference when majority views become so widely accepted that the entire culture represses dissenting views. For this reason, some condemn political correctness as a form of limiting freedom of thought. Although political correctness aims to give minority views equal representation, the majority view itself can be politically correct; for example, college student Max Karson was arrested following the Virginia Tech shootings for politically incorrect comments that authorities saw as "sympathetic to the killer." Karson's arrest raised important questions regarding freedom of thought and whether or not it applies in times of tragedy.

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which states that thought is inherently embedded in language, would support the claim that an effort to limit the use of words of language is actually a form of restricting freedom of thought. This was explored in George Orwell's novel 1984, with the idea of Newspeak, a stripped-down form of the English language lacking the capacity for metaphor and limiting expression of original ideas.