Greg Lukianoff

I think that for those of us who have devoted our lives to freedom of speech, one thing that we are into, whether we know it or not, is epistemology, the study and philosophy of knowledge.

Freedom speech has lots of moral and philosophical dimensions, but from a pragmatic standpoint, it is necessary because we're creatures of incredibly limited knowledge.

We are incredibly self-deceiving.

I always love the fact that Yuval Harari refers to the Enlightenment as the discovery of ignorance.

Because that's exactly what it was.

It was suddenly being like, wow, hold on a second.

All this incredibly interesting folk wisdom we got, which, by the way, can be surprisingly reliable here and there, when you start testing a lot of it,

is nonsense, and it doesn't hold up.

Even our ideas about the way things fall, as Galileo established, like even our intuitions, they're just wrong.

And so a lot of the early history of freedom of speech, it was happening at the same time as sort of the scientific revolution.

So a lot of the early debates about freedom of speech were tied in.

So certainly Galileo – I always point out like Kepler was probably like the even more radical idea that there weren't even perfect spheres.

But at the same time, largely because of the invention of the printing press, you also had all these political developments and –

I always talk about Jan Hus from the – a famous Czech hero who was burned at the stake and I think in 1419.

But he was basically Luther before the printing press.

Before Luther could get his word out, he didn't stand a chance and that was exactly what Jan Hus was.

But a century later, thanks to the printing press –

Everyone could know what Luther thought, and boy, did they.

But it led to, of course, this completely crazy, hyper-disrupted period in European history.

Sure.