TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the subject of censorship. I’ve been censored a lot in my life. My voice was censored as a child. I wasn’t allowed to say certain things. I wasn’t allowed to feel certain things. There were all sorts of feelings, emotions, and reactions to the traumas I was experiencing in my childhood that I wasn’t allowed to have. Whole sides of myself were censored by my parents, later on by my school system, by my culture. I wasn’t allowed to be a full self. There were all sorts of rules that I had to learn along the way about who I could be, what I could say, what was appropriate, what wasn’t. And a lot of it really was inappropriate.
So from a very early age, I learned to be very, very skeptical of censorship. I liked the idea of being able to be who you are. Live and let live. Free speech really spoke to me as a child. But then, as I grew older, I started realizing that my family wasn’t all about censorship. In many ways, they swung to the other direction, toward a very liberal direction that actually harmed me just as much as being inappropriately censored.
My family allowed all sorts of sexual material to come into the family. My mom talked about all sorts of inappropriately sexual stuff with me when I was way, way too young—talking about sex, where babies come from, periods, orgasms. This is when I was like five, six, seven years old. My mom talked to me a lot about masturbation, about women masturbating, about her self-masturbating, about her sexual relationship with my dad. This is before I was in puberty. She talked to me about the goodness of masturbation when I was like 13, 14 years old. She wanted to know if I masturbated. She wanted me to be very open about my sex life. This really messed with my head.
What I realized is a lot of the stuff I was given, a lot of these messages about sex—and there were a lot of other things too—that were age inappropriate for me. This stuff should have been censored from me. Also, I was allowed to see pornography. My mother, in many ways, encouraged it. My father too. They let me have pornography. They let me see very sexual movies with them when I was very, very young, such that it opened me up to stuff that I was not emotionally equipped to handle.
So when I gained some perspective as an adult, when I thought about the subject of censorship, when I started really connecting more with who I was on the inside, really starting to work out my traumas and grieve them, when I started becoming a much more full and true adult, I realized that there were many things from my childhood that I was harmed by that should have been censored. And in that way, I realized in a very confusing way that I actually really believed in censorship.
But how do I balance these things? Because I also know at the same time I’ve been so harmed by censorship. And now, well, I’m almost 50 years old. In this modern world, on the internet, in the news, all sorts of stuff is getting censored. Censorship is becoming a much, much bigger thing. We’re becoming a society that’s doing a lot more censorship. I actually had one of my videos censored off YouTube recently. It was very confusing. It was very painful. It was actually kind of scary for me. It made me think, what is our future? Is my whole channel going to get censored?
And the thing is, there was nothing inappropriate about this video. It just rubbed some people the wrong way. I think actually because it was too true, it was too honest in some way, it was too challenging. Too many people got uncomfortable by it. And so what do I feel about censorship? What do I feel about especially censorship for adults? Because when it comes to censoring stuff for children, I’m all for it. Children should be censored from things that are legitimately developmentally age inappropriate for them. But what about adults? Well, that’s confusing.
Because when I look at people in the world who are adults, even in some ways myself, what I don’t really see is people who are emotionally adults. I see a lot of people out there, the world of humanity writ large, the world of adult humanity writ large, who are physiological, biological adults. They’re 30, 40, 50, 60 years old, 20 years old even. They can physiologically reproduce like biological adult animals. But on an emotional level, what I see is a species of ours that is made up of people who, by and large, actually are stunted emotionally. They’re stunted often to the ages at which different parts of them were traumatized.
So although they are biologically, physiologically adults, emotionally they’re still children in all sorts of different ways. A lot of times they can’t handle a lot of the things out there that maybe they should be censored from because of the ages to which they are traumatized. But that’s confusing. Should a government, should an agency, should a website censor this material from adults?
Well, I know for myself when I was about 13, 14, 15 years old—this is long before the internet—but when I had access to libraries, when I could read my parents’ books, when I could read magazines, I wanted all the information that I could get. I wanted to figure out what is reality, what is truth. I know when the internet first came out, there was a lot more stuff that you can find. I looked at a lot of very disturbing stuff on the internet. I remember watching beheading videos and stuff like that. It was overwhelming, but it wasn’t censored. It was very easy. You could Google it. I think maybe this is even—I don’t know, was I even using Google back then? Was I using AOL search or Lycos or some other search engine? A lot of the stuff was information that was very disturbing. I kind of wished I’d never seen it. I was a young man. I guess it was kind of normal for a lot of young men to look for a lot of disturbing stuff.
But now I think about what is appropriate censorship for adults. Well, what I consider is in an ideal world where adults are actually emotionally mature, when they’ve resolved their traumas, when they’re self-actualized people who have real connection with their true self, when they’re conscious, when they’re self-actualized, they have no need to have anybody outside them censor any information because they don’t want to watch garbage. They don’t want to watch stuff that’s polluted. They’re going to avoid stuff that is unhealthy. They will be able to have enough emotional discretion to figure out what is good for them and what isn’t.
That’s happened in my life. The more healthy I’ve become, the more I self-censor what I look at. I don’t want to look at stuff that’s polluted and bad and unhealthy. I don’t want to watch pornography. I don’t want to watch nasty violence. This is stuff that I feel is not good for me. I practice self-censorship. I don’t want an outside agency to do this for me, though, because I have this inside of myself.
But then it comes to be a question of should these outside agencies censor stuff from people who don’t have the ability to self-censor in a healthy way? And that’s where it’s really confusing because I look at a lot of outside agencies, organizations, websites, even governments as actually being not that healthy themselves. And what I have seen is that when organizations, websites, and governments are not emotionally healthy themselves, when they’re actually traumatized themselves, when the people who make them up and have the power over this organization have the ability to make decisions about what will be censored and what won’t be censored, they actually are like my parents in my childhood. They misuse their power to censor.
What I mean by that is they often use their power to censor things that make them look bad. They censor things that often are true. They censor things for their own good, not for my own good. They often use censorship to hide their own flaws. Or on the other hand, they say, “We are censoring untruth. We are censoring lies. We are censoring abusive material.” And yet so clearly, so often, they share so much garbage that is so hurtful, so abusive, so disrespectful, so often age inappropriate.
I guess what I would say is people who have power, people who have the power to censor, misuse their power to censor to the degree that they are.
Emotionally unhealthy, the degree to which they have unresolved traumas. Now, that’s not to say that all the material they censor is necessarily good material. But I guess what I think is, in my ideal world, that I would like to see a world where people are more healed, people are more mature, where the burden and the onus of censorship falls on adults who are mature to self-censor.
Now, of course, I know this is an ideal world. We live in a world where it’s very hard to heal traumas, hard to become self-actualized, hard to really discern what is healthy and what isn’t. That’s why talking about censorship for me is often such a tough and confusing thing.