Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech | Lex Fridman Podcast #397

If the goal is the project of human knowledge, which is to know the world as it is, you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think, and what people really think is an incredibly important fact to know. So every time you're actually saying, "You can't say that," you're actually depriving yourself of the knowledge of what people really think. You're causing, uh, w- what Timur Kuran, who's, who's on our board of advisors, calls preference falsification. Um, you end up with an inaccurate picture of the world, which by the way, in a lot of cases, um, b- because there are activists who want to restrict more speech, they actually tend to think that people are more prejudiced than they might be. And actually, one very real practical way it makes things worse is when you censor people, it doesn't change their opinion. It just encourages them to not share it with people who will get them in trouble. So it leads them to talk to people who they already agree with, and group polarization takes off.

The following is a conversation with Greg Lukianoff, free speech advocate, First Amendment attorney, president and CEO of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and he's the author of Unleashing Liberty, co-author with Jonathan Haidt of Coddling of the American Mind, and co-author with Rikki Schlott of a new book coming out in October, that you should definitely pre-order now, called The Canceling of the American Mind, which is a definitive accounting of the history, present, and future of cancel culture, a term used and overused in public discourse, but rarely studied and understood with the depth and rigor that Greg and Rikki do in this book and, in part, in this conversation. Freedom of speech is important, especially on college campuses, the very place that should serve as the battleground of ideas, including weird and controversial ones, that should encourage bold risk-taking, not conformity. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now, dear friends, here's Greg Lukianoff. Let's start with the big question. What is cancel culture? Now, you've said that you don't like the term as it's been, uh, quote, "dragged through the mud and abused endlessly by a whole host of controversial figures." Nevertheless, we have the term. What is it?

Cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns, especially successful campaigns, starting around 2014 to get people fired, expelled, deplatformed, et cetera, um, for speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment. Um, and I say would be protected because we're talking about circumstances in which, um, it isn't necessarily where the First Amendment applies. But what I mean is, like, as an analog to, uh, say, things you couldn't lose your job as a public employee for, um, and also the climate of fear that's resulted from, uh, uh, from that phenomena, the fact that you can lose your job for having the wrong opinion. And it wasn't subtle that this, there was an uptick in this, particularly on, uh, on campus around 2014. Um, Jon Ronson wrote a book called So You've Been Publicly Shamed that came out in 2015, already documenting this phenomena. I wrote a book called Freedom From Speech in 2014 and, and but in, but it really was in 2017 when you started seeing this be directed at professors and th- when it comes to the number of professors that we've seen, you know, be, be targeted and lose their jobs, I've been doing this for 22 years and I've seen nothing like it.