Freedom Of Speech In Chinua Achebe's The Great Gats

“Freedom of speech”. This contentious combination of scribbled visuals and vertebrate vocalizations varying throughout globalized groups of grown gorillas has been an agent of domestic conflict in contemporary countries since the Enlightenment Era. The definition is clear and yet, the interpretations are blurred. A sheltered college freshman enslaved to supposed honor will proclaim themselves to be the great progressive defender of the disenfranchised and demand that the rights of their fellow human beings be wrongfully censored and stripped away in order for the oppressed to feel secure – despite many would-be silenced individuals having played no part in the social persecution of the suppressed. For the eagerly righteous, such a mass weaponization …show more content…
Such an authoritarian practice is taken even further by the safe space activists found in throughout college campuses in America -- with some “activists” weaponizing the shield of safe space to harass and bully individuals who they feel are “making [them] feel unsafe” (Friedersdorf). Those who are less aggressive have gone to extra lengths to feel secure, advocating for “trigger warning” labels on classic works of literature such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for the depictions of racial violence and misogyny, respectively (Lukianoff). However, the problems that the safe space movement attempt to address run much deeper than simply speech, and controlling language should not be the course of action to attempt to solve them. The actions of the political correctness movement are essentially the equivalent of a scientist who publishes a thesis, refuses to submit to a peer-review, but still somehow expects the scientific community to accept their claims as valid. The protesting and silencing of public speakers with disagreeing viewpoints at college campuses have even been publicly criticized by Barack Obama as a sort of “coddling” (Byrnes). The adults who will one day lead our nation, the best of my generation, will be …show more content…
When moral subjectivism, Kantianism, and utilitarianism all fail to logically support the arguments of both the insecure social activist, and the illiterate constitutionalist, the two groups of language-prohibitionists can turn to moral egoism. While greed and selfishness may not be an effective argument, such egotistical logic is one of the few excuses these weaponizers of language have