Heresies in a Secular World

The list of opinions that are forbidden has been steadily increasing. Everywhere in the world. Paul Graham is only half-joking when he calls such opinions as “heresies”. In the West, while you won’t burnt at the stake anymore, such opinions sure can get you fired from your job:

“There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for. Those doing the firing don't use the word "heresy" to describe them, but structurally they're equivalent. Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done.”

 

Graham points out the increasing number of “x-ist” words getting thrown around (e.g. sexist). He asks rhetorically:

“Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth.”

Obviously, the answer is Yes. Several statements can be x-ist and true. That becomes very clear when we see the other pattern:

“The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.”

(It very easy to find examples of this in both the left and the right).

 

Another key difference, writes Graham, between heresies and other opinions (right, wrong or obnoxious) is that:

“The public expression of them (heretical statements) outweighs everything else the speaker has done… You could have spent the last ten years saving children's lives, but if you express certain opinions, you're automatically fired.”

In that respect (a single act is all that is evaluated), he says, heresies and like a crime (if you kill someone, it doesn’t matters what good things you might have done in your life):

“A heresy is an opinion whose expression is treated like a crime — one that makes some people feel not merely that you're mistaken, but that you should be punished. Indeed, their desire to see you punished is often stronger than it would be if you'd committed an actual crime.”

 

It's so ironical that an “antiquated-sounding religious concept (has) come back in a secular form”. This trend, for now, is increasingly true in the left and the right, the East and the West.