Thanks for your thoughts. I have been advancing my thinking on freedom of speech. (Advancing where remains to be seen.)

I want to slightly restate your question but hopefully it will still be a relevant response. Question: How does an open and a closed society interact and do they have responsibly for consequences outside their culture? I am using Karl Poppers terminology, but we will assume open society->protected free speech, closed society->restricted speech.

I will attempt to argue that self censorship to avoid outrage in another culture is in fact their culture imposing on the author’s culture. I might mention this post is me thinking out loud so there are some redundancies and unanswered questions in my augument.

Imagine we have country A which is a closed society. The leadership is autocratic or has a one party state and speech on certain topics is legally or socially moderated. I was going to give examples but it some extent, most countries occasionally veer to a closed society.

The people currently in charge have forgotten the first principle of an open society, namely that we may be wrong and that there has to be free discussion. That it’s possible to be opposed to the policies without being unpatriotic. George Soros speaking about the US

Second, imagine we have country B which is an open society. The leadership can be changed by the (non-manipulated) governed using reliable information. It is possible no country fully meets this criteria.

Third, we have a way of communicating from A to B – for example the Internet.

Bert (citizen of open society B) has got a controversial publication. His options are:
1) Publish – it’s discussed in the open society of B. Unfortunately extreme elements in country A use this to launch waves of protests (possibly distorting the original publication) and some people may get killed in the protests. Possibly Bert threatened with death. For those who we killed in protests, I’d say:

“He wondered what the mans name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil at heart, or what lies or threats had lead him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really have rather stayed there in peace.” Character of Sam in the Lord of the Rings

2) Don’t publish – because option 1 is not desirable. But hang on, isn’t the author living in an open society with freedom of speech? To avoid option 1 is to accept that restricted speech is a more desirable course of action! Why should “Bert” who has protected free speech need to be bound by an external culture when publishing? That would be having a closed society values imposing on a open society. We would need to reject the viability of open society because of the detrimental effect on closed societies. I think that would be absurd!

The very unpleasant deaths in closed society protests where not as a direct result of the offending material. Someone needs to distribute it in the closed society and organise the protests… I think they might be the ones responsible for deaths or destruction.

Often a closed society censors information into the country to prevent these problems (in the short term?). They do have a choice not to read publications from open societies.

Hopefully you found something in here that makes sense!

Anti Citizen One