Censorship– an act that prohibits our self-expression. There are two types of censorship, a self imposed censorship and a legally binding censorship- both of which are affected by society.
Self imposed censorship can be for many reasons yet in this instance, I will attribute this reason to society’s acceptable norms. After all, our society is not a particularly inviting one, we are each prejudiced in our own right– a right that becomes meshed together as a whole, becoming unwritten law.
When a person tries to express themselves in a way that clashes with these norms, they are shunned– treated like outcasts and discriminated against until they renounce that expression. It’s akin to a light switch– only two options, for even those who wish to dissent against this unwritten law will not openly rebel until they become a majority.
They will patiently wait– if one generation is not enough, then they will pass this torch onto the next generation before they return to the earth. In the end, these norms are only burnt long after the stigmatized individuals’ death.
Yet in the advent of today’s society, our individual norms can no longer form this unwritten law– for each norm is in conflict with another, thus creating a vortex in the place of this unwritten law that truly allows others to express themselves freely.
But I still see that there are people that still censor themselves out of a fear that they will be held accountable to this unwritten law. They forget that this law’s uniformity is no longer assured, its scope becoming localized with cyberspace being governed by private entities.
While this unwritten law no longer exists, there is an innate one that each human can find common ground on– common sense. That is the very ground needed for a person to express themselves– anchoring themselves to reality.
I’ve engaged in self-censorship in the past regarding certain topics– I know that once I make my identity visible, I will most certainly regret writing about such topics, so I’d rather save myself the anguish from having to hide my work by never writing it in the first place. However, another factor is to avoid the censorship imposed by stature.
Legal censorship is an extension of the common ground that I previously established. However, this extension is influenced by the government’s interpretation of the First Amendment as they believe themselves to be the stewards of the people– a notion that is becoming increasingly unpopular due to the outsized effect of ideologies on the government.
Unlike the unwritten law that I mentioned earlier, this censorship is written and is enforced with an ironclad nature provided that you have not made any generous donations to the government or to one of its officials. As the government’s restriction is broad in its nature to protect the people from themselves, its enforcement is usually iron-clad in its nature– for criminal violations, not civil violations.
So while a certain type of expression may be illegal in nature– as long as this speech is not within the Government’s narrow exception to the First Amendment, the burden of proof is shifted to the victim as this expression is now civil in its aspect.
This is where the inequality created by a capitalist society comes into play– as oftentimes wealth becomes a deciding factor in litigation. It becomes a method of protecting the “Victim” and Aggressor from the consequences of their speech as the common man is forced to suffer this injustice.
In all honesty, I don’t mind being bound in such chains– as I fear that my tendencies may harm the hearts of others in an attempt to release the inhibitions placed within my heart.
It’s a matter of perspective– the lens in which you view life, being the basis of your thoughts. However, we are not limited to a single perspective– a trait that has only served to burden my conscience further, as not only do I have to align my actions with my own perspective, I must also consider the perspectives of others.
Even then, their so-called perspectives are merely approximations that I made based on the information I have of them– meaning that the perspective that I consider could potentially not be their actual perspective. The only true way for me to claim that I see the perspectives of others is if I became omniscient– an imaginary curse wrapped in the coating of a blessing.
Yet that is merely my thoughts– the standards of perspectives being more lax than my own standards, standards that take up most of my thoughts as I become lost in considering possibilities– most of them being irreconcilable with reality, a single action determining the fruition of such a possibility.
With an abundance of lenses to look at the world– it is only natural for contradiction to occur within ourselves and for us to engage in self-conflict. An action that a person makes can have multiple explanations with or without mutual exclusiveness– explanations that I crave to find out as I fear that my actions may affect others negatively.
It’s a fear that I have yet to conclude on whether it has been realised or not– for my question in turn could worsen this effect or perhaps create a misunderstanding and thus manifest my fears into reality with the placebo effect as its guiding principle.
Yet within this piece, there is a contradiction that I must address and resolve– the contradiction of my identity. For I desire to claim this work under my own name yet irrationally fear the consequences of doing so. The benefits and negatives of revealing my identity are very much subjective to the lens used to perceive this issue.
If I claim my writing, then it’ll be recognized as my own work and I see that if I link my identity to my writing, then my writing will be recognized as my own creation. As a result of this, my thoughts would accrue the potential to be discussed further or be criticized– to gain feedback regarding my writing. The connection between these two aspects would become an intertwined one.
However, it would be remiss for me to not account for human nature. By connecting my identity to this, I open myself up to a new avenue of trouble– as I must ensure that my writing is up to standards in regards to the aforementioned censorships and by extension, the policies of the district.
The perception of others will most certainly shift after reading my writings. Speaking of past events, I would also have to recognize and address any past actions that I have committed with this account as my alias.
By introducing the aspect of my writing into the rest of my life, I would disturb this current equilibrium that I had only managed to build up over the course of three months. Yet the disgust that I claim to feel is a term coined by my inability to name it.
However, to continue to use an alias is cowardice, as there is no legitimate reason for me to be afraid of claiming my writing. I will not be ambiguous regarding this topic as even a single negative that I have mentioned has more than enough possibilities for me to not predict and make plans for– thus making my fears irrelevant as they will manifest themselves in different ways even if I choose to conceal myself.
I had already understood at the very beginning of the mantle and responsibilities that I had taken up when I began my writing. I have written about the lack of conviction amongst my generation. But I see that I have contradicted myself– that I have not crystallized my conviction, thus contradicting my own words. I am a hypocrite in this regard and other regards. So be it. It is my obligation to discover and to remedy these contradictions.
The first being one of identity. I’ve decided that I will link my identity to my writing. However I must first set up a condition for me to do so– one that will serve as a pretext to act as a foil. After all, I must maintain propriety– even while I burn with this desire to finally claim my work. Thus this condition cannot be one that is too easy for me to fulfill but at the same time, it can not be too difficult, as I have no intent on being swallowed by this self-inflicted flame.
Perhaps I could use deceit– it would only count as deception in spirit, not of wording. After all, my sincerity remains within these words– a script of my thoughts to be read, a script that I know that few would touch– thus making my words a deception in the sense of spirit. So be it, forget about this troublesome line of thought– for I shall instead claim it in silence.
The absurdism of my thoughts brings me a belated sense of amusement at the intricate net that it created– only for it to evaporate in worthlessness. Moments like these remind me of a saying that’s fallen out of my grace, seldomly being used but now fitting; “Fuck it, we ball.”
It is not as if I have to draft up an elaborate plan when simplicity would suffice.
I’ll just add this account in my public bio, acting as a one-way connection. This way, people’s interest will shift from me to my writing instead of the opposite happening. There is a difference between the two, since I want my writing to be read instead of people looking through my hollow profile.
This account is essentially me writing a book about myself– I still want a level of impartiality so that’s why I’ll make it a one-way connection. A silent soft-launch is the best approach for this.
I may hate this choice later on, but I will not renege it.
The contradiction of my identity is somewhere between superficiality and profundity. There are contradictions whose resolution is far more important– contradictions that make up the structure of my lenses.
Temperance is a virtue that I thought I had. However, it seems that my ideals have poisoned my writing. Even if I am split on two extremes, the fact still remains that my thoughts nor actions were not moderate in its nature. For me to truly gain this virtue, I would need to solve all of my contradictions.
Another contradiction for me is people. I want to know them but also don’t want to know them. It’s fun to learn more about people. But at the same time, I don’t want to ruin this fun by eavesdropping or unnecessarily looking at them– it’s a tasteless and unethical way of playing this game.
So, when there’s no actual reason for me to interact with them, I just cover my ears and ignore them entirely. Yet it seems that I’ll have to change this approach since it worked too well– blinding me to the goodwill of others.
A goodwill that I simply didn’t expect, perhaps because of my assumption that everyone else is like me in how they disassociate with people. It gave a fresh breeze to some of the thoughts that I threw on the shelf and left alone. For starters, I categorize people with the criteria of how much I can tolerate them. In the past, people that I dislike but had to be friends with were considered as school friends.
I hate a lot of people from my past– while their names and faces have faded, the feeling remains. I won’t say something like “let bygones be bygones” since there’s no quarter to be had for such men. But, I am in the present– a fact that I need to remind myself lest I fall back into my past. There’s only friends and those who aren’t– it’s tiring to make nuances all the time so I’ll make a simple black and white side.
I’m a rigid person who operates in a set way, a way that I can’t explain but can understand and alter– drawing conservative lines with a progressive mind. While my mind is flexible, the unconscious habits and lessons instilled to the flesh have hardened my shell. Whenever I do something, I estimate people’s thoughts– a habit that failed me a few times, a habit baked into my soul.
I’m a confused person who sees himself as an acquaintance in the eyes of others– all the while they may think of me as a friend. It’s ironic how I’ve written so much about friendship but can’t even write with certainty that I am viewed as a friend by another person sometimes.
It’s interesting how I’ve managed to disassociate with people by habit rather than it being a conscious choice. I know how to interact with people in theory but deny myself the opportunity to do so by selective ignorance– a combination of awkwardness, isolative thoughts, and by deluding myself into thinking that this is consideration for other people. If I spent the last few years differently, my life would be different and more of my potential could’ve been unearthed instead of being crippled.
But, while I do hate the last few years of my life, I believe that I’ve made it relatively intact compared to what could’ve been me. If I had the choice to redo those last few years, I wouldn’t take it.
After all, my memories are my ego and to lose them is to deny all of the growth that I achieved within those years and potentially replace this version of me that I would loathe.
Memories shape our thoughts on any topic and by extension our ego. That also probably explains my warped self and by extension my weird assortment of skills and thoughts.
While we do collect both good and bad memories over the course of our long life, we have a tendency to better remember the bad memories– ones that define the way we defend ourselves for an entire lifetime.
So while we may look back at such memories and laugh at them, we’re just using laughter as a mechanism to cope with it. It’s a thorough deception that obscures the true nature of those memories, painting over it with a layer of humor.
While our good memories may be plenty, we remember them less since the emotions and aftereffects of those memories are trivial compared to the negative ones. The good memories are cold water while the bad memories are ice– the ice numbing the cold water and making it tasteless.
Bear with me here, when I say good and bad– those words are subjective. While we do share a common definition of those memories, at the same time we have our own lenses to look at those memories– some more tinted with others. It’s as if we are built from the damage we incurred– simply adding on top of the wounds without caring about any sequelae, the tint in our lenses hiding it.
Censorship is a concept that will always be associated with negativity, after all it is the suppression of human expression with moral justification– a justification that waxes and wanes at times, never stable as these morals are also subjective in nature– influenced by a majority, used to suppress a minority.
Oftentimes I agree with this standard, but it seems that this standard has become an inconsistent one, one too easily malleable with the will of a single person– becoming a standard of a single man, condemning others to an unnatural silence.
I find this funny, as this silence is usually one that becomes foreboding in nature– if the people’s voices are silenced, then they will revert back to a universal language– violence. It’s ironic that we are taught to be ignorant in violence when our nations spend much of their budget to specialize in different dialects of this violence.
I’d rather have it so that we have the freedom to say whatever we want– to identify those whose hatred is more broad than mine, the followers of the patron ideology of war crimes. Yet I see that this too will only turn into the second iteration of this problem, a problem that would be even worse than the original as it would essentially make the people themselves the enforcers of this unwritten law– escalating individual conflicts up to a clash of ideology.
Under this new problem, we would partake in a culling on a worse scale than the Salem Trials as a shared hatred towards the group is the only factor that binds people together. Without it, this homogenous group would quickly break down into heterogeneous components and would fight with each other. The massacres that occurred in World War II are an example of this.
So, while censorship is a necessary evil– legal censorship is a lesser evil as the law acts as a check against the cruelty of people that can be seen in unwritten law.
But in the end, we censor ourselves– be it our expressions, our thoughts, our very being. A crime that I’m guilty of in my writing. My writing is my abode for my thoughts, being less filtered than reality but there are still limits to what I can write. Pity is an emotion that I prefer to give, I don’t want to be its recipient– it feels alien.
After all, I know that some of my thoughts would endear me at a cost that I am unwilling to bear. I would say that I have an image to maintain, but I don’t even know it. The most accurate way for me to describe me is a rusty human
Censorship– an act that envelopes far more than expression. It protects us by suppressing human nature. It attacks us by deeming us as a part of that same human nature. A censorship whose morality is of the majority’s.
Yet another censorship exists, acting as a minor to the major– a self-regulating system imposed by the self to avoid the effects of censorship. One that either omits parts or repackages it differently– twisting their own beliefs to align with the majority or to hide the minority within yourself.
Afterword:
An issue here is that I didn’t mean to use my second tone, a problem that I only realized when I was 75% done. I would split this piece into two separate ones: “Censor” and “Identity” and rewrite it, but I connected them together a bit too well and made it dense enough for the act of me separating it be equivalent to amputation.
Moving forward, I’ll try to be a bit more conscious of my word count since I’m now concerned that I’m using it as a metric of writing ability. I wrote over 3,000 words for this writing piece, but I don’t think I inflated it this time since it has more than a normal writing piece’s topics and themes.
The problem here is that when I use my second tone, it’s way too easy for me to add filler and make my word count bigger. I only realized that after I was 75% done with this, meaning that I couldn’t rewrite it entirely. But I did rewrite some of this stuff to reduce the word count and because I simply didn’t like it. Because of how much thought I put into it, this piece was one in which I rewrote the most. I was even thinking about not publishing this since I was dissatisfied with it.
While I would write about the inspiration of this, I’ll just say that it was a result of a mundane interaction and will engage in self-censorship. It’d be a shame if people see themselves in my writing, the only person that they should see is me. I’m definitely going to lose a layer of skin if this becomes a conversation topic.
27-Life 28-Companies 09-Refinement of Hatred 19-About me 22-Judgement 23-Trifecta