When I hear censorship or censoring things I always think of the bleep that happens when someone swears on a TV show. This is obviously for protecting the ears of our young so they don't go and swear in public. This is sensible. Being exposed to these things early on in a person's development could cause them to internalize or interpret their place in our society incorrect, thereby causing children to develop in a way that harms their ability to integrate into our society effectively. To expand on this idea, if a child sees swearing on TV or some other media source, they add that idea of swearing and add that to the culture of what they know and how they act. Before this, the child fit perfectly in society’s culture of how to act. The child confused a culture very different from his own, as his own and because of this, began to extend past the breaking point for acceptable behavior. In The Republic, Plato talks about stories and how for a perfectly just society, there has to be only good because if there is evil or tragedy, there is unjustness. “The first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only.” (Plato 49) It is commonly accepted that censorship is bad but censorship laws allow individuals to speak freely in the United States. No individual may be censored, as long as their speech does not encourage violence, hatred or disregard for the law. Most countries have censorship laws but the most harsh as China’s. China censors things like democracy, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 police brutality and corruption. The United States has never gone to this kind of restriction but 1920 was the start of prohibition. To put it simply, it was a disaster. Because alcohol was banned, it went underground and became an illegal drug which made it even more popular by encouraging organized crime. The reason that I talk about this is because of my curiosity about if no one knew anything of evil, if it would exist. My theory about why Prohibition didn’t work is because people already knew about it. If nobody knew anything about drugs, guns, violence, or evil at all, would evil exist? To answer this question, we need to look inside who we are as human beings. Because God created free will he also created evil, or was it a byproduct of survival of the fittest?
Even if there was no record of anybody being unjust to anybody else, would injustice still exist inside all of us as a possibility of another choice. A just society can’t exist without just people and when given a choice between just and unjustness, even though you have done the just thing your whole life, you might not be able to stop yourself from trying something different. People can go their whole lives without being unjust, but some people can’t and even with no knowledge of evil, they can still do it. When people are given a choice between just and unjust, it is inevitable that not 100% will be good. And when one person is unjust, no one is just unless this hidden seed is stamped out immediately. Curiosity is man’s greatest enemy and The Republic can only function without curiosity. Without curiosity, there is nothing to strive for, and then, does life have a meaning?
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