An attitude that scholars and politicians consider an alarming reflection of fear, all the more worrying since it has been spreading increasingly over the last decades and exponentially in the last five years. In 1990 – in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall – almost 80% of the German population still believed they could freely express their political opinion. Today, the vast majority of citizens of a large country reunified and theoretically free for more than thirty years seem to be afraid to speak freely. As happened in communist East Germany at the time of its political police, the infamous STASI.
The data published by Statista Research Department March 26, 2024, focused mainly on freedom of political opinion, confirm those already made known in 2019 by the Allensbach polling institute regarding freedom of opinion in general. "Three-quarters of the population - the researchers indicated five years ago - believe that we must be very careful about the topics on which we express ourselves, especially in public and on the Internet". Not so much because of the laws and related sanctions but because of the ostracism that we risk encountering from a social and professional point of view. "There are many unwritten laws that determine which opinions are acceptable and which are taboo".
The taboos indicated by the interviewees are topics such as gender and sexual identity, Islam, refugees, but also patriotism. Almost 60% of the interviewees declare themselves “annoyed” by the rules considered “exaggerated” by political correctness and the willingness to conform to them uncritically is decreasing drastically. Only 18% (eighteen) of Germans claim that they can freely express themselves in public on any topic without being subject to social and professional sanctions. 58% believe that they can only do so within family and circles of friends and that they must express themselves with great caution in other circles. For the majority, social media are harbingers of great conflict, they are viewed with suspicion and on the Internet one must express oneself very cautiously.
The researchers' final report emphasizes that the belief among citizens that a systematic social control is taking hold is increasingly widespread. Many citizens feel observed and judged and have the impression of being subjected to a process of indoctrination, unacceptable in a society based on shared norms. The strong unease and social divide that emerges from these scientifically representative surveys is now the subject of study and political debate in Germany.
Should we consider and dismiss it as a purely German phenomenon? If the recent history of Germany (in particular the unhealed wound of National Socialism, the reunification between the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR and the strong immigration from Islamic countries, to name just a few) plays an important role in the current social conflict in Germany, it is enough to look at the conflicts out of control and the resurgence of intolerance in France, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium – not to mention the United States – to believe that the problem of the social censorship of political correctness, the limitation of freedom of opinion that in many cases is self-censorship act as a dangerous detonator for the already deep economic, social and cultural conflicts of our increasingly fragile Western democracies.
If one believes that the data collected in Germany constitute a worrying signal of a weakening of freedom of expression – a pillar of free democratic coexistence – now found in all Western countries, it is appropriate and urgent to ask some questions. What is the democratic legitimacy of political correctness and of those who define it? Is it legitimate for the dominant opinion of some censors to limit the opinion of a majority?
Is it wise that the rules of free expression are determined not so much by laws (which rightly sanction crimes and unacceptable behavior) but by a certain morality dictated by a group of censors? The process of censorship and politically correct modification not only of opinion but of language itself and of History is already so developed in Western countries that one cannot help but rethink the authoritarian scenarios of the control society envisaged by George Orwell.
His dystopian novel “1984 ", seems to us today in some ways terribly real. Let us take for example what Orwell considers the privileged instrument of social control, namely the creation of a new politically correct language, Newspeak: «In Newspeak the expression of heterodox opinions was practically impossible. And much of the literature of the past had already been emended in this sense. Numerous writers such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens and others were undergoing the treatment of ideological translation. Once this work was completed, their original writings, together with all that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. (…) Sand the facts deny it Ingsoc (the dominant ideology, Ed.), then the facts must be changed. Thus the History is constantly being rewritten. If one has to reorder what one remembers or falsify written documents, it becomes necessary to forget that one acted in that way. This is a stratagem that can be learned like any other mental technique. Almost all Party members and all intelligent and perfectly orthodox people certainly learn it."The specific aim of Newspeak – warns George Orwell – was not only to provide a means of expression that would replace the old world view and old mental habits, but to make any other form of thought impossible" (G. Orwell, 1984; Appendix, The Principles of Newspeak).
If we believe that democracy is not about promoting a single thought (and a single language) defined as morally correct by a nomenklatura in power but rather the diversity of opinions, the freedom to express them in society and in politics while respecting those of others without suffering ostracism and intolerance and also the freedom to contest (civil but if necessary decisive) those in power, then we need to make the real risk of an authoritarian drift of our democracies the subject of in-depth public debates. The enormous possibilities of control and manipulation of reality and individuals that algorithms and artificial intelligence allow make this public debate even more urgent.
