Are Americans afraid to speak their minds?  According to a recent study, the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’ has become a place of self-censorship.  Two-thirds of us say that we are afraid to say what we believe in public because someone else might not like it.

These dispiriting results come from a study that tracked 1 million people over a 20-year period, between 2000 and 2020.  The shift in attitude has led to 6.5% more people self-censoring rather than speaking their minds.  That is a huge shift for measurements of attitude like this in a short time, relatively speaking.

To be sure, we humans have apparently always been afraid of being cast out of the tribe.  It’s an ancient belief that presumably came from the very real threat of death if you were exited from the cave in the Paleolithic Era.  On average, apparently, you might survive 48 hours; we humans were not an apex species at that point.  If the saber-tooth tigers didn’t bite you, the woolly mammoths would stomp you to death.

So, our fear of rejection by the crowd is ultimately a practical one, based on ancient realities.  Now, we face ghosting, and canceling, and perhaps worst of all, ghost-canceling.  None of those fates actually threaten to kill in quite the same way as a saber-tooth tiger, but it sure feels that way if you are 14 and your friends stop texting you.

To avoid those fates, we self-censor.  For public speakers, this is a particularly dangerous phenomenon.  We thought leaders have to be able to share uncomfortable, or startling, or revolutionary truths with our audiences, or we risk boring them to death – and we can provide no useful value.  If we are afraid of rocking the intellectual boat, we’re going to pull our public speaking punches and fail to engage the audience in a transformational way.

But the risks are trebled for speakers, because your tribe, the one you want to accept you, is right there in front of you.  Acceptance or rejection is palpable, and it happens in real time.  I’ve lost audiences over the years, and I’ve had them eating out of my hand, rhetorically speaking.  I can tell you that the former is soul-destroying, and the latter is the best feeling ever.

It’s a truism that beginning speakers often want audiences to love them more than they want to deliver home truths, but beneath the needs of the ego are deeper ones for acceptance in order to have a voice in the community.  To be canceled is to lose that voice, to lose the opportunity to do your job, to lose the chance to change the world.  It’s more than ego.  It’s why you work so hard in the first place.

We need to listen to each other.  We need to be able to hear each other, even when saying hard things.  Maybe especially when saying hard things.  To be able to do that, we need to return to a few basic rules in the public sphere that have fallen victim to the partisanship of late.

We need to agree that facts matter.

We need to agree that respect matters.

We need to agree that it is important to listen first to understand, and only after we have understood, to thoughtfully offer differing points of view.  Evelyn Waugh famously said, “to understand all is to forgive all.”  We need a bit more of his generosity in our world today.

We need to accept that arguments ad hominem have no place in the public discourse.  My opponents’ ideas are what matters.  Insulting my opponents’ looks or race or personal characteristics is not an argument; it is abuse, and it should have no role in the public space.  We have too many serious issues that will take the best of our thinking and working together to develop useful solutions – to waste our time hurling brickbats at each other.

We can do better.  We have to.