The Right to Silence
An invaluable corollary of freedom of speech.
Week 5 witnessed a slew of stimulating scholarly articles in Econ 15: The Political Economy of China. In addition to Arendt’s meditation on personal responsibility under dictatorship and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, which I discuss here and here, I had the great pleasure of reading Yang Jisheng’s preface to Tombstone: “The Fatal Politics of the PRC’s Great Leap Famine.” In this piece, Jisheng recounts his realization of the horrors wrought on the Chinese people by the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. He also compares and contrasts Mao’s totalitarianism to the ancient imperial Chinese governments. A key distinction between historical authoritarian regimes and totalitarian Maoism was the right to maintain one’s silence on morally- and politically-sensitive topics:
Under the imperial system of earlier eras, the people had the right to silence. The totalitarian system deprived the people of even that right. In one political movement after another, in meetings and conferences of every size and at every level, each person was forced to ‘declare his stand’, ‘expose his thoughts’ and ‘bare his heart to the Party’. A person had to open the most hidden places in his heart to the Party for examination. ‘Declaring one’s stand’ under a high-pressure political situation effectively forced a person to betray his own conscience and lose jurisdiction over the last morsel of his soul.1
Jisheng’s wise words are particularly germane to today’s culture wars, albeit to a much lesser extent, thankfully. Political activists have absolutely no right to compel speech from individuals; nobody is entitled to compel from you a declaration of your normative position on the day’s hot-button political or moral issue—or any form of speech on any topic whatsoever, for that matter. People that engage in such demands are rightfully regarded as illiberal, presumptuous, entitled totalitarians who should be met with what infuriates them most: utter silence and apathy.
Totalitarians may be able to command actions at the point of a gun, but they have no access to the most vital substance of all: one’s conscience.
In the realm of fiction, V for Vendetta expresses a strikingly similar sentiment:
But it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little but it's all we have left in this place... It is the very last inch of us... But within that inch we are free.
We must safeguard this vital freedom at all costs.
Jisheng, Yang. “The Fatal Politics of the PRC’s Great Leap Famine: The Preface to Tombstone.” The Journal of contemporary China 19, no. 66 (2010): 771.