Investor and podcaster Eric Weinstein recently argued that free speech is overrated. While supporting the idea of the First Amendment, he said that free speech alone was insufficient to combat bad ideas. As he put it, “This whole concept of the marketplace of ideas doesn’t actually work because marketplaces have market failures and very fit dangerous ideas can’t be simply rebutted by better ideas.” He called the notion that good ideas consistently beat out bad ideas in the marketplace of ideas a “liberal fantasy.” To truly drive bad ideas out of the public square, he says, we need to get back to “shunning” people with bad ideas.
There are two big problems with the notion of shunning people who hold the wrong ideas.
For one thing, the people who are shunned aren’t always the ones with dangerous or awful ideas. Far more often, they’re just the ones whose ideas are currently unpopular. In the 1950s, supporters of civil rights for black Americans were shunned and had their businesses blacklisted by the influential White Citizens’ Councils. In the 1960s, supporters of gay rights were shunned. In the madness of 2020, virtually anyone who didn’t vocally support Black Lives Matter and “Social Justice Fundamentalism” (Tim Urban’s excellent term for wokeism) risked their friendships, their social standing, and their livelihoods. Shunning is often done by those who wield cultural power; in such instances, it is a tool, not for punishing people with bad ideas, but for punishing people whose ideas are not currently in vogue. As blogger and gay rights activist Andrew Sullivan writes, “Got a text this morning from a friend of over thirty years informing me not to interact with him in any way if our paths cross in Provincetown this summer, as they usually do. Shunning and ostracism are integral to the LGBTQ+ movement.”
The second big problem with shunning is that, when we shun people, we rob them of the best opportunity to learn why their ideas are wrong. This is especially true of people who harbor bigotry towards a certain out-group, be it Jewish people or black Americans or Republicans. The most effective way to help these people let go of their prejudice is not to socially ostracize them, but to create conditions for them to meet and befriend those they are prejudiced against.
Psychologists call this “intergroup contact theory” and it works extremely well. As Mónica Guzmán (senior fellow at Braver Angels, a national nonprofit that focuses on reducing prejudice between political groups) writes in her book I Never Thought of It That Way:
“Research keeps showing us that the more you mingle with people in your ‘otherized’ out-groups, the less prejudice you’ll feel against them. In fact, a study of 515 other studies found that chatting in person with someone from an out-group cut down prejudice 94 percent of the time.”
So if we can’t shun people out of their bad ideas, is there something else that can stop bad ideas from taking hold of our society? Yes. Contra Weinstein’s claim that the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work, the truth is that good ideas consistently beat out bad ideas.
Weinstein’s notion that good ideas cannot be relied on to rebut dangerous ideas would come as a surprise to Martin Luther King Jr. King didn’t build his movement by using cultural power to shun his enemies, or by using governmental power to limit their ability to speak against him. That would have been impossible, since the political and cultural power was concentrated in the hands of his enemies at the time. Instead, King used a weapon mightier than either of these: freedom of speech. He spoke up. He debated white supremacists and more ‘moderate’ whites who claimed to support his goals but said that King’s timing was wrong. He wrote books. He marched and protested. Over and over again, he and his fellows leveraged freedom of speech to rebut the dangerous ideas of Jim Crow and to change the hearts and minds of an entire generation.
Indeed, it was King’s opponents who had to resort to exerting social and governmental pressure when they could not rebut King’s arguments in the marketplace of ideas. During the Montgomery bus boycott, black drivers were arrested on trumped-up charges so that they wouldn’t be able to help with the boycott. In Stride Toward Freedom, King writes that White Citizens’ Councils “took open economic reprisals against whites who dared to protest their defiance of the law, and the aim of their boycotts was not merely to impress their victims but to destroy them if possible.” City governments sought injunctions to stop King and his supporters from engaging in lawful protest.
Both 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 marketplace, good ideas beat out bad or dangerous ideas as a matter of course. As the great Enlightenment thinker John Milton wrote in Areopagitica:
“And 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. Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing.”
Or to put it another way: when truth and falsehood are allowed to battle in a free and open marketplace of ideas, truth ultimately wins.
It’s in some ways not surprising that Weinstein is making his argument now. Weinstein recently noted that “X/Twitter has become unbelievably anti-Semitic.” He made his comments about the marketplace of ideas in the context of people who cheered Hamas’ brutal October 7, 2023 attack on Israeli civilians.
He also may have made his comments with the past several years in mind. Our society just dealt with a decade of the Great Awokening, during which all kinds of ridiculous ideas became ascendant. As social psychologist Jon Haidt wrote in 2022, “the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid.” If we restrict our analysis to the short-term, it can certainly look like the marketplace of ideas has failed us.
But that’s a mistake. The virtue of philosophical liberalism (including epistemic liberalism, or the marketplace of ideas; political liberalism, or democracy; and economic liberalism, or capitalism) isn’t that it produces perfect outcomes in the short-term, but that it produces excellent outcomes in the long-term.
Opposing the marketplace of ideas because the past 10 years our society has been gripped by some truly awful notions is like opposing democracy because a bad candidate won an election. It’s akin to opposing capitalism because Sam Bankman-Fried made a bunch of money before he was caught.
If we want to judge the marketplace of ideas, the real question isn’t whether bad ideas can gain a foothold for a time. The real question is: in the long-term, does the marketplace of ideas consistently and reliably crowd out bad ideas and replace them with better ones?
The answer to that question is unequivocally ‘yes.’ As Jonathan Rauch documents in Kindly Inquisitors, advocates for gay rights used free speech to poke holes in homophobic arguments and fight for the dignity of LGBT Americans. We’ve seen it with the civil rights movement. We’ve seen it with women’s suffrage. We’ve seen it in science and medicine, too: the reason that we now treat headaches with Advil rather than leeches, and the reason that we now know that the Earth orbits around the sun rather than vice versa, is because more true ideas crowded out less true ideas.
The marketplace of ideas is one of the great vehicles by which our society becomes better tomorrow than it is today. Contrary to Weinstein’s argument, the best way to rebut bad and dangerous ideas is with good ideas.