Freedom is Slavery

It is important to realize that the suppression of free speech in the name of freedom has its intellectual roots in the philosophy of people like Marcuse who believed that the only way to free the minds of the young was to direct them in the correct paths.

In a 1965 essay entitled “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse concluded that America’s supposedly neutral tolerance for ideas was in reality a highly selective tolerance that benefited only the prevailing attitudes and opinions of those who held wealth and power. Such “indiscriminate” or “pure” tolerance, he argued, effectively served “the cause of oppression” and the “established machinery of discrimination.” For Marcuse, as long as society was held captive by militarism and by institutionalized, pervasive social and economic inequality–what he characterized as “regressive” practices–”indiscriminate tolerance” necessarily would serve the highly discriminatory interests of regression
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Marcuse focused on the education of the young: “The restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teaching and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior.” Because students already were so heavily brainwashed to think in the manner that established power had ordained, true “autonomous thinking” was virtually impossible, and one had to take steps to wrench students from the regressive channels into which society had cast their minds. “The pre-empting of the mind vitiates impartiality and objectivity,” he wrote. “Unless the student learns to think in the opposite direction, he will be inclined to place the facts into the predominant framework of values.” Marcuse mocked the “sacred liberalistic principle of equality for `the other side,’” because “there are issues where…there is no `other side’ in any more than a formalistic sense.”…