The Rebirth of Heresy: Why Expressing Certain Opinions Now Feels Like a Crime
I have witnessed a surprising rebirth of the concept of heresy in our secular society. Today, expressing specific opinions can get you fired, regardless of your past achievements or the truth of your statement. This intolerance is driven by aggressively conventional-minded people united by new ideologies that function like religions, prioritizing moral purity over truth. While the window of free expression remains wider than in the past, its rapid narrowing is a dangerous trend we must address.
A heresy is an opinion whose expression is treated like a crime — one that makes some people feel not merely that you're mistaken, but that you should be punished.
- cjs_ac
As someone with many heretical opinions, I’ve found it very easy to avoid accusations of heresy by just shutting up. The right to free speech is not an obligation to speak freely. As a software engineer, my colleagues don’t need to know my opinions on economic policy for me to be able to work effectively with them.
- andy99
2022, and pretty clear why.
Here is the discussion from the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30977147
- dwroberts
Yeah heresy has ‘returned in a modern form’ - if you overlook the glaring issue of the fact that people were typically imprisoned or executed for heresy in the past.
What a ridiculous false equivalence.
- turtleyacht
Is the moderate view "strong opinions, weakly held?"
- PorterBHall
> Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased.
Let’s apply his heresy test. Is his statement true?
It might be, but I don’t know how one could confirm it. What is apparently true is that the amount of expression has greatly increased since then because internet. So that’s the denominator. The numerator of “fired for speech” would have to expand beyond the proportion of the growth of communication for this to be true.
Do you know anyone fired for their outré opinion in the last few years? Do you know _many_? I’ve read stories of it happening in business, universities, government but I don’t know anyone who has gotten the sack for expressing an opinion. Maybe that means I’m a conventional mind safely surrounded by the same.
When I hear about “cancel culture,” I picture a speaker who wants to say something and not face the social disapproval which said things triggers. But that disapproval almost always comes back at them as speech (I think infrequently as a pink slip). So those claims ring as “Free speech for me, not for thee.”