From “The Importance of Living” Chapter ‘On Playful Curiosity’
By Lin Yutang (written in 1937)
“It is for this reason that I hate censors and all agencies and forms of government that try to control our thought. I cannot but believe that such a censor or such a ruler is wilfully or unintentionally insulting human intelligence. If the liberty of though is the highest activity of the human mind, the the suppression of that liberty must be the most degrading to us as human beings. Euripides defined the slave as a main who has lost this liberty of thought or opinion. Every autocracy is a factory for turning out gorgeous Euripidean slaves. Don’t we have fine examples of them, East and West, in the twentieth century and at the very home of culture? Ever autocratic government, no matter in what form, therefore, is intellectually retrograde. (retrograde:” Moving backward; having a backward motion or direction; retreating”)
We have seen it in the Middle Ages in general, and in the Spanish Inquisition in particular. Short sighted politicians or clergymen may think that uniformity of beliefs and thought contributes toward peace and order, but historically the consequence is always depressing and degrading to the human character. Such autocrats must have a great contempt for the people in general when they do not confine themselves to ordering a nation’s external conduct, but proceed also to regiment the people’s inner thoughts and beliefs. They have a naive assurance that human minds will put up with this uniformity and that they will like or dislike a book or a concerto or a moving picture exactly as the official propagandist or chief of publicity bureau tells them to. Every autocratic government has tried to confuse literature with propaganda, art with politics, anthropology with patriotism and religion with worship of the living leader.
It simply can’t be done, and if the controllers of thought go too far in running against human nature itself, they are thereby sowing the seeds of their downfall. As Mencius* put it, ‘if the ruler considers the people as blades of grass, then the people will consider there ruler asa robber or enemy’. There is no greater robber in the world than he who robs us of our liberty of thought. Deprived of that, we might as well go down on all fours, the the whole biped experiment of walking on two legs a mistake, and revert to our earlier posture of at least some 30,000 years ago.
In Mencian terms, therefore, the people will resent this robber as much as the latter despises the people, and exactly in the same proportion. The more the robber takes away, the more the people hate him. And as nothing is so precious and personal and intimate as our intellectual, moral or religious beliefs, no greater hatred can be aroused in us than by the man who deprives us of the right to believe what we believe. But such short-sighted stupidity is natural in an autocrat, because I believe such autocrats are always intellectually retrograde. And the resilience of human character and unconquerable liberty of the human conscience always spring back and hit the autocrat with a vengeance.”
* Mencius was a Chinese Confucian philosopher who lived in the 4th century BCE. He was a prominent student of Confucius and is considered one of the most important Confucian philosophers after Confucius himself.