One of the current social phenomena affecting discourse on matters of public interest is the resistance to dissemination of particular classes of views. This phenomenon includes, but is not limited to classic censorship, e.g. removing books on particular subjects, to social media companies suppressing various ideas under the euphemism "disinformation," discouraging the expression of views through bullying and intimidation under the guise that some thoughts are "harmful." The fact that these phenomena exist is beyond dispute, so the relevant inquiries become will be their likely effects and what are the motivations for such practices?
The first question, related to the effects behind limiting the scope and content of public discourse, is related to the question of whether it is possible to ever suppress compelling ideas. Practical experience is that it is not. Even in the Soviet Union with its surveillance apparatus, the phenomenon of samizdat made possible the circulation of ideas in the setting of difficulties imposed by the state. Parents who initially believe that they can control their children's behavior by restricting what information those children are exposed to soon (for example with respect to vulgar language, drugs, sex, etc.) find out that the world is far more efficient at disseminating information than is at first assumed. The early Christian Church was able to proselytize and grow despite government efforts to suppress and influence knowledge of it. Often, the attempts at suppressing information in itself conveys information, such as when newspapers omit information from a story to "discourage stereotypes." Humans are adaptable, and they adapt to efforts to control information in ways that frustrate those controls.
It does not take much sophistication to circumvent official or quasi-official efforts to control discourse. Information travelled quite effectively before the advent of information technologies. It does not take technical expertise to convey innuendo through the technique of double entendre, for example. Steganography is the process of concealing a message within another message or image. More commonly, ideas leak out into the wider society simply because humans have social instincts that make them prone to communicate interesting ideas to others, regardless of institutional assessment of those ideas. The institutions referenced here are those such as government, corporations and academic organizations.
Ultimately, it is the content of an idea that determines whether it will spread in a society. Weak ideas may spread with the help of large and powerful organizations, but this does not make the ideas influential. Strong ideas will spread due to the influence they have on the people who hold them, and regardless of efforts to suppress them.
Suppression of ideas through censorship or other means is destined to fail if the ideas involved have value. Suppression of ideas requires constant energy that drains the organizations and institutions that attempts such suppression. The countless number of ways that ideas may be disseminated requires constant innovation and increasingly complex process to manage information, until the enterprise collapses under its own weight. More significantly, the efforts of a particular institution to manage ideas inevitably changes the institution doing so. Eventually Twitter, for example, becomes an echo chamber and not a valuable means of serious discourse.
Intelligent people know that efforts to suppress ideas are likely to fail over the long term, so one may reasonably ask the second question posed above: what are the motivations for such attempts? The obvious answer, that such efforts are undertaken to advance a political agenda, does not account for the historical futility of such efforts. While political manipulation certainly explains a great deal of information regulation, there are likely other motivations involved.
One of the sub-chapters of Eric Hoffer's book The True Believer is headed "Make-Believe." Hoffer stated
In the practice of mass movements, make-believe plays perhaps a more enduring role than any other factor. When faith and the power to persuade or coerce are gone, make-believe lingers on.
Hoffer's concept of make-believe is nearly identical to Georges Sorel's idea of Myth, and the more contemporary journalistic malady of "narrative." Make-believe, or play-acting or pretense is an innate human trait. It is the basis of much of the play that children engage in as they are exposed to and adapt to the world. It is how they practice growing up. Hoffer argued that make-believe was an important factor in preparing soldiers for the killing and dying associated with warfare, whatever its cause. Alfred Rosenberg's Nazi polemic The Myth of the Twentieth Century indicates the motivating power of make-believe right in the title.
The purpose of much modern censorship and information suppression is not really to eradicate ideas, or even keep them from spreading. It is to stigmatize them so that they do not interfere with the illusions that underlie the make-believe, the myths and narratives that give people the desired image of themselves. They are intended as much to maintain the illusion that the world is a morality play in which only certain people can be the hero as they are to change the world outside of that imagined world of myth and narrative. One reason information is suppressed, or discouraged is not because that information is bad for the world, or detrimental to abstractions such as equality or justice, but rather because it is inconvenient to the fanciful narratives that people create to flatter themselves. Hoffer noted that "Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience..." It is this striving for glory or public approval or even self-image that motivates much of our modern narratives, and is the reason why Facebook and Twitter and the news media and academic institutions are so eager to suppress information. Modern censorship is not so much an attempt to control the political opinions of people as much as it is to control people's moral impressions of other people. This is why affluent, educated, comfortable people approve of it. Censorship and suppression of ideas are more commonly used to maintain a narrative than they are to keep people from becoming aware of certain ideas, which is an almost impossible undertaking.
One should also note Hoffer's observation cited above: Make-believe lingers on when faith and the power to persuade or coerce are gone. Censorship and information suppression are not means to an end. Their relative prevalence among corporations and Universities may simply reflect the waning ability to persuade or coerce.
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