Investor and podcaster Eric Weinstein recently stated that free speech is overrated. While he claims to support the First Amendment, he argues that free speech alone is not sufficient to combat bad ideas. As he puts it, “This whole concept of the marketplace of ideas doesn’t really work, because markets have market failures, and very adaptive dangerous ideas cannot simply be refuted by better ideas.”
He called the belief that good ideas consistently defeat bad ones in the marketplace of ideas a “liberal fantasy.” To truly drive bad ideas out of public discourse, he argues, we must return to the practice of “shunning” people with bad ideas.
There Are Two Major Problems With the Idea of Shunning People With Wrong Ideas
First, the people who get shunned are not always those with dangerous or terrible ideas. Far more often, they’re simply the ones whose ideas are currently unpopular. In the 1950s, the influential White Citizens’ Councils shunned supporters of civil rights for Black Americans, and their businesses were blacklisted. In the 1960s, gay rights advocates were shunned. In the madness of 2020, nearly anyone who didn’t vocally support the Black Lives Matter movement or the ideology of “social justice fundamentalism” (a great term by Tim Urban for wokeism) risked friendships, social status, and even their livelihood.
Shunning is often wielded by those who hold cultural power; in such cases, it becomes a tool not for punishing those with bad ideas, but for punishing those whose ideas are simply out of fashion. As blogger and gay rights activist Andrew Sullivan writes:
“This morning I got a message from a friend I’ve known for over thirty years informing me not to speak to him or interact in any way if our paths cross in Provincetown this summer. Shunning and ostracism are now built into the LGBTQ+ movement.”
Second, when we shun people, we rob them of the best opportunity to learn why their ideas are wrong. This is especially true for people who harbor bigotry against an outgroup — whether Jews, Black Americans, or Republicans. The most effective way to help such individuals shed their prejudices is not to exclude them from society, but to create conditions for them to meet and befriend those they’re prejudiced against.
Psychologists call this the intergroup contact theory, and it works incredibly well. As Mónica Guzmán, a senior fellow at Braver Angels (a nonprofit focused on reducing polarization between political groups), writes in her book “I Never Thought of It That Way”:
“Research consistently shows that the more you spend time with people from groups you see as ‘different,’ the less prejudice you’ll feel toward them. In fact, a meta-analysis of 515 studies found that personal conversations with someone from an outgroup reduced prejudice in 94 percent of cases.”
So If We Can’t Talk People Out of Their Bad Ideas, What Can We Do?
Is there anything that can prevent bad ideas from taking over our society?
Yes.
Contrary to Weinstein’s claim that the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work, the truth is that good ideas consistently win out over bad ones.
Weinstein’s claim that we can’t rely on good ideas to disprove dangerous ones would likely surprise Martin Luther King Jr. King didn’t build his movement by wielding cultural power to silence his enemies or by using government authority to suppress their voices. That would’ve been impossible — political and cultural power at the time was firmly in the hands of his opponents.
Instead, King used a weapon far stronger than any they had: free speech. He spoke out. He debated white supremacists and the “moderate” white Americans who claimed to support his goals but thought his timing was wrong. He wrote books. He marched and protested. King and his colleagues used free speech over and over to refute the dangerous ideas of the Jim Crow era and to change the hearts and minds of an entire generation.
In fact, King’s opponents had to resort to social and governmental coercion when they couldn’t refute his arguments in the marketplace of ideas. During the Montgomery bus boycott, Black drivers were arrested on trumped-up charges to prevent them from supporting the boycott. In Stride Toward Freedom, King writes that White Citizens’ Councils“undertook open economic reprisals against white people who dared to protest, and the aim of their boycotts was not only to intimidate their victims but to destroy them if possible.” City authorities sought injunctions to prevent King and his supporters from engaging in lawful protests.
King’s reliance on free speech — and his opponents’ reliance on intimidation and coercion — reveal a central truth about the marketplace of ideas:
In a free market, good ideas defeat bad or dangerous ones.
As the great Enlightenment thinker John Milton wrote in Areopagitica:
“Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?”
In other words: When truth and falsehood are allowed to compete freely and openly, truth ultimately prevails.
Why Weinstein Might Be Discouraged Now
In some ways, it’s not surprising that Weinstein is making this argument now. He recently noted that “X/Twitter has become incredibly antisemitic.” He made his comments about the marketplace of ideas in the context of people celebrating Hamas’s brutal attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023.
He may also have been thinking about the past few years. Society has just gone through a decade of the Great Awokening, during which all sorts of absurd ideas became mainstream. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote in 2022:
“The past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid.”
If we look only at the short term, it certainly can seem like the marketplace of ideas has failed us. But that would be a mistake.
The Virtue of Liberalism Is Long-Term Results
The virtue of liberalism — including epistemic liberalism (the marketplace of ideas), political liberalism (democracy), and economic liberalism (the free market) — is not that it produces perfect results in the short term. It’s that it produces excellent results in the long run.
Opposing the marketplace of ideas because society has recently been infected with terrible ideas is like opposing democracy because a bad candidate won an election. It’s like opposing capitalism because Sam Bankman-Fried made a fortune before getting caught.
If we want to judge the marketplace of ideas, the right question is not:
Can bad ideas sometimes gain traction?
The right question is:
Over the long term, does the marketplace of ideas reliably push out bad ideas and replace them with better ones?
The answer is an unequivocal yes.
As Jonathan Rauch documents in The Kindly Inquisitors, gay rights activists used free speech to poke holes in homophobic arguments and fight for the dignity of LGBT Americans.
We saw this with the civil rights movement.
We saw it with women’s suffrage.
We’ve seen it in science and medicine:
The reason we treat headaches with Advil instead of leeches, and the reason we know the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way around, is that true and accurate ideas have eventually displaced false ones.
Conclusion
The marketplace of ideas is one of the great engines by which society becomes better tomorrow than it is today.
Contrary to Weinstein’s argument, the best way to defeat bad and dangerous ideas is with good ones.
Author: Julian Adorney, founder of the Heal the West movement
Originally published by The Daily Economy
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