George Orwell said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Admittedly I tend to have a slightly dour outlook on the current state of the culture and politics, the side effect of being sucked into my own personal negative news cycle. My husband calls me a Negative Nellie, I tell him I’m simply a realist, which makes him laugh. Starting with an Orwell quote may not dissuade anyone from agreeing I have negative tendencies, but what if this quote is a signal of the impending doom of liberty in America, not in 1984, but now?

In universities and on college campuses across America, a recent and growing trend of suppression of speech is making headlines. The Heckler’s Veto (a situation in which a person who disagrees with a speaker’s message is able to unilaterally silence that speaker) has become the main tool of this suppression. The students leading the protests and interruptions claim people such as Ben Shapiro, Christina Hoff Summers, and Charles Murray are fascists spewing hate speech. Students are unwilling to hear any idea that strays from their leftist viewpoint; they cannot afford the opportunity for anyone to hear the speakers’ words. If you don’t have the right opinion, you aren’t entitled to an opinion- or worse, your opinion is wrong or hateful. This results in a serious problem in the intellectual development of our youth. A person who travels through life insulated from different ideas and perspectives than their own will never have the ability to articulate his own thoughts and beliefs. John Stuart Mill writes in his 1859 work, “On Liberty”, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” The longer this behavior is allowed to continue, the more we will see the end of free speech and free exchange of ideas on our college campuses. We will graduate a generation of young people not only unwilling to listen to different ideas, but find them offensive. In his March 10 essay, “The Psychology of Progressive Hostility” Matthew Blackwell writes “People get angry at what they don’t understand, and an all-progressive education ensures that they don’t understand.” Anger in response to disagreement is not discourse. Self-reflection and intellectual curiosity may be difficult. It is human nature to dislike admitting one is wrong (speaking of arguments between me and my husband). But growing pains beget growth- intellectually, spiritually, and psychologically. We learn from our mistakes when we admit them.