The Importance of Dissent

I believe that the most important of the eight values of freedom of expression is protecting dissent. Our society can not and will not function without dissent. Most of the time nowadays when people express themselves they are expressing dissent of something or someone. Without being able to express your disapproval for something, you lose the right you have to tell the government no. When thinking of a country trying to pull off a functioning society without permitting dissent, it is impossible for one to not think of the society of Oceania in George Orwell’s “1984”. That is the dictionary definition for a society without dissent. See, the society portrayed in 1984 took the idea of prohibiting dissent to a whole new level, making it illegal to even think negative thoughts about the government. However, even on a smaller scale, restricting a people's right to express disapproval of an idea is the first step on the path to convincing a country that freedom is slavery and two plus two equals five. Prohibiting dissent in some ways is similar to promoting censorship, a value that was expressed in another famous dystopian book, Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”. In both of these dystopias, the government has taken complete control of a society’s power and used it against the people. What is the difference, you might ask? Unlike promoting censorship and hiding things from a society, when you prohibit dissent, people can see how badly they’re being treated, they just can’t do anything about it.

  

Without dissent, you can not even begin to question the other seven values of freedom of expression. Let’s take the first value of freedom of expression, having a marketplace of ideas. We say that having a marketplace of ideas is important because we need all ideas on the table, including bad ideas at times. The whole idea of having a marketplace of ideas is restricting the government from picking and choosing ideas for us. If we were to prohibit dissent, that takes away our right to disapprove of certain government actions that go against our beliefs. Good luck trying to tell the government that they can’t pick and choose ideas when we can’t even say no.