Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…If you’re saying that something is or is not economics, “Well, you can say everything’s economics, and therefore I want to talk about poetry.” There’d be some line drawing exercise in there, but let’s say at once you decide to open up to poetry even, it’s a big difference between saying, “Now, we’re open to poetry, but you can’t say Dante was bad. That’s a forbidden opinion now officially in this otherwise open forum.” That would immediately at an intuitive level strike people as a bigger problem than just saying that poetry isn’t economics. I mean, that intuitive level that you speak to, I hope that all of us have that basic intuition when a line is crossed. It’s the same thing for pornography when you see it. I think there’s the same level of intuition that should be applied across the board here. It’s when that intuition becomes deformed by whatever forces of society, that’s when it starts to feel like censorship. I mean, people find it a different thing if someone loses their job simply for their political opinion, even if that employer has every right in the world to fire you, I think Americans should still be like, “Well, it’s true. They have every right in the world, and I’m not making a legal case that maybe you shouldn’t fire someone for their political opinion.” Think that through, what kind of society do we want to live in? It’s been funny watching, and I point this out, yes, I will defend businesses’ First Amendment rights of association to be able to have the legal right to decide who works for them. From a moral or philosophical matter, if you think through the implications of if every business in America becomes an expressive association in addition to being a profit maximizing organization, that would be a disaster for democracy. You would end up in a situation where people would actually be saying to themselves, “I don’t think I can actually say what I really think and still believe I can keep my job.” That’s where I was worried I felt like we were headed because a lot of the initial response to people getting canceled was very simply, “Oh, but they have the right to get rid of this person.” That’s the beginning and end of the discussion. I thought that was a dodge. I thought that wasn’t actually a very serious way that if you care about both the First Amendment and freedom of speech of thinking it through.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.