Foundations of Free Speech - Adding a Truth Layer to Social Media via Nostr’s Full Decentralization

Taryn Christiansen @ DoraHacks

Special thanks to Eric Zhang for in-depth discussions.

A mirror post on Dora Research Blog is available: https://research.dorahacks.io/2024/12/24/free-speech-foundation

Intro:

This article will argue that truth-based justifications for free speech are inappropriate within the social media context.1 Flooding the market with more information doesn’t necessarily force truth to emerge and bob at the surface. No matter how much information is pumped into a space filled with falsehoods and deception, if the right mechanisms aren’t in place, the area will only grow more chaotic and overcrowded, and therefore all the more easier to get lost in it. As an instrument to obtain knowledge of the truth, free speech has to be properly used, and people need to know how to use it.

That isn’t to say that the tap should be shut off and that free speech should be curtailed; other justifications are perfectly reasonable, as will be seen below. But the idea that what we’re up to on social media is seeking out the truth only produces more confusion about what we collectively take to be sources of trustworthy information that is accurate and sincere. We would be better off if social media were viewed as an information network that is distinct from other spaces that are generally considered places where we obtain reliably true beliefs.

But other spaces have the potential to be a more appropriate target for truth-based justifications for free speech, one of which is Nostr. Because of Nostr’s fully decentralized and open nature, which allows for innovation at all levels of its protocol, people have more opportunity to create valuable content that will only be distributed across the network because it is in fact valuable. The algorithms on social media force content to be valuable because there are standards that aim at maximizing user engagement in cheap and overstimulating ways. It doesn’t matter to these mechanisms whether something is true or not. What matters first is whether something promotes the ends of the social media companies, which are primarily driven by maximizing profits through ads and attention. Achieving this goal means reducing users' autonomy in picking and choosing what content to consume. Nostr aims to give the users their autonomy back by freeing developers to build both relays and clients. If users can make decisions that aren’t influenced by social media’s algorithmic decision-making, then it can be discerned whether truth is naturally relevant to people in these kinds of information networks, as well as whether people really desire to care for the truth.

Section 1:

It should be assumed at this point in history2, especially in liberal democracies, that the freedom to express one’s mind is inseparable from a basic conception of human dignity. If one is prohibited from freely discussing and challenging prevailing beliefs or forced to conform to a point of view that was not arrived at by using one’s own rational and reflective faculties, then human dignity suffers. There’s a reason Socrates went around the Athenian marketplace and tirelessly questioned the people he encountered there. He wasn’t interested in forcing people to submit to specific beliefs. Socrates wanted people to realize and reflect on whether what they believed was true or not, and therefore if it was something worth believing in. But integral to this project is the idea that people have to think through the questions themselves and not rely on an authority. Authority may be right; it may hold true beliefs and assert rational demands, but it doesn’t mean anything unless people themselves know the way to them. This requires the individual to be willing to develop what’s necessary for this.

John Milton was right when he wrote in his 1644 pamphlet Areopagatica, which was directed against the English Parlament’s order for licensing books, that “A man may be a heretic in the truth… If he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reasons, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.” People must be free to reason for themselves, to arrive at truths through the use of their own faculties, to develop their individual conscience, which, by its nature, must be exercised by the individual’s will and not by an externally imposed authority. Immanuel Kant’s call to the Enlightenment, Sapere aude! - “Have courage to use your own reason!”3 - is a call to actualize human dignity through the use of one’s reason. These faculties cannot be cultivated unless the individual can express him or herself freely.

Woke culture is an illustrative example of how there is a connection between free speech and human dignity. It shows that when the strategy is to problematize and silence people, no matter how noble or virtuous the goal is believed to be, it only perpetuates a cycle of frustration and anger. The problem with woke culture isn’t necessarily their ideals. We all would agree, or should at least, that people should respect the basic dignity of others, treat everyone as persons, empathize with those with a different experience, and learn and grow from one another’s unique perspective. These are all good things; they’re profoundly valuable. The issue is how woke culture formulated and implemented their interpretations of what these notions amount to, what they call for, and what moral duties they demand. One of its principal goals has been to discern how historical oppressors should atone for previous wrongdoings. Many have come to understand this as meaning that those who come from those lineages are, in some sense, problematic and that, therefore, proponents of wokism have the duty to silence them, to condemn them, to act as if they are a net negative to the social good, and to impose a punishment of silence to atone for the past. This has been a grave mistake. Instead of engaging in a dialogue to reach the other person’s conscience, those who bore this duty have tended to sermonize in a sanctimonious, demeaning way, which only shuts people down and turns off the parts of the brain that promote learning and development, and turns on what generates combative and defensive behavior. The typical approach in woke culture has been enormously undemocratic in spirit due to its preference to force people to adopt reasons rather than opening people up to consider them in their proper light, namely, as claims about morality that make demands on the conscience of the person, which can only be properly understood and felt through the use of his or her own faculties. Woke culture, which offers some genuine insight into the world's contemporary moral situation, failed to respect the dignity of those they wished to persuade by using coercive measures instead of appealing to their conscience. Free speech is absolutely necessary in an endeavor like this because only by upholding such a social practice will everyone’s basic dignity be respected, which is integral to people being open to changing their minds. Moral debates within society should never devolve into a contest of wills. This only undermines the foundation of a democratic community, the basic pillar being human dignity.4

But although free speech bears a necessary connection to human dignity, it does not bear the same relation to truth. For free speech to bear a proper relation to truth, one where free speech produces a high probability of tracking it, those seeking out truth must have the right psychological orientation toward it; otherwise, the two easily come apart. In his recent book Nexus, Yoel Noah Harari presents a clear way of seeing this. Harari criticizes what he calls the ‘naive view of information,’ which “argues that by gathering and processing much more information than individuals can, big networks achieve a better understanding of medicine, physics, economics, and numerous other fields, which makes the network not only powerful but wise.” The notion of wisdom is key. While it’s theoretically possible that an information network can be wise (especially with the development of better AI), it will be useless unless human beings have some idea about what wisdom is. If they don’t, then they’ll have to just assume that the information being presented was properly arrived at, i.e., with the wisdom necessary for obtaining truth, which will, in effect, create a servility to the information network and not to the human faculties necessary for discerning and knowing the truth. To use a distinction made by Plato, they will have an opinion about the truth, not knowledge. To know means to understand the reasons why something is the case, not just that it is the case.

Harari’s book is important because the naive view of information he presents is prevalent and is most often expressed in the marketplace of ideas metaphor. In essence, the metaphor suggests that free speech operates like a free market because, by allowing individuals to pursue and satisfy their preferences freely, the truth will somehow outcompete falsehoods. Either because people’s preferences are more deeply satisfied by truth, and/or because the beliefs people hold will only have any real value (or utility) when they are true, when they accurately represent reality. But in a marketplace, “people don’t reliably ‘buy’ truths. People buy the ideas they like. And people don’t reliably like truths better than falsehoods. What the invisible hand does, all going well, is efficiently allocate goods to people based on what they want.”5 For truth to reliably outcompete falsehoods, consumers must have a particular orientation around truth. Unless we think ideas are true based solely on their utility, which is itself not a very useful notion, more has to be said as to why consumers would desire the truth over anything else in a marketplace of ideas. Everyone has opinions they cherish and hold to be, in some way, fundamental to themselves and their identities. It is perfectly conceivable that someone will reject any truth that conflicts with these deeply valued sentiments. For a free competition of ideas to track and produce true information, consumers have to want truth to win out, and this desire should motivate the consumer’s decision-making. In other words, one must bear a special psychological orientation toward truth for the marketplace metaphor to be an appropriate model for understanding free speech as being justified for the sake of truth. Again, free speech is important for other reasons, such as human dignity. But whether free speech is justified for the sake of truth is a separate question, and until the proper stance is taken toward truth, truth-based justifications are inapplicable.

The fact that the distribution of more and more information doesn’t bear a necessary connection to truth can also be gleaned from historical examples. When a technology revolutionizes human information networks, which allows for information to be shared more efficiently and in larger quantities than ever before, the society that implements it does not therefore obtain a higher fidelity to truth. The opposite is equally plausible. This is the problem facing social media. If truth-based justifications are an appropriate way to justify free speech practices on such platforms, social media must create an environment that promotes the proper psychological orientation toward truth. What matters is whether they can care for the truth rather than adopt a stance that promotes what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt called bullsh*t, which means to be indifferent toward truth. Before explaining this further, let’s look at a historical example that demonstrates the following: First, as new technology arrives and transforms information networks, the information that is consequently distributed can equally promote both what is true and what is not; and second, and more philosophically, the technology can also reorient a society’s relationship to truth, which in turn affects how the society arrives at knowledge.

Section 2:

Take the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in 1440. Before its inception, the Catholic Church made Western Europe effectively an echo chamber. They dominated the information networks by controlling what could be printed, distributed, and accredited as knowledge. The vast majority of the population couldn’t read, and only a select few could read the Holy writings, which contained information that was considered the highest truth attainable by human beings. Only a select few were blessed enough to be able to handle this sort of information. Because all other information flowed from this central institution, everyone else depended on the Church for what to believe. The reality of that situation, and what it must have felt like to be in such a dependent position, can begin to be imagined by considering the following: “In the thirteenth century the library of Oxford University consisted of a few books kept in a chest under St. Mary’s Church. In 1424 the library of Cambridge University boasted a grand total of only 122 books. An Oxford University decree from 1409 stipulated that ‘all recent texts’ studied at the university must be unanimously approved ‘by a panel of twelve theologians appointed by the archbishop.’”6 When the quantity of information is this low, and in the context of the Catholic Church, is also greatly limited in diversity, it’s difficult even to imagine anything outside the worldview that is being imposed.

Now, alongside the Church’s control of information networks, the production efficiency of copyists and scribes who had to manufacture the books was dismally low. It exponentially grew when the printing press automated the work. The historian Sir John Harold Clapham wrote, “A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in A.D. 330.”7 The restriction on information and people’s inability to consider anything outside of the prevailing tradition, as well as the technological and productive inefficiency of the time, left most people in darkness, with no way out other than by following the dim, consoling light cast by the Church. The printing press changed all of this. “It revolutionized the world,” as the philosopher Francis Bacon said.

The printing press gave people the autonomy to print and distribute ideas that the Church didn’t authorize and thereby provided the platform necessary for the Reformation to take hold, which started with Martin Luther in the early sixteenth century. There were previous attempts at reform, but the printing press made a momentous difference. The concurrence of the printing press and the Reformation revealed the corrosive corruption within the Catholic Church. People were finely able to learn about the degenerate tendencies within the institution, which the Church was previously able to stifle because it controlled the information networks. The buying and selling of Church positions and indulgences that allowed people to pay their way out of purgatory, political intrigue, nepotism, bribery, and immoral consolidation of wealth through taxes was disclosed as a consequence of the printing press. The notion that the Church was the medium by which people moved toward God’s grace collapsed, and people saw that “it had become a means of securing worldly prestige, power, and wealth for those who were clever and ruthless enough to bend it to their will.”8

But this historical occurrence also unleashed a flurry of misinformation. The religious wars that followed the Reformation were devastating, and millions of people died, an exceptional case being the Thirty Years War (1618-48). The dissemination of Luther’s 95 theses regarding the corruption of the Church spread like wildfire across Europe after he posted them in 1516 on the Church Castle in Wittenberg, Germany, which the printing press made possible. It would only make sense, then, that the Church would follow suit and take advantage of the technology to combat what it held to be heresy and to reinstate its power as the dominant influence in the West (for an amalgam of reasons, of course.) All sides involved in these religious disputes didn’t merely use the printing press to disseminate accurate information. They used it to spread misinformation to satisfy their political interests, intensifying the ensuing wars and battles between the various emerging religious sects and the rising monarchies.

This demonstrates the first point: the printing press, which was a revolution in human information networks, produced both true and false information. There was no causal, historical determinacy one way or the other. While it disclosed truths about Church corruption, it was also used as a means to spread political propaganda that fueled the religious wars.

Now, as for the second, more philosophical point, the Reformation also reoriented people’s relation to truth by democratizing matters of faith. Whether one believes the Reformation was, in this respect, an overall good or not, from a liberal democratic point of view, it has to be considered good. The Reformation placed faith into the hands of the individual conscience, rendering considerations about one’s standing in relation to God to have a personal, rather than institutional, significance. Before, “the Church was the keeper and protector of Christian truths and the harbor of salvation for those at sea in sin.”9 Luther rejected this picture of salvation and believed one could be saved through faith and scripture alone, without an intermediary. Luther thought that one’s spiritual significance did not depend on authority. He didn’t see the Church as some emanation from God or a reflection of a Divine order that the individual participated in and was guided by to reach salvation. Individuals are solely responsible for their spiritual significance and capacity to reach a higher truth in God. In one of his more heroic acts, he translated the bible into vernacular German from the traditional Latin (which was considered the holy language, the only one appropriate for capturing religious truths). He gave common people access to what was previously sealed off from them. The individual, free from external imposition and constraint, can privately attain truth on his or her own.

Luther formulated a radical inner freedom that broke with some of the Church’s fundamental precepts. There was, of course, an inner freedom already present in Catholicism, but Luther placed it at the center of things rather than as revolving around an institution. Before Luther, St. Augustine went to great lengths to demonstrate the spiritual significance of an inner life, and Luther was an Augustinian monk. But Luther went much further than him. In one of his lectures on YouTube, the philosopher Michael Sugrue observes that this amounted to a kind of Copernican Revolution in religion. That is to say that, rather than the Church being the axis by which things revolve around and where one finds his or her salvation, rather than identifying with an institution by which one finds freedom within a corporate body in which lies their place amongst others in a perfectly ordered, hierarchical, and harmonious cosmos, the individual became the center axis of spiritual and religious matters. It’s easy to see, then, how this theological idea possesses the potential to develop into the idea of individual rights and liberties. Luther provided a kind of autonomy10 for the individual, where whether one is saved is bound up with one’s inner conscience and not with external works or good deeds that the Church facilitates. The individual is an irreducible unit of value that is not subsumed by any other worldly object. And the individual's value rests in their conscience and capacity to receive God’s grace. This idea has sparks of the modern sense of human dignity, and it will create a conflagration throughout Europe as it develops. If there is no Church or institution to settle one’s moral, spiritual, and intellectual significance, one is left to use one’s faculties for guidance. And because it is one’s faculties that attain truth and spiritual salvation, they are the center of value in human life, which bears a natural right for protection.

At the Diet of Worms in 1521, where Luther had to answer to charges of heresy because of his theological work, the Church demanded that he recant. He refused. But the reasons for his refusal are the most important. He demanded that the Church show him through scripture and reason alone that he was wrong and not through the dictates of authority. His protest demonstrated that the individual can reach the truth through his or her own means. The Church’s decline began far before this historical moment, but Luther made the decisive blow that the printing press made possible. The Church fragmented as a consequence, which, to Catholics, meant truth itself was fragmented and resulted in a proliferation of denominations scattered across Europe.

Section 3:

What was so subversive about Luther in this respect is that he divorced sanctification, the process by which one lives in the image of Christ, i.e., a life of virtue, from self-transformation. Although Luther carved out the individual as an irreducible unit of value, this also severed the individual from a stable and definite path that assuaged one’s existential suffering: “The Church… assured the individual of her unconditional love to all her children and offered a way to acquire the conviction of being forgiven and loved by God. The relationship to God was more one of confidence and love than of doubt and fear.”11 Luther believed that one was saved through faith alone and by no other means. He thought that because human beings are all sinners, their wills cannot do anything to reach salvation and spiritual peace. How, then, can one tell if they have been saved? There is no longer an authority to adjudicate this. The individual can discover the truth for themself and so must determine what this means on their own. Several centuries later, Kant gave voice to the duty he believed to arise from this new freedom:

Thus, it is difficult for any individual man to work himself out of the immaturity that has all but become his nature. He has even become fond of this state and for the time being is actually incapable of using his own understanding, for no one has ever allowed him to attempt it. Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity. Whoever threw them off would still make only an uncertain leap over the smallest ditch, since he is unaccustomed to this kind of free movement. Consequently, only a few have succeeded, by cultivating their own minds, in freeing themselves from immaturity and pursuing a secure course.

So, while much was gained during the Reformation, the reorientation around truth also had consequences. Self-transformation, the effort of will, the idea of having an inner and outer journey that culminates into something larger and more significant, took on radically different meanings under Luther and the future Protestant countries. To see this, we can turn to Dante’s Divine Comedy, which demonstrates part of what was lost under Luther.

Section 4:

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the culmination of the Medieval worldview before Luther, Dante embarks on a Christian pilgrimage that ends in his being saved. Just as with the above, it’s crucial to understand that the point here will not be exclusively religious but universal in the sense that religion, as manifested across all cultures, didn’t create this experience but was the medium by which it has been expressed and made sense of; it provides it a voice. This goes back to William James and his book The Varieties of Religious Experience. There is the private aspect of religious experience, and then there is the institutional component within which the private side takes shape. Buddhists practice meditation and strive to contemplate Nirvana; the Christian prays and goes to mass; the Stoics distance themselves from their inaccurate emotional representations and contemplate what is rational and in his or her control; and so forth. As James points out, what is fundamental to all religious experience, in the private sense, are two aspects: there is an uneasiness, which, “reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand;” and two, a solution, which “is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers (508).” The first aspect means the self is in conflict, is divided, and desires unification. In religious language, the self seeks salvation and an experience of being saved from their situation, which is characterized by suffering due to inner division and conflict. This can take on an existential mode, as with Leo Tolstoy in his book Confessions, or it can be highly moral. In Tolstoy’s book Confessions, he relates a story of a traveler being chased by a beast that imaginatively captures the relevant phenomena:

Seeking to save himself from the fierce animal, the traveler jumps into a well with no water in it; but at the bottom of this well he sees a dragon waiting with open mouth to devour him. And the unhappy man, not daring to go out lest he should be the prey of the beast, not daring to jump to the bottom lest he should be devoured by the dragon, clings to the branches of a wild bush which grows out of one of the cracks of the well. His hands weaken, and he feels that he must soon give way to certain fate; but still he clings, and sees two mice, one white, the other black, evenly moving round the bush to which he hangs, and gnawing off its roots. The traveler sees this and knows that he must inevitably perish; but while thus hanging he looks about him and finds on the leaves of the bush some drops of honey. These he reaches with his tongue and licks them off with rapture. Thus I hang upon the boughs of life, knowing that the inevitable dragon of death is waiting ready to tear me, and I cannot comprehend why I am thus made a martyr. I try to suck the honey which formerly consoled me; but the honey pleases me no longer, and day and night the white mouse and the black mouse gnaw the branch to which I cling. I can see but one thing: the inevitable dragon and the mice—I cannot turn my gaze away from them.”12

Clearly, Tolstoy is suffering from a serious existential episode in which he can’t find a purpose or meaning in life that will clear away his anxiety, which is represented in the dragon, which time, represented in the mice, slowly draws him near. This is his “uneasiness.” He must find a solution, then, because his situation is unlivable.

Religion has historically addressed this need. In the Middle Ages, the Church was the institution through which people expressed this experience and resolved their inner conflicts, tensions, and divisions. Let’s turn to Dante’s Divine Comedy to see how the private aspect of this experience is made sense of through Christain’s notion of the pilgrimage.

The poem begins with Dante suddenly becoming aware of himself, “Midway upon life’s journey,” as he says, and terrified by the fact that he’s lost in a dark world, having “gone astray,” and is in despair because he has begun to lose all hope for himself. “We know nothing of how Dante has gone astray, only that he has, and that he must undertake a journey, therefore, to save his soul.”13 He is, like Tolstoy, experiencing an “uneasiness” (though in more of a moral rather than existential sense; God is always present for Dante.) So, he has discovered that he has been living wrongly, that he’d strayed from the right path, from the way, and despite his attempts to free himself of his sins and burdens, he’s unable to do it alone. Although it’s unclear why Dante has lost his way, “the journey itself is clearer. It will take him through the entire Christian spiritual universe.”14

The Roman poet Virgil is sent to initiate and lead him on this path forward. Virgil represents all of Classical learning, from the Greeks to the Romans. Though they were pagans, they represent the highest one can do as a non-Christian, which is to reach, as Aristotle said, the contemplative life15, where one can reflect on the Whole, on the cosmos. But because they didn’t have faith, they could never experience a fullness of being or completeness that produces the solution to the uneasiness that James discussed. According to Christian doctrine, only Christians may experience this. Thus, they had to remain in Hell.

Now, for Dante to move down through Hell, climb up Purgatory, and then transcend into Heaven, he must engage with the Classical world by wrestling with the questions they set out to answer, which is an immensely difficult aim to take on; one that will transform the self as it moves through an activity and process of the soul, intellect, mind, or whatever it is that is the center in which human development toward the Good, as Plato would say, takes place. What’s fascinating about this ascent is that, in the Medieval worldview, it wasn’t merely an internal endeavor; it also bore a deep and profound relationship to the external world. By embarking on the Christian pilgrimage, one was, in a sense, becoming closer and closer to reality, to truth, to what is most real, which corresponded with a transformation of the self that is accompanied by an experience of fulfillment. As one ascends, one climbs what was called the Great Chain of Being, a metaphysical (ontological) thesis that was first articulated by Aristotle, which was adopted by, and adapted to, Christian thought in the thirteenth century.

The Chain of Being introduces a vertical aspect to reality rather than merely a horizontal one. At the top is the highest Truth, and the lowest is the least real, i.e., the lowest level of being, which consists of matter and material objects, whereas the highest consists of what is immaterial, like consciousness or mind. And so everything and everyone grows increasingly heavier as Dante moves downward through Hell due to being weighed down by an attachment to the material, earthly substance, which produces a growing despair and lack of fulfillment. As Dante moves upward from Purgatory to Heaven, things become lighter and immaterial in proportion to how much something embodies the spiritual, divine substance, which is achieved through directing one’s desire toward the right objects, toward what is more real and true. In Plato’s allegory of the cave, as one breaks free from the chains and shadows at the bottom and climbs toward the exit where the sun can be seen, one also gains more and more insight into reality as things are illuminated more clearly through the light. Like Purgatory, the ascent up the cave is profound and challenging. But the initial insight of seeing into reality, which reveals that what was previously experienced was illusory, produces the desire to see even further into what now appears absolute and true. This desire pulls and aims Dante upward as he climbs higher toward reality and up the Great Chain of Being. The economist and philosopher E.F. Schumacher16 put the significance of this view as follows:

The ability to see the Great Truth of the hierarchic structure of the world, which makes it possible to distinguish between higher and lower Levels of Being, is one of the indispensable conditions of understanding. Without it, it is not possible to find out where everything has its proper and legitimate place. Everything, everywhere, can be understood only when its Level of Being is fully taken into account. Many things are true at a low Level of Being and become absurd at a higher level, and of course vice versa.

Dante’s pilgrimage, then, aims toward attaining a higher level of being than when he found himself lost in the forest. By turning inward, by engaging in a contemplative mode of being that engages the self in pursuit of an inner harmony that resonates with an external, hierarchic order, Dante is striving to attain a kind of freedom that is somewhat alien to us today. We can think of the notion of freedom in a negative and a positive sense. In the negative sense, freedom is understood as freedom from something; from external constraint, for example. The First Amendment is typically interpreted along these lines. Everyone is free to speak their minds because the state should not be allowed to interfere with our freedom to do so. All are free to do as they please as long as they do not infringe on another person’s right to do so.

The positive sense is much different. It is a freedom for something. In Dante’s Hell, everyone found themselves there because they (at minimum) acted free purely in the negative sense. They lived their lives as they saw fit, without regard to any higher form of life. They didn’t act for the sake of a virtuous purpose (although that’s not quite right regarding the virtuous pagans and a few others.) To be free in the positive sense means to act according to a higher aim. When Socrates refused to renounce the philosophical life and was put to death, he made that decision based on a principle grounded in his inner conscience, which he took to express something sacred and higher, which always spoke to him when he was about to do wrong. He accepted the death penalty because the unexamined life wasn’t worth living; it had no purpose toward a higher aim17. 17

Dante’s Divine Comedy provides a narrative by which the uneasiness one experiences in life, as articulated by James, can reach a solution and resolve the inner conflict and division by providing a framework by which the individual moves closer to reality, to what is most real, and up the Chain of Being.

Section 5:

Now, the pilgrimage captured in Dante’s poem was not something anyone could take up, at least not in its full dramatic content; it was obviously something only a select few could embark on, and this depended on the situation one was born into, like whether one was wealthy enough to receive an education. One’s salvation in the social order was rarely epic or heroic in nature; it typically meant following the structure imposed upon the individual by the Church. Just as how the cosmos was hierarchically ordered, so was society. The reasons for the social order were Divinely decreed. The social structure was immovable in a way because shifting the social order and rearranging it would violate scripture and God’s Word. Hence people were, as we would judge today, unfree and restricted. However, as psychologist Erick Fromm writes, “although a person was not free in the modem sense, neither was he alone and isolated. In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social world from the moment of birth, man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need, for doubt. A person was identical with his role in society; he was a peasant, an artisan, a knight, and not an individual who happened to have this or that occupation. The social order was conceived as a natural order, and being a definite part of it gave a feeling of security and of belonging.”18 Luther’s devastating blow against the Church in the Reformation rejected the social order and the Chain of Being and set in motion the release of the individual from the bondage they were restrained in. But by freeing the individual, he also eliminated the necessary self-transformation that played a substantial role in the Medieval worldview. Luther democratized salvation, spirituality, and questions about meaning in one’s life.

This Copernican revolution in religious matters allowed for a radical reorientation toward truth, which relied on the printing press's efficiency in producing and distributing information.

There were, of course, other factors that contributed to the Catholic Church's decline. The literal Copernican revolution and the rise of science being an obvious example. But what became increasingly less present in the scientific worldview that was emerging then is the idea that, as one gains knowledge of the world, one also goes through a transformative experience like Dante’s. The notion that knowledge of truth and reality converges with a meaningful and spiritual ethical development has mostly fallen off. Science’s aim is pure objectivity. For much of history, what is ‘objective’ is also intrinsically beneficial to the subject coming into contact with it. Values in scientific judgment and knowledge are a transgression, a violation of scientific precept, and are opposed to the whole epistemic enterprise (meaning a method by which knowledge is gained.) Science does not care about how one feels, what one desires in life, or what meaning one may find in it and simply presents facts as a body of indifferent and empirically verified knowledge.

This is, of course, a caricature, as Thomas Kuhn19 argued in the twentieth century. Scientists certainly value their theories and are not merely attempting to refute them through experimentation. Theories allow scientists to have a grip on the world and a language of concepts that can be used to describe it accurately. This conceptual framework gives the world a theoretically intelligible and discernible order. And so once the anomalies and unsolved problems in a scientific paradigm grow serious enough, those working within it enter into a crisis until a new paradigm emerges (as is what happened when moving from Newtonian mechanics to Eistenin’s relativity.) Still, moving from one paradigm to the next isn’t believed to be an ethical progression. It’s a movement from one framework to the next. Unlike the Medieval worldview, it is generally held that science says nothing about human values and how one ought to live. Being a scientist does not suggest that someone is wise like a Socrates or Plato.

Unlike the Church in the Middle Ages, which, in terms of knowledge, played a similar role to science today, science is not an institution that is in the business of handing out ethical and moral guidance. A scientist would likely balk (or should balk) at the idea of being viewed as someone who has gone through an ethical self-transformation to gain the knowledge that he or she has solely because of becoming a scientist. Being one of course requires an enormous amount of discipline, effort, and intelligence, which is, in a way, transformative, but in a different sense than what Dante embarked on. Today, knowledge of truth and reality does not necessarily correspond with an ethical progression.

This idea of not requiring ethical self-transformation to gain the highest forms of knowledge is most noticeable in Rene Descartes’ philosophy in the seventeenth century. Descartes set out to rebuild a foundation through which knowledge could be rebuilt from the ruins left by the Church’s decline.20 The Church had lost its viability as something that could be believed to provide reliable knowledge for the social body. It was no longer psychologically obvious that the Church was the principal source and authority of appeal when dealing with matters of truth. Referring to scripture, for instance, could no longer be done by relying on what the Papacy had interpreted it as meaning. Luther (and others) undermined this immediacy for many. The United States faces a similar situation today. There is a diminishing trust in the democratic institutions that have historically served as distributors of trustworthy knowledge. Descartes attempted to deal with a similar crisis by discovering foundations immune from doubt. And he believed himself to have discovered such a foundation through his Cogito: I think, therefore I am. I can doubt all of my mental representations of the world, such as those of tables and chairs and coffee mugs, as well as my particular thoughts and feelings, and even the existence of my own body and sense experience. For all I know, I may be dreaming or being deceived by an evil demon into believing all kinds of imaginary and false representations of things. I can’t affirm or deny this with any certainty. But I cannot doubt that I am doubting; that much is certain. And since doubting is a property of thinking, I can’t doubt that I am thinking.

Therefore, I am a thinking thing, an immaterial substance that is distinct from the physical bodies liable to doubt21. This is the most fundamental truth that not even reason could call into question. It’s radically different from truth as understood on the Chain of Being model. There is no ethical transformation involved in realizing this indubitable proposition. It’s self-evident to anyone rational and clear-minded (or so Descartes thinks.) And this is certainly how many people today think of knowledge. And in some cases, quite rightly. Take human rights as an example. John Locke22, a momentous figure who shaped the language of rights and how modernity thinks about them, argued that human rights are self-evident in the same sense as a geometric axiom. It just appears before the mind as something incapable of being doubted (to a clear, rational mind, of course, who has done the proper thinking, like someone who has rightly apprehended a geometric axiom.) The US’s founding document memorializes Locke’s claim: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The deepest, most profound truths about humanity are ‘obvious’ to any rational mind. This is, of course, a good thing. It is good that people intuitively find one another intrinsically and irreducibly valuable. But when this notion is taken for granted, when, as we’ll soon see with John Stuart Mill, an idea grows ossified, fixed, and dogmatic, it loses its potency and desired effect. But if one arrives at the idea of human rights through a transformative process, where one realizes the concept through a process of development and growth that culminates in seeing the profound value within a conscious human being, the notion of rights is animating and action-producing; it stirs and moves the motivation of those who go through this process. In other words, it produces a particular psychological orientation around what is believed to be true.

Section 6:

So, information technologies do not merely distribute previously unavailable information that is then propagated across a network. Nor does the production of such information bear a natural, necessary connection to truth. They can do both, but much more is at play. The printing press allowed for the conditions necessary for the Reformation to occur, and its occurrence produced a radical shift in the Medieval worldview. Truth was hierarchically organized, and those at the top had exclusive access. The Reformation leveled this structure and diffused the notion that all Christians are equal regarding Divine knowledge. There was no need for an authoritative intermediary to facilitate people’s relation to God. People could do it themselves through faith and scripture alone. But this also meant that all the social practices instituted for the purposes of coming into contact with truth, all the rituals and rites used to reinforce the beliefs of when and how truth manifests itself, slowly went with it. Therefore, people’s orientation around truth, how they conceived of it, where it resided, and how one knew it, was disrupted. People weren’t merely given previously unavailable information; the entire information landscape was turned upside down. This can reveal new terrain within the landscape that can lead to deep and valuable truths, such as human rights and liberties, and it can also conceal older, previously established truths, like the notion of transformative experiences being necessary for coming into closer contact with reality.

Similarly to the printing press, social media poses a historical parallel. We can see this by looking at the most famous defense of free speech for the sake of truth, namely, John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty. We’ll see that, like how the printing press reoriented people’s relation to truth, social media is doing so by increasingly shifting how we conceive of, participate in, and come to know the truth. As a social practice, it’s shifting the culture toward different ways of arriving at truth. It's difficult to say whether it is categorically good or bad. But the focus here will be on what would certainly be a momentous loss in our social practices regarding truth, namely, a departure from Enlightenment values.

There is a developing tendency to determine the truth through sheer will rather than discussion and a dwindling desire to correct this error. People seem to care less about deliberation, compromise, tolerance, and the general agreement that the goal is to come to an inclusive decision that is in the best interests of people who share a basic respect for each other’s dignity. All political orientations have growing factions that believe the content of other’s beliefs determines how they should be viewed and treated. Rather than work toward building a community that is able to cooperate with one another and agree on a uniting set of values, the cultural attitude is moving toward a competition between wills for power. But it’s not only behaviorally motivated by power; there is also the belief that all effort by a group toward an ideal is entirely reducible to power. That very well may be true. But if it is, democracy is in a precarious position. So, if we value democracy, we should steer back toward the proper path. For Mill’s account to work, which is crucial if we wish to justify free speech for the sake of truth in Enlightenment, democratic terms23, social media should not be viewed as a truth-seeking information network24. Mill believed free speech is necessary for human flourishing in a democratic society. If it’s the people who are going to be involved in the deliberative processes of society and be the ones choosing what is best, then the people must be able to discuss and exchange ideas, opinions, and beliefs freely. However, just like how the Medieval view operated within a certain orientation around truth, which provided a framework through which truth could be arrived at, so it is with democracy. And like the printing press, social media has placed enormous tension on our democratic orientation. So, if we desire to maintain democratic values derived from the Enlightenment, then we have to take a certain stance toward social media, one that eschews the expectation that truth is situated within its environments, where we expect to discuss, debate, hash things out, and arrive at truth.

Now, On Liberty offers two sets of reasons supporting free speech, the first being epistemic, meaning that the benefits have to do with knowledge, while the other set is psychologically beneficial. The first set argues that free speech is an overall good for society because if what someone says is true or partially true, both possibilities benefit a democracy. If what is said is true, it will benefit because it professes a truth that will add to the preexisting stock of knowledge. If partially true, this also contributes to preexisting knowledge; “and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.” The second psychological set of benefits is primarily derived from the utterance of false beliefs, which have no direct epistemic benefit because they do not contribute any knowledge to form beliefs around. If what is said is wholly false, the opportunity to defend and contest it will also be an overall good because it will demand that the bearers of that knowledge account for the reasons for its truth. Mill expresses this well: “Unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds.” This then produces a further psychological benefit. By remaining a prejudice and not as something rationally grasped, “the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct; the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction from reason or personal experience.” Therefore, contesting what is true will keep beliefs from devolving into prejudice or dogma.

Section 7:

The first thing to observe about Mill’s reasons for free speech is that the first set of epistemic reasons really depends on the second set (the psychological ones). But it’s peculiar to speak of the latter as ‘benefits’ because of this. It’s more accurate to say that a certain psychological orientation must give rise to them. We can think of this as a kind of feedback loop that produces the benefits Mill is speaking of. One must have the proper psychological orientation toward truth to break into this loop. That is to say that the members within a society must hold a psychological orientation toward truth that allows for the free expression of true, partially true, and false beliefs to be a net good, i.e., to bring about the best possible consequences within a democratic community. With the psychological reasons offered for free speech, notice that the benefit is derived from the speakers and listeners within the community being open to receiving true, partially true, or false utterances. The beliefs they hold must be perpetually open to revision because they may or may not be in possession of the actual true ones; they understand that their knowledge is an ongoing process, something that is constantly unfolding, and so hold a particular stance toward the free expression of beliefs.

They would understand that, even in the best instances of human knowledge, the most stable kind (like knowledge of physics), it is still susceptible to be overturned by future evidence, as was the case with Newtonian mechanics and Einsteinian relativity. That is not to say truth is therefore unattainable, but only that there should be a fair degree of epistemic humility within a democratic, truth-seeking community, given that our best knowledge often falls far short of absolute certainty. As the psychological reasons specify, if the people within the community hold their beliefs as prejudices or dogmas that are fixed and unchangeable, they will be unreceptive to being challenged. So whatever anyone utters, whether true, false, or in between, it won’t provide the benefits Mill intended. There must be a certain psychological orientation toward truth for Mill’s argument to succeed.

Let’s now specify what this orientation should look like and see how it’s vital in upholding free speech arguments for the sake of truth. There are three components to this orientation: (i) certain beliefs, (ii) certain desires, and (iii) certain attitudes born out of (i) and (ii). (i) consists of two beliefs. The first belief is that truth exists, and the second is that it is, in principle, knowable. (ii) consists of two desires as well. The first desire is to attain human flourishing, and the second is that truth is constitutive of this aim. Given that there is truth, one must also have the desire to attain it. But this is also a special kind of desire; it’s a desire that fulfills what must be viewed as a higher need, one that is constitutive of human flourishing or happiness. We can call this a fulfillment need. This means that we desire truth because it occupies a natural place in the space of human good. We will lack something fundamental to our flourishing if we don’t have contact with truth; we therefore both desire it and have a powerful motivation to attain it because we desire to flourish. Fulfillment needs should be understood as part of what constitutes this principal end in life that characterizes human excellence.

For those who know Greek philosophy, this will sound familiar. As Aristotle says in his Ethics, all things aim at some final good. Achieving this good means for something to actualize its potential and attain excellence. The final aim of human beings is to flourish, or, in Greek, to attain eudaimonia, and to attain this means to achieve human excellence. Excellence, says Aristotle, means to fulfill the particular function assigned to a thing's nature. An eye’s function is to see, a car’s function is to drive, while the seed’s function is to grow into a plant. Human beings’ nature is to be rational, to optimize their cognition, to reduce error, and to reach the truth. Again, since the ultimate aim is to flourish, and because seeking truth is constitutive of that goal, we desire to know the truth as a fulfillment need, which helps satisfy the principal good in human life. Now, while Aristotle’s claim about human nature is of course disputable, if Mill’s argument for free speech is to work, and it’s important that it does, Aristotle’s account of human beings, or something resembling it, must be held within a democratic community.

That being said, there’s a deep plausibility to the notion that humans have a fundamental need to be in contact with the truth, and presuming rationality is necessary for this, Aristotle may very well be right. In his lecture series Awakening From The Meaning Crisis, John Vervaeke offers a powerful example to illustrate this. Imagine your parents one day asking you to follow them into a hidden room you had never seen before inside your house on your eighteenth birthday. When you enter, you see a wall of monitors showing old footage of you throughout your life. Your parents then turn to you and say that your entire life has been an FBI experiment; everything has been manufactured. The love you thought to be sincere and nourishing, all the support you’ve received throughout the years, the holidays you have come to cherish, and the memories and feelings you’ve come to have are, in the most profound sense, fake. None of it was real. Your parents then tell you that you have two options. You can either act as if this incident had never happened and move on as usual, or you can move out and move on with your life. What’s the desirable option? Most of us would choose the latter. Why? Because none of what was thought to be real turned out to be true. It was all fabricated, illusory, and bore no substantive relation to reality. For the majority of us (although hopefully everyone), there is no going back to the way things previously were. The truth makes a fundamental difference in the decision-making between the two options. By discovering that our life is untrue, we feel a deep absence, a lack of fulfillment, an incompleteness on account of what we’ve learned about ourselves. An essential aspect of the decision to move on, then, is a deep motivation to discover what is in fact true. It’s like Dante when he discovers himself lost in the dark forest. We’ve been led astray, and now we desire to find the right path, which is the one that converges with truth, with what is most real. This is what happens to Jim Carrey in The Truman Show when he decides to leave that disturbing, manufactured simulation dome he was raised in. He could have stayed, but he was psychologically unable to. By obtaining this new self-knowledge, he would have never achieved eudaimonia. He would have remained stuck in life because he would have been bullsh*tting himself (again, I mean this in a technical sense and not simply as an explicative, which will be explained below.)

This brings us to (iii), which is to bear a particular attitude toward truth provided (i) and (ii). The proper attitude toward truth is one of care. To care for the truth means to know how to reliably arrive at it, which means utilizing the relevant cognitive processes in forming true beliefs. Recall the quote at the beginning of the article from John Milton, which expressed that it is a heresy to arrive at a belief in the wrong way, namely, by not properly using one’s own reason. It matters, then, how we form our beliefs, and what matters is which cognitive processes are used to get there. For ease of presentation, we can use the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s formulation of these cognitive processes from his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman lays out two cognitive systems, System 1 and System 2. “System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” Whereas “System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration (p. 21).” To see the difference, take the two following examples of arithmetic: “2 + 2 = ?” We have an immediate cognitive reflex to such an equation, and little to no effort is required. Filling in the answer resulted from System 1. “17 x 24 =?” Now this equation typically demands more effort. A reasoning process is engaged to determine the answer that requires concentrated effort and isn’t reflexively provided. Such a process is supplied by System 2. For another example, say someone is hiking and spots a tree in the distance. If such a person cares nothing for botany, then the object will have a great deal of transparency, and the person will carry on about their day. Such a process would be within System 1. But if the person is a trained botanist and has never seen this kind of tree before (say they’re in a foreign country), they may begin to observe it, inspect it, and direct their effort toward retrieving the relevant information that may help identify the tree. That person has engaged System 2.

Caring for the truth means knowing how to optimize these two systems so that System 1 and System 2 are in a recurring dialogue with one another, with the aim to arrive at the truth. Now, there are at least two aspects to this idea of care. The first can be classed as having to do with general skills in critical thinking, which primarily consists of analysis. Examples are things like working out one’s cognitive biases and reducing error. In essence, being successful in this regard means being able to reason well and work through problems rationally. Take a case of confirmation bias, for example. Imagine a republican voter who believes certain conspiracy theories about the democratic party and who is watching a presidential debate and hears the Republican candidate make an assertion attributing misconduct to the Democratic candidate. Because the assertion confirms the prior beliefs of the voter who is watching, it will be easy for that person to immediately agree with what was said. Engaging System 2 is effortful and costly in mental energy, and so it is easier, as well as cognitively more pleasurable, to passively (probably unconsciously) consent to System 1’s impulse, which presents the Republican candidate’s statement as attractive and belief-worthy. If this person cares for the truth, however, he or she would engage System 2 upon receiving what System 1 has provided with the aim of verifying whether the assertion accurately represents or corresponds to reality. Perhaps the person reasons through the assertion. If the candidate said something like, "Inflation has skyrocketed due to the current administration, which she’s a part of,” the voter watching may reason that, while it’s true inflation has risen, her position in the administration bears little to no significance on that outcome; therefore, the assertion is misinformed. Or perhaps the voter doesn’t understand government structure very well and does research, visits several sources, and concludes based on the information that the assertion is misinformed and implies an invalid conclusion. Whatever the route taken, the voter is presented with the potential to make a cognitive error through System 1, and because he or she cares for the truth, System 2 is utilized to solve the task presented.

Competence in this aspect of care, which means to be a competent critical thinker, consists of knowing how to obtain propositional knowledge, which is knowledge that accurately represents reality. One has the tools and skills to work through assertions, analyze arguments, and appropriately form beliefs according to the evidence. One can situationally respond by engaging System 2 when one detects that System 1 is presented with information expressing propositions about the world. Someone who has mastered these skills has developed dispositions that engage the relevant cognitive behavior under the relevant conditions. In other words, such a person knows how to instinctively and properly respond to the appropriate cognitive stimuli.25

The second aspect of caring for truth is deeper than this and, like Dante’s journey, more transformative. Caring for truth in this sense means optimizing System 1 and System 2 by using them to shape one’s conception of the good. What reason, for example, would this argument, rather than another one, be more relevant to someone competent in critical thinking? Why care about what this person has to say rather than that one? Answers to these questions will suggest the underlying conception of the good that is assumed when one finds one set of information more salient. In other words, the second aspect of caring for truth means understanding one’s conception of eudaimonia, or flourishing, which is one’s final aim and idea of human excellence. Critical thinking in the propositional sense is a highly valuable set of skills that is fundamental to the whole project of pursuing truth. But what it consists of does not provide a final criteria to judge what one should believe about human flourishing and what it amounts to. It plays a vital role in articulating and grasping this goal but won’t deliver it. In other words, critical thinking is a powerful tool in reaching one’s goals, but it itself cannot bestow the goals themselves. This requires the second aspect of caring for truth, which means optimizing System 1 and System 2 to become aware of what final end is guiding their operation. Regardless of how much one engages in critical thinking, irrespective of one’s mastery of logic and reasoning, if one never utilizes these skills toward understanding what provides the salience of one set of information over another, they may never satisfy their fulfillment need for truth.

Tolstoy’s book, The Death of Ivan Illych, illustrates this. In the story the Russian protagonist, Ivan Illych, lives his life in pursuit of what is pleasant. He shuns the annoyances and discomforts that arise in life and views them, in a way, as unnatural, as occurrences that disrupt how life should be. His goal in life is to maximize pleasure and avoid pain and suffering. He’s not, however, a Don Quixote or an extreme hedonist; he’s not trying to experience all the possible pleasures one may have. He wants to live a successful and acceptable life that commands the esteem of his colleagues, makes his family happy, comfortable, and at ease, and allows him to pass through life with as few disturbances as possible. He holds a very familiar and common conception of the good.

And Ivan does in fact find this success. He rises to be a great and respectable judge in Russia. He’s highly competent, makes a substantial living, and can buy and provide his family with whatever he pleases. Yet he finds himself running into the disturbances he’s always tried to avoid. He’s constantly fighting with his wife:

There remained only rare periods of amorousness that came over the spouses, but they did not last long. These were islands that they would land on temporarily, but then they would put out again to the sea of concealed enmity that expressed itself in estrangement from each other. This estrangement might have upset Ivan Ilyich, if he had considered that it ought not to be so, but by now he took this situation not only as normal, but as the goal of his activity in the family. His goal consisted in freeing himself more and more from these unpleasantnesses and in giving them a character of harmlessness and decency; and he achieved it by spending less and less time with his family, and when he was forced to do so, he tried to secure his position by the presence of outsiders.

He’s experiencing the “uneasiness” formulated by William James above. His solution is not to reflect on his final end in life, his conception of the good, his idea of human flourishing and excellence, but to find other means to attain it, which is to turn away from what he’s representing as unnatural and frustrating. He’s not deficient in critical thinking; he’s a highly competent and successful judge. He lacks the wisdom and self-knowledge necessary for reflecting on and evaluating what makes some things and not others salient for him, which is his goal in life to live pleasantly. There’s a reason why he finds spending less time with his family a more obvious solution than trying to get at the root of why it is he feels so frustrated and annoyed at the fact that he’s not feeling fulfilled despite his success; and he’s not utilizing System 1 and System 2 to investigate that reason, i.e., he’s not caring for truth in the second sense. It’s only until he is faced with a random, coincidental death that he realizes he hadn’t been searching for a solution to his “uneasiness” that converged with truth. Not truth in the propositional sense, but truth regarding human flourishing and excellence. Insofar as he was unable or unwilling to direct his cognition toward what was guiding it, he remained incapable of progressing and transforming toward an aim that would afford him self-awareness, self-knowledge, and, ultimately, eudaimonia.

Both aspects of caring for truth matter if Mill’s benefits are to be obtained. It matters propositionally (the first aspect of care) because critical thinking and analysis are necessary for seeing information clearly and discerning whether something maps onto the world. But caring for the first aspect alone will only clear the fog, so to speak, and allow one to see the landscape with more specificity and definition. It will provide knowledge about the causal regularities that govern the territory and the predictable patterns that follow from them. It will not, however, indicate what to do with that knowledge or inform one of what it means. For free speech to be justified for the sake of truth, which means free speech plays a substantial, instrumental role in sorting out the true information from the false, people must care for the truth. They have to find it salient in the right ways. If people don’t care and don’t share the proper desire to pursue it, then no amount of discussion will necessarily bring the community any closer to the truth. They may easily settle for something else.

Section 8:

The claim, then, is that social media does not warrant truth-based justifications for free speech. Because social media platforms don’t promote or incentivize the psychological orientation necessary for truth-seeking but reward the opposite behaviors, the idea that one is seeking truth within such a context is false. The view that social media as a public space is best characterized as a social practice that aims toward truth has generated an insidious confusion within the culture, and we would be better off by evaluating it differently. Social media is certainly an information network, but it’s wrong to presume all information networks are oriented toward truth production.

To see this, think of a university. The principal purpose of this institution is to generate knowledge (there are other purposes, of course, but put those aside.) Now, there are many parts to the structure of a university, but let’s zoom in on the classroom environment. Within it, there’s a hierarchy in place. The teacher’s purpose is to guide the students through a curriculum, get them to think critically about the information, debate and discuss it, foster their abilities to engage with it, cultivate the necessary faculties for this, and to ensure that they learn something specific about the given information, as well as something general about learning, something they can use in all cases. To achieve this, the teacher must orient the students around truth-seeking, i.e., he or she must teach the students to care for the truth, as explained above. The teacher must challenge the students’ cognitive biases. Logical errors, bad reasoning, and lack of critical thinking have to be checked, corrected, and reinforced by the teacher.

Ideally, the teacher will also help the students think critically about their conceptions of the good. In the ideal scenario, the teacher not only challenges their cognition but also fosters their ability to question what human flourishing and excellence looks like. It’s ideal because claiming that this is absolutely necessary for an information network to warrant being evaluated as a truth-seeking social practice is, perhaps, too high. But it is what one should aim for. However, it’s important to bear this in mind because it will be shown that, even if the threshold is lowered in this sense, social media still fails at what any information network that is correlated with truth should provide, which is to promote the proper analytical skills in getting clearer about reality.

Now, an important reason universities are trusted as truth-seeking information networks is partly because of the teacher's role in distributing that information. It’s trusted as an institution because those who go through it are supposed to have been guided by experts who demonstrate how to pursue knowledge. Students who leave the institution are expected to have participated in a social practice that taught them to be competent in their field (and hopefully to be a good human being as well, whatever that means precisely) and who can now further distribute and utilize their knowledge by applying it to other domains within society. The teacher’s function within the institution is essential to this goal and fundamental to the trust granted to the institution itself. Let’s call this function a Socratic function.27

Social media doesn’t have a Socratic function, and any information network trusted as a distributor of knowledge should have something resembling it. Worse than this, however, is that social media actually promotes cognitive behavior that is opposed to the whole project of pursuing truth. As an overarching, general pattern, social media reinforces and incentivizes things like cognitive bias (the immediate and intuitive presentations of System 1.) The whole business model is aimed at maximizing attention. People easily become addicted to these platforms and binge content endlessly. The only way to achieve this is by easing the user’s cognitive effort as much as possible and stimulating them with dopamine responses, allowing the user to enter a semi-hypnotic state. Of course, not everyone is affected like this; most people can assert moderation when using social media. But in an ideal world, one where social media is optimally thriving, everyone would be glued to their screens. Practical circumstances of course make this impossible, and therefore it wouldn’t truly be in social media’s interests because no one would show up for work, but if we turn the dial on the business goals of these platforms to the max, then this would be the logical consequence; it would maximize profits.

Social media serves many purposes, though, and the claim is certainly not that it is, for these reasons, entirely bad. It’s only the contexts, circumstances, and situations in which it is reflexively represented as a competent and trusted information network that deals in matters of knowledge and truth that it creates an overall deficit. This is because of the intellectual and ethical confusion it produces, which is caused by its lack of a Socratic function that incentivizes and reinforces the proper psychological orientation around truth-seeking. Again, it has the opposite aim, which is to ease the effort of System 2 as much as it can and allow System 1, with all its cognitive vulnerabilities, to be at the helm. Because of this aim, social media has a Sophistic function, which contrasts the Socratic one, whose defining characteristic is to be a bullsh*tter. As mentioned above, this notion is a technical one and needs to be properly explained.

The notion of bullsht comes from the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt and his essay Bullsht. Sam Harris uses this term often, especially regarding social media. First, let’s clarify what it means to lie. Lying involves an intent to deceive on the part of the person lying, who wishes to get the other to believe something contrary to the truth. The seventeen-year-old who sneaks out, gets caught, and tells their parents that they forgot their phone at their friend’s house and went to get it in the middle of the night is lying because they’re trying to deceive their parents into believing something false about reality. But reality is still salient to their aim. Although attempting to distort it, they still have reality in their conscious field of intentions, motives, and desires, i.e., they care about truth rather than caring for it. Someone who bullshts, on the other hand, has no regard for truth. It provides no reason for consideration on its own, independent of the bullshtter’s aim. Whereas the truth matters for the liar, it’s of no concern whether what one says is true or false in the case of bullsht. The bullshter’s enterprise is characteristically different than the lier in this regard. The liar “is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false… The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it.”26

The classic archetype of a bullshtter is the salesman. The truth about whether the product sold is efficient, useful, or whatever else is indifferent to the salesman. What matters, and what distinguishes one who is good from one who is not (in the sense of achieving their goal to sell the product, pure and simple,) is whether they can deceive the consumer into believing that the bullshtter is asserting something they themselves believe. There are few constraints on what a bullshtter may say to achieve their aim. Whatever helps satisfy their goal is fair play. The liar is unable to be creative like this. They must strategically and purposefully contend with the truth by believing they know it. If the liar doesn’t in fact know the truth, this will likely spoil their plans. They will be unable to grasp the situation and will likely misunderstand what the circumstances call for. A bullshtter doesn’t need to know the truth at all. They just need to make the other person think that they do. The truth conditions of their beliefs and assertions are, by itself, irrelevant.

Social media is a bullshtter in incentivizing and rewarding behavior that employs bullsht. It therefore has a Sophistic function. The chief culprit for this is, of course, the algorithms. The algorithm's aim is to curate content that maximizes user engagement and attention. Whether what it presents a user with is true or false is a matter of indifference. It can matter in a sense, but only if the user is disposed toward viewing content that is oriented around truth, which is of no concern to the algorithms. The function is to bullsht the user by minimizing cognitive effort and maximizing the incentives that will keep their attention, e.g., by triggering dopamine responses through a constant succession of content patterned according to the user’s preferences. If the user desires content that aims at truthfully representing reality, he or she has to maneuver through a minefield of bullsht. There is no Socratic function that guides them through it, as there would be in any other social practice that is considered an information network whose purpose is to distribute knowledge. The proper psychological orientation that warrants discussions about how free speech is necessary for pursuing truth within a given context is entirely absent within the social media model.

Hence Mill’s influential argument for the utility of free speech for the sake of truth doesn’t apply to social media. Let’s reflect on what Mill said after this long discussion. Recall the epistemic benefits he argued for. He said that letting everyone freely express their minds produces the best outcomes within a democratic community, regardless of whether what one says is true, partially true, or false. If the truth doesn’t move people, and if the general tendency to find truth salient is absent, then letting everyone say what they think is self-undermining. Why would truth matter if everyone free to speak their mind disregards it? Seeing truth as a reason for a social practice means truth is fundamental to the aims that characterize the institution, and this means being properly oriented around it, which means caring for it.

Section 9:

I want to end now with a discussion about how this all relates to Nostr and how it has the potential to be an information network that performs much better than social media as a context concerned with knowledge and truth. The principal reason that will be considered here is Nostr’s pursuit of a fully decentralized model that aims at user autonomy. Autonomy makes a crucial difference between an information network that more reliably tracks truth and one that is indifferent to it.

Social media reduces users' autonomy by trying to use them as a means toward further ends, namely, their attention, engagement, and data. The algorithm's job is to sort through users’ information and curate it in ways that maximize profit. This generally results in the spread of bullsht because what determines information as worth spreading does not depend on that information’s truth value. However, when users can curate their own content by judging for themselves what information they wish to retrieve from relays; when it’s left to each user to decide what content is valuable and what isn’t; when users themselves can determine what is worth censuring and not be subject to the interests of a centralized server, the aim is clearly to place autonomy back into their hands. What’s important, though, is that autonomy has a certain purpose in the Nostr context: to allow people to create at all protocol levels. Part of what a centralized server does is create a fixed infrastructure that greatly restricts what users may do on the platform (the chief restriction being to yield as much profit as possible for shareholders.) Creators especially are affected by this because the value they contribute to the platforms is filtered through what will necessarily constrain it. Nostr, however, is different. What largely motivates the value of autonomy is the desire to let creators create content freely and without outside constraints, which, of course, is to provide them freedom of expression. By users having the freedom to build and the autonomy to curate and choose what content is personally valuable to a user, truth becomes highly relevant within the context. Now, if Mill is right when he says that only true beliefs have any utility (and false beliefs necessarily lead one astray in some sense,) users who produce content will be highly incentivized to track the truth, to have an accurate representation of it, because to fail at this will result in unappealing content due to its lack of value. No centralized authority is supposed to be able to force something to appear valuable; it’s up to the users to determine this. And if something will endure and not fade once the reasons why it may have trended disappear, it needs to track the truth. If it doesn’t, if it only matters to people because it is sensational or cheap, if it’s bullsht, it will always lose in the long run.

Since people on Nostr have the autonomy to build and curate their own content, unlike social media, there is less at play that can ossify the network. There must be a great deal of motion because, in principle, no user or client can monopolize the space. This built-in fluidity captures an important aspect of truth-seeking, which John Milton expressed when saying, “Knowledge thrives by exercise… Truth is compared in scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.” Everyone has to earn their success on Nostr, so the principal way to do this is to create something valuable. Again, if Mill is right, the value must largely be derived from the truth that the content represents, creating an incentive to care for the truth. Bullsh*t can’t be forcefully distributed because it maximizes some desired metric. Information is chiefly distributed by individual users valuing it.

Nostr provides a way to see if Mill was right in thinking only true beliefs have any real value. Since the intention is to move away from social media’s business model, there is an opportunity to determine whether people will naturally choose the truth through their own autonomous decision-making. If there are no algorithms that aim to seize and maximize user attention, people are free to choose what content they wish to consume. It is a choice whether truth prevails over its opposite in the Nostr context because individuals are incentivized to contribute what they want to see. And if things go astray, people can fix it by creating something better.

Notes:

For a similar but far more elaborate, comprehensive, and complex argument of this kind, see John Vervaeke’s Awakening From the Meaning Crisis on YouTube.

1. For an elaboration on free speech justifications, see Greenawalt, K. (2007). Free Speech Justifications. Colombia Law Review.
2. For a history of Free speech, see Jacob Mchangama’s book Free Speech: Socrates to Social Media.
3. Kant, I. (1784). What is Enlightenment? (p. 1). Hacket Publishing.
4. This is not to suggest wokism is the sole culprit of this cultural trend. It’s one example amongst others on all parts of the political spectrum. But it’s an important example because wokism aims to be virtuous and moral. Therefore, it’s a good example because it is important to question whether their moral claims are correct. Furthermore, a plausible reply on the part of one who may subscribe to something like wokism (whatever that means precisely) is that it isn’t the duty of those who have been oppressed to teach those they consider to be oppressors. The duty falls on the latter. This is a challenging question to settle, and it makes up the potentially unbridgable gulf between wokism and its opponents. But if empathy is a virtue (or a vital moral response), it’s central that everyone exercises it, not just those who are held to be guilty of something.
5. Simpson, R. M. (2024). The Connected City of Ideas. Daedalus.
6. Harari, N. Y. (2024). Nexus. Random House.
7. Eisenstein, E. L. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (p. 45). Cambridge University Press.
8. Melchert, N. (2007). The Great Conversation (p. 304). Oxford University Press.
9. Melchert, N. (2007). The Great Conversation. Oxford University Press.
10. Wagner, C. (2012). Scientia Moralitas (Moral Autonomy and Responsibility - The Reformation’s Legacy in Today’s Society). Scientia Moralitas Research Institute.
11. Fromm, E. (1941). Escape From Freedom (p. 54). Discus.
12. James, W. (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience (p. 54). Penguin Classics.
13. Dreyfus, H., & Kelly, S. D. (2011). All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (p. 122). Free Press.
14. Dreyfus, H., & Kelly, S. D. (2011). All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (p. 122). Free Press.
15. Aristotle, A. (1953). Ethics (p. 122). Penguin Classics.
16. Schumacher, E. (1977). A Guide For the Perplexed. Harper Colophon Books.
17. As Isaiah Berlin makes clear in his essay Two Concepts of Liberty, it is easy to see how positive freedom may easily lead to foolish and immoral action due to its purposeful nature. It is quite challenging to dissuade someone that what they believe to be their purpose in life, their ultimate meaning, relies on false premises.
18. Fromm, E. (1941). Escape From Freedom. Discus.
19. Chalmers, A. (1974). What is this thing called Science? Hacket Publishing.
20. Descartes, R. (2010). Meditations on First Philosophy. Oxford World's Classics.
21. See Bertrand Russel’s The History of Western Philosophy for how Descartes's argument is logically invalid. He can’t doubt that some process of thinking is occurring, but whether something is doing the thinking isn’t obvious.
22. Locke, J. Two Treatises on Government.
23. Justice Holmes made the Marketplace metaphor popular in Abrams v United States (1919), and has become a central precedent in free speech cases.
24. For a similar argument, see Nevin Chellappah’s “Is John Stuart Mill’s Account of Free Speech Sustainable In the Age of Social Media?”
25. Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. Penguin.
26. Frankfurt, H. (1986). Bullshit. Princeton University Press.
27. To see the Socratic function in real time, watch The Joe Rogan Experience episode #2171. Eric Weinstein demonstrates what it means for an expert to engage with someone outside their respective field who claims to have knowledge that overturns the discipline but with no professional training to back it up. His attitude demonstrates a care for truth.