A new silent generation: Why America’s students are choosing self-censorship

American teenagers may be doing to themselves what the Chinese Communist state does to its citizens.

An Ivy League professor — an old-fashioned liberal who actually cares about free speech — recently warned me about what’s happening in classrooms like his.

He encourages class discussion of the great books he teaches in class — but students are reluctant to speak.

Not because they’re afraid of the professor, but because they fear each other.

Communist regimes have tried to stamp out dissent for more than a century; tyrants and totalitarians have always tried to sow suspicion among their subjects, turning friends, neighbors and even family members into informers against anyone who won’t conform to the party line.

That’s the scenario in George Orwell’s dystopian classic “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” and it’s the intention behind China’s insidious “social credit” system today.

What Orwell never imagined, though, was that young men and women in a free society would one day willingly impose “political correctness” on their peers — and use the 21st century’s decentralized social media to do it.

Students, the professor told me, are afraid to be recorded on their classmates’ cellphones talking about politics and political philosophy — the subjects he teaches — and don’t want to disagree with their fellow students about anything because the person they’re arguing with might belong to a “disadvantaged” group.

It’s not only what you say that’s dangerous, but who you say it to.

A young man getting into an argument with a young woman, or a white student with a black student, is not a good look on social media, and a classroom conversation runs the risk of sparking an online inquisition.

Conservative students, who often have to face ostracism for their dissenting views, might be less intimidated than liberals and progressives, who aren’t used to not fitting in.

But all too many liberals have been conditioned from a young age, both at home and in school, to believe that good-faith argument about serious subjects is inherently offensive — you might hurt the feelings of the person you’re arguing with.

Better to remain silent, even if the professor urges you to speak up.

Communists in the 20th century used very heavy-handed tactics to punish dissidents.

But the more groups like the independent, Catholic-inspired labor unions of Poland’s Solidarity movement were harassed, the more they resisted. 

What’s terrifying about the new self-imposed social control in America is that it’s more effective using less coercive and more decentralized techniques. 

And the effect is a kind of brainwashing, no less than what Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith suffers in Room 101 of the Ministry of Love.

Once young men and women get used to censoring themselves and their defensive crouch becomes permanent, they don’t need to be punished anymore: Their thoughtcrimes will have been stopped before they can begin.

This American-style social credit system is what happens of when pervasive technology combines with an ideology that claims to be about compassion and tolerance — but that really uses those noble-sounding principles as a pretext for enforcing submission.

That part Orwell did anticipate: There’s a reason Big Brother’s inquisition is called the Ministry of Love.

Anecdotes aren’t data — maybe my professor friend has just had an unusually passive set of students for the past 10 or 15 years.

Yet plenty of other indications support what he tells me.

A study published in Science last month by researchers at Stanford University, for example, found one-third of American teens prefer turning to AI for “serious conversations” rather than engaging with another human being. 

This was a study of artificial intelligence’s people-pleasing bias — it tells users what they want to hear.

It doesn’t argue, contradict or hurt anyone’s feelings, “even when users engaged in unethical, illegal or harmful behaviors,” the study noted.

“The very feature that causes harm also drives engagement,” the report’s abstract concluded.

That might be said about today’s liberalism as an ideology, too — it may sound agreeable and nice, but adopting it leads to harm, including the psychological damage that politically left-wing people report experiencing at much higher levels than conservatives.

Fragility, bitterness, timidity — these are the fruits of the orthodoxy America’s elite has embraced, and which its children enforce against outliers with vigilante zeal.

The victim mentality has become an excuse for bullying.

And rather than confront it, many young people find it easier to make friends with an AI chatbot than with one another.

Social isolation is socialism’s greatest ally, while the kinds of community the Communists could never stamp out, not with all the power of Soviet tyranny, are the secret to freedom’s survival.

Something as simple as a robust debate in class strikes a blow against Big Brother — and against Little Brother’s snooping cellphone.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.