WhatFinger


OWS protesters are no more entitled to other people’s audiences than they are to other people’s money

Candidate Bachmann Steals Human Ears!



From a November 10th Reuters article, we have the following:
“Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann was about 10 minutes into a foreign policy speech in South Carolina on Thursday when she was drowned out by the shouting of protesters.
“About 30 people rose in unison and began shouting a scripted message during Bachmann’s address aboard the USS Yorktown, a World War Two aircraft carrier. “The group, which later identified itself as being part of Occupy Charleston, accused Bachmann of ‘dividing Americans’ and promoting discrimination. “‘You cater to the 1 percent,’ they yelled.”
Four sentences, and, appropriately, Reuters has already given us two ‘shouts,’ one ‘yell,’ and one ‘accusation.’ In the next paragraph, we learn that “[a]fter about three minutes, the protesters shouted: ‘Have a pleasant day,’ and marched out chanting ‘We are the 99 percent.’"

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Why all this accusatory shouting, yelling, and chanting? Reuters allows one of the protesters to yell on behalf of the group:
“‘We’re Americans criticizing her. We’re just getting our voices heard,’ said a young woman who wouldn’t give her name. ‘She’s getting her voice heard. Why can’t I have my voice heard?’”
So there you have it. These young, anonymous ‘critics’ were shouting and yelling in order to get their voices heard. After all, Michele Bachmann was getting her voice heard, so why can’t anonymous young critics get their voices heard, too? You’d shout and yell too, if you wanted to get your anonymous voice heard, wouldn’t you? And in an accusatory manner at that, if you felt that someone else was getting her voice heard, and was thereby depriving you of your right to equal (anonymous) voice-hearing time. I mean geez! In all seriousness, though, there is more than an accidental connection between all this shouting and chanting on the one hand, and the underlying premises that spawned the Occupy Wall Street movement on the other. There is often great clarity in muddled thinking, as witness Bachmann’s anonymous protester, who defended her group’s actions with the plea that Bachmann “is getting her voice heard,” so “[w]hy can’t I have my voice heard?” Indeed, why can’t she? Furthermore, who ever said she couldn’t? Certainly not Michele Bachmann, who, after the protesters had departed, graciously restarted her speech by remarking, “Don’t you love the First Amendment?” So why all the embittered language about getting one’s voice heard? The answer, of course, is that the anonymous young woman did not merely want her voice heard; she wanted her voice heard by this audience. In other words, she and her fellow protesters felt oppressed by the fact that Michele Bachmann had these particular listeners at her disposal, whereas they did not. They were demanding their fair share of this audience—and, by extension, any audience that Bachmann, and other members of the “1 percent” to whom Bachmann ‘caters,’ might have access. In this light, all the shouting and yelling seems reasonable. In a recent CFP article, I examined the various fallacies inherent in the ‘1 percent vs. 99 percent’ mantra. In particular, I detailed the common liberal absurdity of perceiving the economy as a static quantity of wealth which gets divided, or “distributed,” in more or less equitable ways. Here we see how this basic notion—that free markets lead to a concentration of limited wealth in the hands of an oppressive few—is applied, via the same kind of sloppy reasoning, to other freedoms, in this case freedom of speech. Michele Bachmann spent many years living, learning, and working in the ‘obscurity’ of private life. (What kind of audiences did she command then?) She followed this with years of running for political office, working as a congresswoman, serving on congressional committees, and taking positions that sometimes set her at odds with many of her fellow Republicans. Finally, she decided to run for president, which entails months of fundraising, debating, personal scrutiny, and accusatory shouting from morons. In South Carolina, she was speaking to a particular group, at a particular venue, by invitation. The audience present was there specifically to hear her, and precisely because she is the product of all the background I have just outlined. Most of us, who did not have that particular audience at our disposal, would concede that she had earned it. It was her audience, as it were, and not ours. For the 99 Percenters, however, this was an unfair deprivation. Why should Bachmann have this audience, and not they? For them, Bachmann is not merely a 1 percent type in material wealth, but also in ‘listener wealth.’ It is somehow unjust that she has more listeners than they do. Therefore, they have every bit as much right to occupy her speech venue as to occupy the venues of corporate greed. The two types of venue, like the two types of wealth, are effectively one and the same. Bachmann’s generous manner of dismissing the protesters’ interruption notwithstanding, the First Amendment really is at issue here, but not in a way that favors the protesters. As has been pointed out many times over the decades since uncivil disruption of public events became a normal method of leftist political discourse, the right to freedom of speech does not mean the right to someone else’s microphone, someone else’s pulpit, someone else’s airtime, or the ears of someone else’s voluntary audience. It means the right not to be silenced in speaking to whatever audience, and in whatever venue, one is able to earn for oneself through voluntary interaction. And even this right must be qualified, not in the name of limiting a right, but in the name of a clear, non-contradictory understanding of a basic constitutional protection. The right not to be silenced does not mean that there is no sense in which one can be silenced. One can be silenced in the sense of being refused a microphone, a pulpit, or a particular audience. What the right to freedom of speech—like all the rights properly enumerated or entailed by the U.S. constitution—specifically protects one against is acts of government. In brief, the OWS protesters are no more entitled to other people’s audiences than they are to other people’s money. But their belief that they are entitled to such audiences derives from the very same faulty premise as does their belief that they are entitled to the wealth of the ‘1 percent.’ The premise, once again, is the liberal fallacy that, in a free economy, one man’s wealth is another man’s deprivation, and hence that the violent retrieval of some or all of that wealth is of the essence of justice. That premise is as false in the realm of ‘ear-wealth’ as it is in the realm of dollar-wealth. You are not entitled to someone else’s audience, or means of addressing others, unless their possession of that audience, or those means, militates against your finding (i.e. earning) an audience of your own. In other words, if the speaker had been Vladimir Putin or Hugo Chavez, and the venue in Russia or Venezuela, these angry protesters might indeed be justified (not to mention exemplars of courage, rather than merely of bad parenting). Message to anonymous young shouters: If you feel deprived of an audience, go and win one. If it isn’t big enough for you, try to convince your audience to bring friends next time. Furthermore, if you actually have something worthwhile to say, and have yet to find an audience for it, that is indeed pitiable. It is, however, no justification for incivility and intrusion. As in the case of financial wealth, so in the case of an audience, if you want more of it, and gifts are not forthcoming, you’ll just have to produce it yourself.


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Daren Jonescu -- Bio and Archives

Daren Jonescu has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He currently teaches English language and philosophy at Changwon National University in South Korea.


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