This isn’t really true. To give the most prominent example, Holocaust denial is heavily suppressed in Western societies, in many even with criminal penalties, although its falsity is not in any doubt whatsoever outside of the small fringe scene of people who espouse it. (And indeed, it really doesn’t stand up even to the most basic scrutiny.) For most beliefs that the respectable opinion regards as deserving of suppression, respectable people are similarly convinced in their falsity with equal confidence, regardless of how much truth there might actually be in them.
Now, sometimes it does happen that certain claims are clearly true but at the same time so inflammatory and ideologically unacceptable that respectable people simply cannot bring themselves to admit it, even when the alternative requires a staggering level of doublethink and rationalization. In these situations, contrarians who provoke them by waving the obvious and incontrovertible evidence in front of their eyes will induce a special kind of rage. But these are fairly exceptional situations.
How do people respond to the claims? I acknowledge that any response other than just “that’s false” de-emphasizes the falsity of it, but if the response is “That’s a lie and illegal,” that’s a different sort of thing to say than “That’s classist,” or the like for other claims. If people respond with “The powerful Jews will lock you up for saying such a thing, by the way I think it’s 15% likely true,” then that’s an interesting case too, one that isn’t a counterexample.
In one sense legal coercion is at the far end of a single scale from mild disapproval to ostracization to illegalization,but in another sense it is qualitatively different. A country within which saying something is illegal might have most endorse the illegal idea, or most oppose it by simply calling it “false”, or most oppose it by emphasizing its illegality and somewhat mentioning its illegality, etc., or no majority of any type. What’s important here is the social climate around the statements, for which the laws on the books are important evidence but alone don’t make an example or counterexample of a country.
This isn’t really true. To give the most prominent example, Holocaust denial is heavily suppressed in Western societies, in many even with criminal penalties, although its falsity is not in any doubt whatsoever outside of the small fringe scene of people who espouse it. (And indeed, it really doesn’t stand up even to the most basic scrutiny.) For most beliefs that the respectable opinion regards as deserving of suppression, respectable people are similarly convinced in their falsity with equal confidence, regardless of how much truth there might actually be in them.
Now, sometimes it does happen that certain claims are clearly true but at the same time so inflammatory and ideologically unacceptable that respectable people simply cannot bring themselves to admit it, even when the alternative requires a staggering level of doublethink and rationalization. In these situations, contrarians who provoke them by waving the obvious and incontrovertible evidence in front of their eyes will induce a special kind of rage. But these are fairly exceptional situations.
How do people respond to the claims? I acknowledge that any response other than just “that’s false” de-emphasizes the falsity of it, but if the response is “That’s a lie and illegal,” that’s a different sort of thing to say than “That’s classist,” or the like for other claims. If people respond with “The powerful Jews will lock you up for saying such a thing, by the way I think it’s 15% likely true,” then that’s an interesting case too, one that isn’t a counterexample.
In one sense legal coercion is at the far end of a single scale from mild disapproval to ostracization to illegalization,but in another sense it is qualitatively different. A country within which saying something is illegal might have most endorse the illegal idea, or most oppose it by simply calling it “false”, or most oppose it by emphasizing its illegality and somewhat mentioning its illegality, etc., or no majority of any type. What’s important here is the social climate around the statements, for which the laws on the books are important evidence but alone don’t make an example or counterexample of a country.