A troubling new piece of legislation continues to make its way through the British parliament. Dubbed the “Banter Bill,” the Employment Rights Bill would criminalize any speech that might be considered offensive by any passerby.
As Dominic Green reports for The Free Press, under this proposed law, “Britons can be prosecuted for a remark that a worker in a public space overhears and finds insulting.” Under this standard, whether a certain sentiment (for instance, that Britain should reduce immigration) is legal will now depend on whether someone in the vicinity takes offense.
Unfortunately, this new subjective standard for what types of speech are allowed isn’t restricted to Great Britain. In the United States, more and more states are experimenting with a similar system. The Washington Free Beacon reports that eight states have set up “bias-response hotlines” which citizens are encouraged to call if they hear a comment — from a neighbor, coworker, or even passersby on the street — that they consider to be offensive. As Oregon says of their hotline, if you see or hear someone “creating racist images/drawings; mocking someone with a disability; or telling or sharing offensive ‘jokes’ about someone’s identity” they want to hear about it.
For examples of how absurd this can all get, in the United Kingdom, one man was arrested for praying silently in his apartment because a passerby found his praying offensive. In Oregon, a bias response incident was logged when a reporter from the Free Beacon, seeking to test how far this new Orwellian system would go, called to complain that after a dispute with their neighbor about the situation in Gaza, their neighbor had started flying an Israeli flag.
To be clear, the system in the United States, while bad, isn’t nearly as draconian as the system in Europe. In the United States, offensive jokes and racist memes are still legal, and it’s not clear what (if anything) the state has the power to do to people accused of making biased statements. Nonetheless, both systems represent a kind of snitch network: a state-based system that encourages citizens to run to the authorities any time they hear someone say something that they find offensive or disagreeable.
One of the biggest problems with these types of snitch networks is that they threaten to make us worse people.
For one thing, these networks encourage us to act like schoolchildren running to tattle on a classmate. “If you see something, say something” is awful advice when what you see is simply people praying silently or hanging flags with which you may disagree. Over time, networks like these threaten to change our culture from a “dignity culture” into what sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning call a “victimhood culture.”
Here’s how Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff describe dignity culture in their book The Coddling of the American Mind:
In an optimally functioning dignity culture, people are assumed to have dignity and worth regardless of what others think of them, so they are not expected to react too strongly to minor slights…People are expected to have enough self-control to shrug off irritations, slights, and minor conflicts as they pursue their own projects. For larger conflicts or violations of one’s rights, there are reliable legal or administrative remedies, but it would be undignified to call for such help for small matters, which one should be able to resolve on one’s own.
By contrast, Campbell and Manning describe “victimhood culture” as one in which people “display high sensitivity to slights,” “have a tendency to handle conflicts through complaints to third parties,” and “seek to cultivate an image of being victims who deserve assistance.”
Dignity cultures cultivate emotionally healthy responses and encourage people to develop the emotional resilience necessary to cope with life. Victimhood cultures encourage us to see oppression everywhere, to become paranoid, and to see our fellow citizens as possible threats to be reported.
Snitch networks encourage the callers to see themselves as victims. When the reporter from the Free Beacon called to complain about the Israeli flag, the operator suggested that he could “apply for taxpayer-funded therapy through the state’s Crime Victims Compensation Program, which covers counseling costs for bias incidents as well as crimes.” Just to reiterate how insane that is: this is a state government, telling a citizen that he might want to seek therapy because his neighbor was flying an Israeli flag.
This has the potential to do profound psychological damage. The truth is that, as humans, we more or less rise or fall to the standard to which others hold us. If people around us (especially people we endow with authority and trust, such as the operator of a government-sponsored hotline that we’re calling) tell us that we’re so fragile that we might need to seek therapy after seeing a flag, then we’re liable to believe them. We might even go to therapy, which can further reify our thin-skinnedness and reactivity. That, in turn, can make us feel even more vulnerable the next time that we hear or see something that we find uncomfortable, which can encourage us to start the vicious cycle all over again.
As the old saying goes: whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re right. To put a psychological spin on it: whether you believe you are strong and capable enough to see an Israeli flag (or a man silently praying) and then go on with your day, or you believe that you’re so fragile that said sight necessitates a call to a government agency and possibly therapy, you’re right.
These snitch networks can also encourage catastrophizing in the kinds of people who use them. When the Free Beacon reporter called to report that their neighbor had begun flying an Israeli flag, the operator called it a “warning sign” and suggested that the caller consider installing security cameras in case the situation “escalates.” When the Free Beacon called again, this time posing as a Jewish man whose neighbor had hung a sign that said “From the River to the Sea,” the operator responded by offering to “talk about a safety plan” if the caller didn’t “feel safe.” “We have a small pot of money that can be used to purchase security cameras, locks, and other types of security measures,” the operator said.
But when people we trust encourage us to catastrophize, we can start to see threats all around us. When state operatives tell us that we should install security cameras in case our neighbors take hostile action, we start to see those neighbors as a threat — even if they’re actually completely benign. The whole system is a path to anxiety and paranoia.
These snitch networks threaten to make us more fragile. Instead of calling the authorities every time we see someone say something that we consider to be offensive, perhaps a healthier approach would be to remind ourselves of that old adage about sticks and stones.
These snitch networks are also a good reminder of what happens when our government is no longer limited.
Limited government encourages its citizens to act like adults, because there’s not always an authority figure hovering nearby to resolve any conflict. By contrast, one of the bigger psychological dangers of a totalitarian government is that it encourages its citizens to act like children.