Jordan Peterson: A history lesson for political radicals

Hate speech laws criminalizes people’s right to open dialogue on sensitive issues, which not only violates our right to free speech, it also cultivates fringe hate groups, while removing our ability to learn how to stand up for our personal values as mature human beings. We absolutely need free speech and the ability to offend others, so that we can encourage dialogue about difficult and emotionally charged topics. Such dialogues help us to empathetically enter into the viewpoints of others, which produces understanding, and helps us to further evolve our thinking and ability to formulate higher reasoned judgments. Hate speech laws based on subjective ideologies hurt everyone, and not just those on the right; for when free thought and speech dies, tyranny is finally able to fully act upon its hidden intentions — and the first to suffer are usually those who were used to subvert free speech in the first place.

See the video below for a historical look at how tyranny forms and operates once free speech is eradicated.

Professor Peterson discusses ideological possession, communism, concentrations camps, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and existentialism. View the full lecture HERE.

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