The film "The People vs. Larry Flynt," directed by Miloš Forman, tells the story of the founder of the first pornographic magazine in the United States. The magazine really existed, and Flint was a real man who became rich by selling nudity and coitus to America.
But the film is also about freedom. The freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
FECALE COMPARISON
It is from this film that one of the most famous film sayings about people who are happy to express their opinions, without thinking first, comes. "An opinion is like a plank, everyone has one." This gave rise to a surprisingly toned-down Balkan version, in which the plank is turned into an ass - more convenient for quoting without shame. But it takes away its Dadaist sting.
Why is it important to remember a film that was made exactly thirty years ago and a line that became a folk proverb wherever the film was shown? Because in these three decades we have stepped deeply into a digital civilization that could also be defined as a civilization of algorithmic encouragement of asses to speak. Here I have to remember what my mother used to say to me when I would not keep quiet when it was better to keep my mouth shut: "You would speak up even if it was your ass."
So, we have stepped deep into the cesspool of expressing opinions without prior thought. Every opinion, even the most banal, has an apodictic character in the new, virtuous digital world. Apodictic (from the Greek. apodeiktikos – provable, clear) denotes something that is indisputable, absolutely certain, necessarily true and obvious.
Such an appearance without a shred of doubt or possibility of opposition is today the most widespread form of electronic communication. Every opinion expressed on social networks, even those that are as unwashed asses – indecent, unhygienic, vulgar and irresponsible – considers itself apodictic.
PREJUDICE DISGUISED AS OPINION
We are victims of a confusion of terms. “Opinion” is not the result of a process of reflection, analysis or questioning. What today’s man carries as a shield in front of him, saying that he has the right to his own opinion, is actually not an opinion but an attitude. What is an attitude? A cemented opinion. While an opinion has flexibility, sometimes changing like a weather forecast, depending on arguments, circumstances and intelligence, an attitude is connected to the deeper structures of our psyche – emotion, belief, knowledge, imitation and behavior – transformed into a mixture called a value attitude. Since our attitudes are important to us – their revision is a traumatic experience – we declare them in advance as opinions. Faced with other attitudes, we do not think, but defend ours. This is not a dialogue, this is a verbal skirmish.
That is why politicians' calls for dialogue are tragicomic, because in everyday media practice, cursing their opponents serves to affectively synchronize their camp. Incitement to verbal wars is hardly hidden in the post-truth world. That is why the fortresses of apodictic positions do not serve any exchange. They were never intended to do so. "Opinions" which, as we learn in the story of Larry Flynt, are like planks, because everyone has them, serve as cannons on these fortresses. It is no wonder that the verbal fire from these digital or media towers amounts to logoreas - linguistic diarrhea.
LEADER'S ROAR
How did we get to this point? It's easier to have an attitude. It's harder to think. To have an attitude, all you have to do is adopt the value set of an authority or the group you belong to. The most frequently repeated opinion in a group will trigger a reflex to align with the pack. It's warmer there.
If information, education, intelligence and conscience tell you that your attitude is wrong, you have two options. To become a cynic, or to revise your attitude. The latter involves a process of moving away from the corporate spirit. That is why the world is full of cynics who live in their comfort zone.
Sometimes people of dubious moral qualities call girls and boys who seek justice – Ustashas, knowing that this is nonsense. But they are cynical enough to understand the mechanism they set in motion: a pack of dogs calmly walks past a man, if the leader does not growl. If he does growl for any reason – claiming territory and resources, asserting his leadership, trying to expel an intruder in his enclosure – the situation becomes dangerous. Followers instinctively begin to compete in growling, snarling, barking, flattering authority and confirming their identity – belonging to the pack. A hierarchy of aggressive loyalty is established. Then it is only a matter of time before a bloody bite follows.
Each of us knows that the trick of the absence of opinion hidden behind the "right to opinion" is the most common practice, both in a pub and in the public digital space. The right to opinion is actually the right to a fan's stance. The other is not a potential incentive for seeking answers to our questions. The other must confirm the answer thought up by someone else's head, before any opinion. If he questions the logic, the meaningfulness of such an answer, the other is not "ours" but "theirs". Therefore, fundamentally flawed as a human being.
When a bunch of losers gather on a platform, they always feel like winners by cursing those better than them. Group attitudes are enough for them. Doubt is betrayal. Questions are a sin.
We have lost our curiosity, our assumption of learning, of always being right. And we are tired of that. Because we pretend to have an opinion, repeating other people's formulas for salvation, we advocate positions without a shred of joy in questioning ourselves and others, without conversation.
It is our response to the new opacity, to the excess of choice – from self-service, to online shopping, to the party spectrum. To the excess of freedom. Cemented attitudes in the digital jungle.
EVIL IS BORN FROM THE ABSENCE OF THOUGHT
We tend to answer before every question. It seems to me that Gadamer's thought has been forgotten - a question opens the horizon, an answer closes it. Or Hannah Arendt's thought that evil often comes not from conviction, but from the absence of thought. The quick judgments to which algorithms have condemned us are a form of intellectual laziness. Only critical thinking is able to question widespread self-evident truths. If it were not so, if there were no resistance to "ultimate truths", we would still be living in caves. Since every answer keeps something unexplained and unspoken, it dialectically gives rise to new questions. If we do not see them, then we are blind idolaters of the existing order of things. If we see them but do not acknowledge them, then we are masters of passivity. Sociopaths, colorblind for other people's emotions and social moral values.
In a performance society, quantity and speed are important. And the question that constitutes us in our humanity – why? – simply does not exist. That is why people who think are vulnerable. People who ask questions are not beloved members of the community.
True philosophers cannot entertain us on Instagram. They doubt the shaky foundation on which we build our house of false pleasure. Mystics are not good material for today either. They express respect for what the human mind cannot comprehend with silence. Neither of them accepts the chatter in the fortresses from which cannons of “opinions” are fired loudly.
The philosopher would like to shape the thought, which has long traveled underground like a sinkhole, into human language. The mystic would like to feel in silence what is before language. Buddhism does not value questions that feed the ego, but those that liberate us.
Apophatic silence in Orthodox mysticism is a practice in which the divine can be felt but not expressed. The splendor of God begins where language ends. Newly composed Christians have no idea about this, wasting words like on a conveyor belt. Chatter distances one from God, even if it is pseudo-pious chatter.
THE DENSEST MATTER OF MEANING
And here we come to the unspeakable. It is where the thousand-year-old traditions of mystics and poets intersect. Poetry as a practice is, above all, a condensation of language. And as such, completely incompatible with apodictic instant-views about everything and anything – primarily about what we have no idea about. Poetry is the densest matter of meaning. That is why it can never be accelerated at the will of an algorithm. It is not emotionally predictable enough, it is not unambiguous, it does not offer cheap identification. Or have you perhaps heard of the viral Popa verses? Hölderlin as a TikTok star?
Speaking of Hölderlin, he left a note in Hyperion that language is a great abundance. "But the best always remains in solitude, resting in its depth like a pearl at the bottom of the sea."
The reductionist process whittles down the language to the slender body of the poem. In a world of excess words, excess attitudes, excess "opinions," this is scandalous and therefore marginal. Besides, poetry counts on the ineffable, it cannot do without it, just as Eros cannot do without Thanatos.
The poem creates a space in language where it can remain alive. It unites doubt, question and silence. It preserves meaning, the wisdom that, as Eliot says, we have lost in knowledge. Or as Sloterdijk says – it is not about knowing as much as possible, but about not becoming petrified by what we know. Digital hyper-information is connected to our indifference, to our acceptance of the game in which prejudices disguised as opinions compete for attention. Which is like a board. Everyone has one.
Now that we've mentioned Larry Flynt, the pioneer of the American pornographic press, it's time to say what the court he was in decided because he wrote about a guy having sex with his mother. Does the First Amendment on freedom of speech cover lewd insults?
Yes. The court ruled so. Larry Flynt knew what was at stake: "If the First Amendment protects a shitbag like me, then it will protect all of you, because I am the worst case!"
Freedom without responsibility – we have long lived in Flint's world. In it, bags of shit spread their contents without consequences by sticking the label "my opinion" on those bags.
In this toxic universe, meaning has retreated to the margins, in order to survive. Freedom is not wrong. But without responsibility, it is not right. Without a social agreement on how we will treat each other, we will all sooner or later turn into flint bags of shit. Or into hermits.
Yet poetry knows a better way through these dilemmas about freedom, language, right and wrong living. One of the greatest mystics and poets that humanity has had, Rumi, says: Beyond right and wrong there is a field. There I will meet you.
Bonus video:
