Children are hounded with insults until they suicide. We have a president who posts and reposts obscenities. We see long term public servants reduced to a single insulting sentence of dismissal from leadership at the highest levels in government. We are witnessing forms of expression that would have gotten anyone fired from their jobs for gross misconduct not ten years ago. Domestic violence numbers escalate while violent crimes drop. Freedom of Speech is a phrase that no longer contains the scope of expression possible in the 21st century. How could a group of men writing a constitution in long hand with quills quite comprehend where things were heading in this age? Time for the Next Democracy and the citizen virtues that must accompany it. The first virtue we must re-articulate to meet the present day challenges is Freedom of Speech.

Can speech be a crime? Can other related forms of personal expression be criminal? Is it still wrong to lie? In the future, when will deceptive expressions of AI become wrong and possibly criminal. AI deception is three dimensional and becoming inseparable from reality. Finally, is there a reality outside of media and the internet? For more and more people the basis for balance of discerning what’s real has shifted into this planet’s ultimate shape shifter: the internet. How do we hold ourselves as a modern culture responsible for how we express ourselves? 

A modest proposal for good

The shifting of the basic human right from Freedom of Speech to Freedom of Expression responds to the massive newly developed range of communicaitons now available to the individual to do either good or harm in their personal expressions including speech. The expanded base of this virtue declares whatever good or harm comes from your expressions in whatever medium including speech is your responsibility. Expression can be healing and it also can be a lethal weapon. In this 21st century we are seeing lethal expressions in near epidemic levels if you count the people who are reduced to clinical and suicidal depression by chronic toxic expressions of dismissal and insult. Our own vice president recently was called out for trying to defend the Young Republican’s potentially lethal communications on the internet as a young person’s joke. I am pretty sure this devout Christian would have a much different response in his own home if his children expressed such dangerous aggression. Naming Freedom of Expression and setting aside Freedom of Speech takes an old, stuck, dangerously misinterpreted virtue back to the ground level for redefinition. That would be good providing we take some time to examine our national ‘sense of good’ to guide the process of clarification. Welcome to the 21st Century Next Democracy.

To Read this Projects short proposed Preamble to the New Next Democracy click here: https://thegooddecision.org/your-sense-of-democracy/