The Spiral of Silence*
On July 14th, 1789, 156 years to the day before I was born, thousands of French citizens stormed the Bastille in Paris. Actually, only about 900 people stormed the Bastille. Numbers vary depending on what cable news channel Parisians watched. Citizens were fed up with Louie the 14th; he must have been worse that his 13 predecessors. His wife, Marie of Antoinette, reportedly snorted and said of hungry Parisians, “Let them eat cake.” Apparently, she never said it, but let’s blame her anyway - it fits the narrative and that is all that counts these days. She was arrested, tried, and beheaded on October 14th, 1792. Reports vary as to if the head and body were buried together. The Bastille armory, fortress, and political prison symbolized the raw power and tyranny of the monarchy. Revolution was necessary, but before the revolution was possible, defending the King had to go out of fashion. Revolutionaries would need to employ a strategy that would change public opinion. In more modern terms, public sentiment necessary to make the monarchy tenable would need to be crushed. Storming the Bastille is a study in public opinion and mass psychology. It also teaches us about the power of free speech and the squelching of it. Before a mob could storm the Bastille, a spiral of silence would be required.
Once the crowd turned into a mob and found its way to Les Invalides, or the square near the Bastille, it had grown to several thousand. For a large crowd to turn into a mob, individual moral judgements must be deferred to the group and the group itself becomes a living entity. Normally rational individuals defer judgment and even individual morality and turn their will over to the self-appointed leaders. Often when questioned later, members of a riotous mob will deny any personal responsibility for the destruction of property, injury, or even the death of others. They have become convinced in a “greater good” than transcends all normal forms of morality.
A very interesting dynamic in all of this is that as this crowd shoved its way toward the Bastille, it was only able to move in that direction because they were allowed to move there. The cooperation of the soldiers was necessary, the opinion of the authorities was to allow the crowd to proceed. They shot at the Bastille from 10:00 am until 5:00 pm. The walls were forty feet high and thirty feet thick. They could have shot endlessly for days and no real damage would have been done. The soldiers in the Bastille were careful not to harm the crowd. The crowd made demands; thus, the Bastille commander withdrew the cannon from the firing ports. And then he invited a deputation from the mob to have breakfast with him. The commander then ordered his soldiers not to fire on the crowd, even if attacked. He finally allowed his soldiers to fire on them after alerting the crowd that he had done so. He had already lowered the first bridge into the fortress, I’m sure as a show of accommodation.
The commander’s opinion was shaped by forces other than conventional convictions that previously had protected the Monarchy from threat. The Commander and his soldiers no longer believed in those convictions, they had changed their minds, public opinion had changed. In the end one of the fighters put it well, “The Bastille was not taken by force, it surrendered before it ever could be attacked.” In the end, a soldier inside the Bastille lowered the bridge and allowed the mob to enter in and begin the destruction. What appeared to be all of Paris outside the fortress to the 120 soldiers inside was actually less than a thousand active revolutionaries. There were thousands more gathered, but witnesses reported that most were spectators, well dressed men and women stopping to watch on their way to do something else. Like most corrupt leaders or ideologies, they eventually crumble under the weight of their own failures.
The interesting aspect to this was the behavior of the onlookers who vastly outnumbered the actual people storming the Bastille. They went along with the mob - they knew that in order to avoid isolation, rejection, and criticism, they would need to show approval. Crowd hysteria is a manifestation of public opinion. It’s somewhat like an out of state vehicle enters your neighborhood and runs over a child. The outraged residents attack the vehicle, drag the driver from the automobile and beat him or her in a righteous rage.
During the past months here in the United States we have seen this same dynamic at work. It is not my purpose to take a political side in this article. We have, however, seen how officials have ordered their police to stand down in the face of a peaceful protest deteriorating into looting, destruction of property, rioting, and physical abuse. How is this possible? It is possible because public opinion has changed and is being shaped. And here I will take a side, public opinion is being falsely shaped by the censorship of Big Tech, by Big Media, and backed by Big Money. I don’t have a problem with all sides being represented by Google, Facebook, and Twitter. But I do have a problem when they suppress free expression and undermine the First Amendment. And then the sad result is a good share of Americans do not have the opportunity to make a truly objective sourced decision regarding their leaders and representatives. This also has led to the cancel culture and then out of malice or ignorance, publicly protected non-partisan platforms have started to curate the news and shape it to fit their narrative. It has become clear by their employees and leaders voting and charitable habits, that they are quite partisan. There is a larger point to make here - Freedom of Speech is a moral issue, and it is based on an absolute truth.
The Contemporary Argument against the First Amendment
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Some simple exegesis interprets the relevant phrase “or abridging the freedom of speech.” To abridge something is to limit it, shorten it, or to curtail a right or privilege. There is a movement among less enlightened or historically ignorant generations that says, “some speech is so heinous or wrong, or misleading, it should not be allowed on public platforms or seen by the American people.” This is an argument that has been put forward since the earliest time of humankind, and it has been soundly rejected in the United States again and again. The first amendment’s speech provision is to protect all speech, especially the kind that is heinous, incorrect, and crazy. Unless all speech is protected, none of it is and what gets protected is decided by whomever is in power. We must hear from the alt-right and the loony-left, we are responsible to sort it all out. It is the only way truth can remain center stage, without it, we are not a free people. The press is also free to be as partisan and crazy as they have become. They are free to lose the confidence of the American people, as they have. The people of the United States are free to turn them off, criticize them, and even replace them. The free market will replace them when the citizens ignore them and stop watching, listening, and reading them.
Earlier I stated that freedom of speech is a moral issue. This centers around the answer to the question, from where or from whom do we claim that free speech is more than a political right, but a right bestowed upon all humans?
The Materialistic View
I propose that the idea that the existence of humans, the heavens, and the earth are all cosmic mysteries or some mathematical improbable probability to be a lie. A universe without a guide, a mind, a strategy, or purpose is an absurdity. It defies logic, any sense of reason or science. Science requires reason, logic, and order to exist. Most of all it needs material, motion, and life itself in order to practice. The mind itself cannot be trusted to work a problem if not designed to comprehend laws of the universe that are logical. Matter and mind must match up in order for anyone to make sense of what is happening around us. The easiest lie to expose is the one that repulses all of humanity - there is no God, your life is an accident, you are nothing more than a meat puppet. You live, you die, nothing really matters. As Paul put so simply,
“They know the truth about God because he has made it obvious to them. For ever since the world was created people have seen the earth and the sky. Through everything God has made. They can clearly see his invisible qualities-his eternal power and divine nature. So, they have no excuse for not knowing God.” Romans 1:19,20 NLT
Here is the link to free speech. The materialistic view, which is held by many in the ruling class, believes we are simply consumers. They can censor and edit out reality from the consumer class because their conformity to the greater wisdom of the ruling class is a higher value than freedom of speech. The government makes the decision as to what is true and false, what is right and wrong, and they have the power to confer limited freedoms on the population in concert with what the ruling class thinks is best for the underclass. This is how the majority of nations have conducted themselves for most of history. This is not so in the United States and let me tell you why.
The Spiritual View
This is the most simple and clear point because it is profound. Even our Founding Fathers, some Congregationalists, some Baptists, some Methodists, and yes, agnostics and Deists agreed on this. That we are made in God’s image and our rights come from the divine, not from man or government.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
And the first amendment to this constitution as seen above was the right to free speech given to every human by God. But this goes even deeper - God made man in his own image. This means in man’s immaterial nature, the personality traits such as mind, spirit, will, conscience, and soul. We are so valuable to God that he became a man in the person of Jesus the Christ and died for our eternal souls. Jesus’ visit to earth was the most powerful word or statement that could possibly be made as to the value of persons. He gave himself as a sacrifice that ensured our freedom, and our dignity. That also meant that every thought and word that a human being has is valuable to God and every person has a right to be heard. We are told that one day every word we speak will be remembered by God and we will be held accountable for those words (Mt. 12:36).
The fight for freedom of speech is one worth having. Don’t give into the spiral of silence that has already begun. Please step up, don’t shut up. I leave you with the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
“Not to speak is to speak, not to act is to act.”
Pray for the courage to speak up the next time you are told to shut up, to pipe down, to not create a ruckus. What you say matters, don’t go with the mob, don’t fold in the face of the ruling class or as a citizen of the secular city. You are a citizen of the Kingdom of God and Jesus is listening to you, recording what you say, and unlike Siri, will be there to reward you on judgment day.
*Title of article and germ of idea from The Spiral of Silence, Public Opinion-Our social skin. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. University of Chicago Press, 1993 second edition. Pages 107-114.
