The Loneliness Of The Intellectual
"Believing in free speech means it’s necessary to defend all speech – even speech you don’t agree with."
When Rikki Schlott was in New York University, she was afraid to have Thomas Sowell and Jordan Peterson books on her bookshelf. As a liberal, she feared she would be verbally attacked on social media and labelled a bigot for reading what was designated on the left as “bad” literature. As if ideas are a contagion, instead of necessary to understand other human beings and grow as a person who lives in a shared society.
The truth is, if Rikki had posted what she was reading online, she would have certainly been harassed and cancelled for it. Mob mentality, unlike reading a book, is actually a contagion. Even if she shared the book without comment, she would have been labelled the same things the left has labelled those authors and publicly shamed into deleting her post, going offline and thinking about her actions. Because once a writer is labelled as bad, all of their ideas are discredited as bad and anyone who shares those ideas is now bad too.
The idea that people should be cancelled for sharing ideas other people don’t like is anti-intellectual. I would go as far as to say that it’s fascist. During the rise of Nazi Germany, it was university students who got together to burn books. NYU, one of the top schools in the world, would be presumed to also be at the top for free speech. Universities are supposed to encourage intellectual dialogue. But NYU is rated yellow by the organization Fire for having at least one policy that restricts speech.
An intellectual is defined as someone who spends a lot of time studying and thinking about complicated ideas. Being somebody who does this in the time of the internet is bittersweet. You have so much information at your fingertips, and the ability to discuss it with people all around the world. But at the same time, you’re impeded by groupthink and censorship. Mob mentality overcomes logical discussion, where attacking contrarians is a sport that brings people together. Revolutionaries have always had pushback, but the internet puts this on a level never seen before. People are losing their livelihoods over Twitter posts. It leaves the intellectual in a lonely predicament, wondering where they can go to discuss ideas.
When I was growing up, I felt stupid all of the time. Now that I know I’m neurodivergent, I understand that my brain just works differently than other people. I used to feel embarrassed that I struggled to physically put things together, but now I understand that my strength is mentally putting things together. I mentally put things together so well that I’m on my third book about communication. The more I study how people think and how to get better at it, the more I see how social media is a stage for miscommunication.
People who attack you online don’t know how to work through their emotions in a healthy way. When they hear new ideas and don’t understand them, their initial response will be fear. They’ll project that fear onto you instead of engaging with those ideas. Often when I try to explain things to people on the internet, they say I’m condescending or have an agenda. This is why people will call you dangerous for simply trying to have a discussion. To you, it’s just an intellectual exercise, but to them it feels like they’re under attack – so they attack back. Because you’re upsetting the status quo, they’ll genuinely think you’re a threat and try to hurt your reputation, cancel you, get you to leave the internet and let’s be real, probably cheer if you kill yourself.
We often think people think like we do, because we can’t fathom another brain working differently than ours. So when I started discussing ideas on Twitter, it was a bit of a shock how angry people became toward me. I didn’t understand that most people aren’t there to have real conversations – they’re there for entertainment. To them, my persuasive writing style was interpreted as authoritative. Twitter could be the perfect platform for having these world-changing discussions, but unfortunately American-centric society cares more about having the “right” takes, and turning those who have the “wrong” ones into the enemy. And what do people do with the enemy? They try to destroy them to feel like the hero and win social credit.
In an interview with John Stossel, Rikki says believing in free speech means it’s necessary to defend all speech – even speech you don’t agree with. That means anybody should have the right to say anything, as long as it doesn’t directly threaten people. For example, if someone talks about how they’re not sure DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) should be mandatory, that’s not the same thing as saying people should have a right to be racist in the workplace. But within cancel culture, that comment will be treated as the same thing. The person will be harassed, called a racist and there will be a movement to have them lose their job. There’s no room on social media to question things or discuss nuance, unless you’re brave enough to be called a bigot and have a permanent footprint of people saying you’re a horrible person.
There’s a Japanese saying that goes, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” In capitalist society, we’re not taught to engage with new ideas, look at different sides, have healthy discussions and come to our own conclusions while showing respect to people who don’t think like us. We’re taught to memorize information, pick a side, follow that side like a religion and abandon and even dehumanize anyone who says anything that isn’t identical to what we believe. I personally know this to be true, as someone on the left who was brainwashed to do it.
Recently something switched in me. Over the last four years of the pandemic, I’ve had more time to explore ideas, learn what my principles are and feel my intelligence expand in ways I never knew it could. I stopped listening to people telling me how to think and started learning how to think for myself. The more I shared what I was learning, the more I realized that I was thinking in a very different way from other people – or at least the online mob. I was sharing ideas just for the sake of sharing them, even if I wasn’t sure I agreed with them. But people online viewed social media as a game of outrage, making me the new target.
Intellectually we know that sharing someone’s ideas isn’t an endorsement of everything that person has ever said – but people on Twitter are running on emotions, not logic. As Jon Ronson, author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, would say, people want the dopamine rush of “getting” you more than discussing ideas. If we were having these conversations in person, we wouldn’t text all our friends that someone said something we didn’t like. We wouldn’t tell them to stop being friends with the person. We wouldn’t call up the person’s job and tell their boss to fire them. We would see that as fucking insane. But because of cancel culture, it’s where we’re headed.
“A lot of college campuses have administrative mechanisms for reporting people for their speech,” says Rikki. She talks about how they have bias hotlines, where you can report professors or other students for something they said. In theory this sounds like a good way to keep people at school safe. But this isn’t only being used when people say bigoted things – it’s being used when people say anything that’s seen as bigoted. And last I checked, everyone has bias. There is a difference between hate speech and being offended, and in many cases these campuses are appeasing the mob. This isn’t fostering an environment of discussion, but rather indoctrination.
In these environments, students aren’t learning how to work through their emotions and tolerate people who have different opinions than them. Because of cancel culture, they’re being taught that it’s the other person’s problem for offending them, and that they should be punished for it. Top universities like NYU are encouraging this behavior by allowing people to cancel their peers. People getting high-status jobs are from these universities, implementing cancel culture into the job culture.
So how can we make sure we live in a world where we’re free to discuss ideas, be wrong, change our minds and grow? We shouldn’t be afraid to have certain books on our bookshelf for fear of being verbally attacked – online and off. In order to question things and be nuanced thinkers, we need to be able to explore both sides of an argument. If we don’t know the other side of the argument, we’re just repeating doctrine instead of knowing our own principles. My new favorite podcasts are where liberals and conservatives have conversations, where I can learn why people lean a certain way politically. I often find myself agreeing and disagreeing with things both liberals and conservatives say, because I have my own principles regardless of my politics being on the left.
Rikki says there’s hope for the future. Only 8% of Generation Z has a positive view of cancel culture. When you grow up at the risk of having anything you say used against you, you personally see the negative effects that this culture has on you and those around you. In Rikki’s book that she co-wrote with Greg Lukianoff, The Cancelling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All, she hopes to give people the courage to find a different way forward. One where intellectuals are free to explore ideas without being cancelled for having the “wrong” take.
“Courage is contagious. As soon as I spoke out at NYU people came out of the woodwork to approach me and say thank you for saying that, I completely agree with you,” says Rikki. “We need to come together and fight back against cancel culture and say that we want to live in a free speech culture.”
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