New Couch

I’m sitting on the couch in my new home. The entire place is empty, seeing as the owner (who I’m renting from) left on holiday yesterday morning for three weeks. It’s certainly quite a turn around from living with all my stuff in one corner to spreading it all over a house. It’s also quite a difference from being in the centre of it all. Now I’m about five kilometres from the heart of things. I feel like I’m living among the tribes.

Quite fitting really, seeing as most of the people out here are of definitely quite non-Caucasian skin tone. Does that sound racist? It’s most definitely not PC, but then I have no problem with being un PC. Fortunately fewer and fewer people enforce PC. The majority has long since accepted that PC talk taken too far actually becomes an attack on freedom of speech.

I rather like freedom of speech.

On the other hand, I also fully accept that some things should not be said. There is a balance that has to be struck between being able to say what you want and not provoking hardship, violence and hatred by saying those things. It is, of course, a very difficult balance to strike. Who gets to decide what is necessary and what is inflammatory? It would be great if the individual could monitor him or herself. Unfortunately each individual’s judgement differs about what belongs to the first and what belongs to the latter.

So that creates the necessity for an overarching organisation to administer a general standard. The problem is then; how is this general standard arrived at? The obvious answer would be to take an average of the people at large. What the people at large find acceptable or not should be taken as a standard for what the overarching organisation would find acceptable or not. The only problem with that is that people are rather fickle. That is why the PC rage first took off, for example. That was also why if you look at movies from the sixties and the seventies you could see naked women and sex – in the eighties and nineties that suddenly disappeared (thought the violence heavily increased) – and now it’s back again.

What’s really necessary is an objective measurement – applied by people trained in applying such a standard. The big problem with that is that the people as a whole will feel disenchanted and ignored. They will say, as they always do when the academics disagree with the common man, ‘what special powers do these people have that I don’t personally possess? Why should I believe these people and not my gut instinct?’

And in many cases they’d be right. After all, the trained people are still people – liable to be biased, corruptible and easy to trick. They will make mistakes and they will be influenced by trends. You’d hope their standards would be slightly more objective, but that too is created by man and therefore not completely safe from subjectivity and bias. These people might exhibit less extreme fluctuations of applied standards – but they would still fluctuate.

And then, what is so bad about that fluctuation? Yes, on occasion it might draw people to an extreme, but if these standards do not fluctuate, then before you know it what is being said and what is allowed to be said will be in different eras. Then people will get hassled by the organisation – while the people at large have no qualms with what is being said.

I really don’t actually have an answer. These were just my musings while sitting on my new couch in my new home. All I do know is that it’s better to err on the side of caution and give too much freedom rather than too little. After all, it seems to be much easier to take freedom away than to give it back.