INEWORD P

Monday, May 1, 2023 | Pinewood International American School of Thessaloniki

Is “Freedom Of Thought” A Conquered Right Indeed?

atteo Huang | Contributing Writer

In the bill of rights, the freedom of thought, speech, religion, petition and assembly is widely acknowledged as the highest-ranking amendment, as it is considered to be the very foundation and essence of maintaining a democratic society. Yet, when we magnify the ‘thought’ aspect in this amendment, we can easily observe a pressing flaw, especially in modern society: Thoughts and opinions are so easily influenced and manipulated they no longer take form as one’s own, free thoughts. And so a question plausibly arises: in our current societies, are our thoughts and opinions really ours? Are they really ‘free’?

Think of a future where everyone has conveniently abandoned their ability of thinking critically to fit into thoughtless majorities that can be moulded and manipulated by governments. And no, this isn't just some depressing and dystopian thought, or some sequel to Orwell’s 1984; but the inevitable reality our generation is heading to. Modern man’s thought is not really in flux, “εν ροή” as the philosopher Heraclitus would have put it, but it is stagnant, stone-like. Modern Man’s thought does not derive from conscious, well thoughtout and fully perceived experiences, from constructive dialogue. Instead, it is just blindly reiterated; copy-pasted rambling made out of what one hears or reads; made out of the supposed “opinions” of others…

The truth is, these opinions that conquer the media are neither original nor free opinions formed from facts or constructive dialogue; instead, as a society, we have fallen into the mob mentality and the fandom culture, or rather subculture, making us so prone to irrational group thinking and ideological radicalism, which ultimately results in us not actually having any freedom of thought. And as Oscar Wilde would put it, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”...

Alternatively, others might wonder: What if being in the mob is a good thing? If the mob can provide a sense of community and allow greater net happiness, why shouldn’t we comply with these norms? However, it is obvious to me that society is already too far into the mob. We are far too drawn into the fantasies of the media which fail to accurately portray reality; we are desensitised from violence, from pure joy, from rage and anger and it is all reflected in our lack of empathy towards one another. And this is not an unfound concern or an unsupported claim; a study comparing empathy levels of college students nowadays to 50, 40 years ago, found that college students show a 40% decline in their empathy levels; most of which occurred after the 2000s, where social media and the internet