Today, almost anyone has been given the ability to speak publicly about anyone else. To comment on another person’s life, judge decisions made by people they do not know, insult, belittle and condemn them without ever truly facing the consequences of their words. All it takes is a phone, a profile and a few seconds to say what once required far more courage.
Once, there was the threat of a club.
Not because the time when people settled disagreements by force was better, nor because we should return to it, but because the distance between words and their consequences was much shorter. When you said something to someone, you usually had to stand in front of them. You had to see their face, hear their answer and remain there when the words you had spoken were no longer yours alone. People knew that what they said could provoke a reaction, and that awareness, however crude it may sometimes have been, still set a certain boundary.
The digital world has almost erased that boundary. Today, someone can sit alone in a room and, with a few taps on a screen, insult another person’s appearance, family, background, work, knowledge, illness or tragedy. They can write things to someone they have never met that they would probably never say with only a table between them, then put down the phone, make a cup of coffee and continue their day as if nothing had happened.
Technology has therefore done more than expand the space for free speech. It has also given many people the illusion of courage. People who struggle to enter even an ordinary conflict in real life now pass moral judgments with astonishing confidence, humiliate strangers and intrude into their lives. The screen gives them what the presence of another human being does not. It gives them distance from the consequences.
But courage does not begin where consequences disappear. Courage means being willing to stand behind your words even when there is a person in front of you who can hear them. Everything else is often not courage at all, but cowardice that technology has allowed to speak louder.
It is good that we no longer live in a world where an insult inevitably leads to a physical confrontation. That should be a sign of progress as a society. We should be able to disagree without violence, criticise without humiliating and express a view without needing to demean the person on the other side. The problem is that, as we rejected force as a response, we gradually began to reject our sense of responsibility for what we say as well.
Over time, we have confused freedom of speech with the absence of boundaries, the right to hold an opinion with the right to insult, and the ability to say something with the belief that everything that crosses our mind deserves to be said.
Perhaps we truly no longer need the old club.
But it would serve us well to relearn why people once chose their words more carefully. Not out of fear of being struck, but because they understood that words carry weight and that, even when they travel through a screen, they always reach a human being on the other side.
Reshid Dervishi