Читать книгу Uncomfortable Ideas - Bo Bennett PhD - Страница 9

The world is full of some really dangerous people with even more dangerous ideas. When we put restrictions on the expression of ideas, we make it more difficult to identify potentially dangerous people and their dangerous ideas. While it might be more comfortable avoiding these people and their ideas, and pretending they don’t exist, the better strategy is confronting them and doing our best to explain why we think their ideas are dangerous. Isolation breeds extremism; integration promotes moderation.

The casual use of deliberately insulting labels such “racist,” “misogynist,” “homophobe,” and “xenophobe” might feel satisfying and might even be perfectly justifiable, but rarely causes the accused to change their way of thinking. Instead, it lets people with dangerous ideas know that their ideas are socially unacceptable, which is not the same as being wrong or dangerous. We need to encourage the free exchange of ideas, not banish those with dangerous ideas into exile where their ideas fester and eventually are expressed as behaviors and possibly even devastating actions.