The EU political system and its underpinning ideology, liberal democracy are in deep crisis. Of course, a political system can use its power structures and wealth to prolong its final demise but, for the EU, all the tell tales are there.
The EU’s efforts to muzzle free speech with control over social media demonstrate the crisis of liberal democracy as the ideological underpinning of the EU political system. But how can we understand EU efforts to limit free speech in the conditions where the EU has lost the plot, its economy is in the state of perpetual crisis, whereas its role as a global leader has failed to materialize?
Both its legal and algorithmic censorship are typical Dead-Horse-Theory remedies to the EU major and multiple crises, and none of them would manage to shield the EU’s out-of-touch political, economic and cultural elites against criticism of having betrayed their own people, robbed them of jobs and national pride, and replacing them with cheap labor and servitude imported in the EU from outside Europe.
The Dead Horse Theory as a metaphor of EU censorship
The Dead Horse Theory is a satirical metaphor applied to describe situations where people continue to invest efforts into a clearly failing project. The core idea is simple: When you discover you’re riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, instead of doing so, people often employ increasingly absurd strategies, including
- changing means (buying a stronger whip);
- changing leader (changing the rider);
- rebranding the problem (forming committees to study the horse’s condition);
- redefining the concept of “dead” (declaring the horse is “living-impaired” rather than dead);
- blaming external factors;
- sunk cost fallacy (because so much has already been invested, abandoning the effort would be wasteful);
- optimism bias (convincing oneself that success is just around the corner);
- fear of change (preferring the familiarity of the failing situation over the uncertainty of starting anew);
- groupthink (going along with the majority opinion to avoid conflict); and
- symbolic value (insisting on continuing because the effort represents a tradition, legacy, or principle).
Implausible assumptions
Western approach to human rights follows two major assumptions. The first one, the social contract approach claims that individuals are endowed by their Creator with certain natural rights. Although its proponents hold “these truths to be self-evident,” they are clearly not self-evident, but rather metaphysical assumptions with an absolutist interpretation of liberties, confined only by the need to safeguard subjects’ life, liberty, and private property.
According to a second tradition developed mainly in the Post-WW2 Europe, the Creator has endowed individuals with human dignity, an expression that could mean everything to everyone, but which defines nothing to no one. The term “human dignity” has served as a catchall and stretchable term that can hopefully cover any made-up rights without the need to philosophically justify them. Guaranteeing human dignity becomes a relativistic exercise, giving its guarantors leeway to censor individual liberties perceived as infringement upon human dignity of other individuals.
Those approaches hide incompatible tensions: the negativist take of the former versus the positivist take of the latter. The individual-liberties approach concern mostly negative liberties, the individualist spirit of the Enlightenment, which envisioned a man that should be left alone, and relies on government only for overcoming collective action dilemmas and some basic security. The human dignity approach resembles more a morning shadow, out-proportionally big and perpetually shape shifting. Since human dignity is almost impossible to define, this approach views authorities as both its definers and guarantors.
Source: pexels.com
I challenge both those assumptions: There are no primordial human liberties and/or human dignity; their state in a society represents the current equilibrium point between what liberty and dignity the power elites relinquish to their citizens, and what those citizens have been able to grab. The outcome of such a tug-of-war is the expanding and shrinking, shaping and reshaping of human rights according to contenders’ power interests. Rooted in Humean utilitarianism, this approach views the state as an instrument of power elites to manipulate individual and collective liberties.
Democracy as a value or democracy as a political power tool
One of the arguments outlined by the supporters of EU censorship of free speech is that democracy is a deliberative system with the ultimate goal of delivering a certain political product. Democracy’s goal is to clean up the way toward deliberation from all distractions and impediments, including unpreferred speech. This unusually candid argument shifts the debate from the realm of the unmeasurable values to the realm of measurable political calculations.
Recognizing that the EU horse is dead would have been an admission of systemic failure, and would have raised legitimate calls for systemic reforms, the return to the Europe of nations, national sovereignty, reindustrialization, human dignity by work and national pride rather than the “protected minorities” absurdity, and ending mass discrimination against the legitime majorities, native Europeans who have worked for centuries to build the greatest civilization ever, the Western Civilization. That would mean the humble admission that there is no such a thing as “hate speech,” but only speech that the power hates. But recognizing that the EU horse is dead would have been also capitulation. That’s why, instead of admitting failure, the liberal uniparty that rules major EU powers and the EU itself keeps applying Dead Horse Theory remedies, including the vain hope that algorithmic and legalistic censorship would somehow make the EU horse still run. It won’t.
The failure of legalistic or technological censorship
The EU’s cumbersome legalistic net cannot catch all of the dissenters, and many of them have developed techniques to outfox both the law and the algorithm. Some influencers have learned to bleep certain catch phrases or distort certain words; others contribute by building new codewords; yet others remain defiant and take pride in clashing with authorities and the law. Just as initially warned by opposers of the hate speech legislation, in Germany and Great Britain those laws are being used to punish those who harshly criticize politicians or highlight inconvenient facts about certain “protected minorities”.
In some EU member countries, the police refuse to release the ethnicity or immigration status of crime perpetrators. Rather than recognizing that their failed mass migration policies are irreparably altering the demographic and cultural makeup of the continent, as well as their failed school curricula that teach students to hate their own country, history and tradition, and instead ironically preach cultural enrichment of European cultures by the inexistent cultural riches of migrants from failed societies and states, the liberal propaganda tries to muzzles those who point out such failures. In doing so, the power elites are not trying to protect any values or human dignity; they are just trying to protect their grip to power threatened by increasingly defiant native populations.
In lieu of conclusions
The EU political system and its underpinning ideology, liberal democracy are in deep crisis. Of course, a political system can use its power structures and wealth to prolong its final demise but, for the EU, all the tell tales are there. Thirty years ago, the EU was upbeat and confident, and was ready to meet everyone at the battlefield of ideas. By then, even charlatans of the shape of Francis Fukuyama could persuade enough people that liberal democracy was the ultimate political order that marked the end of the political history. His ridiculous claims aged fast and ugly, and all is left from that boastful forecast are the hate speech laws and some lousy algorithms operating under the illusory hope that they could police free speech.
I spent 25 years of my life in the ultimate totalitarian dictatorship: The communist regime of the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. I have seen people suffering long prison sentences only for saying the obvious fact that West’s capitalism was a success story, whereas Albania’s socialism was a failure. I have seen people being arrested for complaining why there were no vegetables in the state-run market. As a school boy, I was forced to watch people being humiliated by authorities in the city square only because their hair was slightly longer than what the regime allowed or why the bottom ends of their pants were wider than the “the marginal norms of the communist morale.”
Yet, even under such sheer terror, people still uttered the obvious truth, still tried to delay their visit to the barber, and still tailored wider boot-style pants. At the very end, it was the Albanian communist regime that imploded under the unbearable weight of oppressing its own people. The EU’s illusory hopes that it would somehow manage to prolong its existence and “defend human dignity” by robbing people of the very dignity that comes with free speech are doomed to fail.
And that’s why, yes, EU efforts to tighten control on social media and platforms violate free speech, but that doesn’t matter anyway. People will say what they have to say under any circumstances, and no government can prevail over what the Burkean ethos attributes to our very humanity: The irresistible urge to complain when we dislike our common state of affairs.
