Mandatory and forbidden. Is there a gap between those two? Is anything not mandatory therefore forbidden? Is anything not forbidden obviously mandatory?
Book bans are in the headlines these days. And as we all know, it’s never the good guys who ban books.
Fortunately, the world we live in makes book bans extremely difficult. There are too many independent websites, too many independent book stores, too many independent libraries for a single book to be cut off from a person determined to read it.
So what are we worried about?
The problem with books is that there are millions of them. There are more words that have been written on more pages than can possibly be consumed by a single human, even if he should spend his entire life trying. Due to this inescapable shortcoming, a ban is not necessary to dampen the spread of a particular story. One can simply fail to promote it.
Recently, a Florida judge has ruled that the federal government may not mandate masks on airplanes and trains. This doesn’t stop the many people at higher risk from communicable disease from continuing to wear a mask.
The problem with the choice of masking is that the mask most useful to a person is not the one that they themselves wear, but the one worn by the person already infected.
The Right has traditionally attempted to ban certain fringe ideas, beliefs, and practices to prevent them from seeping into the mainstream. And most of us now believe that banning things is wrong. But now the Left is attempting to mandate certain fringe ideas, beliefs, and practices to force them into the mainstream.
The problem with mandating things is the same as the problem with banning them: people make mistakes. And the people who make big decisions for many people are the same breed of Homo sapiens as the people who make small decisions for themselves.
The right needs to trust that, when bad ideas spread through the population, a large enough number of free people will recognize that they are bad. And the left needs to trust that, if an idea is good, free people will eventually recognize and spread it.
The belief that some people have the Mandate of Heaven to lead the unwashed masses to a brighter future, no matter where the people themselves may wish to go, is very common throughout human history. What makes the modern liberal experiment unique is the strange belief that the unwashed masses, by nature of being human, deserve the right to choose their own destiny.
Even if they choose wrong.
