The right and duty to offend

Gegen gesellschaftliche und moralische Normen zu verstossen ist nicht nur etwas, was wir genervt dulden sollten, sondern es ist unser aller Pflicht.

It’s the idea of human weakness and incapacity; the poisonous notion that humans are fragile and therefore our speech and our interactions with each other must be monitored and policed and always checked for danger. It is this utterly orthodox, misanthropic idea that they promote, and protect from criticism, just as surely as priests once ringfenced their beliefs from ridicule.

In this choking, censorious climate, where everything is treated as potentially offensive and all sorts of people are no-platformed or safe-spaced, we’ve got to move beyond talking about a right to offend — we have to talk about a duty to offend.

Anyone who cares for freedom and truth, anyone who believes that humanity only progresses through being daring and sometimes disrespectful, now has a duty to rile and stir and outrage; a duty to break out of the new grey conformism; a duty to ridicule these new guardians of decency; a duty to tell them: „Fuck your orthodoxies.“