Brain Speech

Free speech is literally in our heads:

A classic test of autistic cognition is the pencil-in-the-sweet-tube test. The child is shown a tube of sweets and asked what he (and it is more likely to be a he by at least four to one) thinks is inside. He’s disappointed to discover that rather than the sweets he expected, the tube contains pencils. But now he is asked what another child who had not been shown the contents would think and typically replies, “Pencils!” Normal children can pass this test from about age four and realise that another child would think as they did that the tube contained sweets. One of my own sons, aged about three, had been cautioned by me not to tell his mother that he had bought her a present the day before her birthday. But the moment he heard her coming into the house, he rushed up to her and exclaimed, “Mummy, I mustn’t tell you that I have bought you a present!” Typically for his age and for autistics much older, he had failed what is known as a test of false belief: the ability to realise that others may not know what you know — or in this case, need to be kept in ignorance of it. If you think about it, thought-policing — and indeed all dogmatic intolerance of differing points of view — amounts to an autistic-like denial of what the agent regards as others’ false beliefs. Indeed, leading authorities on Asperger’s syndrome comment that some high-functioning autistics go into so-called “God mode” and become “an omnipotent person who never makes a mistake, cannot be wrong and whose intelligence must be worshipped” (see T. Attwood, The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome). Clearly though, this cuts both ways, and people who routinely are in ‘God mode’ where others’ speech and beliefs are concerned could be seen as acting like autistics, with thought-policing as an institutionalised deficit in appreciation of false belief.

Censorship is literally a mental condition...