‘Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?’ The line is a revised version of one in the Marx Brothers’ movie Duck Soup, itself a revision of a popular song from 1904. It speaks to the fact that there are situations in which we would prefer not to learn the truth; situations in which we want to be deceived; and others where we want to be deceived even though the deception is so flimsy that we can see right through it. ‘Who you gonna believe’, the White House asked us after the infamous 30 June debate between Biden and Trump, ‘me or your lying eyes?’. It turned out we preferred the evidence of our own eyes; lying has its limits.

The difference between believing and pretending to believe may seem important, but perhaps it isn’t: in professional wrestling the term ‘kayfabe’ refers to the willing suspension of disbelief that leads the audience to treat staged and choreographed bouts as if they were real. The philosopher David Hume thought most people who listened to hellfire sermons didn’t actually believe in hellfire (or, indeed, in a life after death), but nonetheless they got a thrill out of being terrified. He was too nice a chap to suggest (as Lucretius would have done) that they took delight in the thought of their enemies and neighbours being roasted alive.

Mundus vult decipi, wrote Sebastian Brant (author of The Ship of Fools) in 1542, in a book written partly in Latin and partly in German: ‘The world wants to be deceived.’ Si mundus vult decipi, decipiatur: ‘If the world will be gulled, let it be gulled,’ wrote Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, in 1638. Two years earlier Samuel Bohl, in a truly obscure work, the Commentarius biblico-rabbinicus super orationem tertiam Esaianam, had (it would seem) first published the proverb in what has become its standard modern form: mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur: ‘People are deceived because they want to be.’ People want to be lied to, and they want to pretend they believe the lies they are told, and the lies they tell themselves. Surely this has always been the case; but the proverb (or, as Burton would have it, with a characteristic display of learning, the diverb) was new.

What was new for Brant, Burton and Bohl was the sense that it really ought to be possible to stand against popular superstition and credulity. This, after all, was a foundational commitment of Protestantism. Even if the populace was illiterate, a trained cadre of ministers could teach it what, and what not, to believe. Popular beliefs – in fairies for example – could be reclassified as ‘old wives’ tales’ (the phrase occurs in Marlowe’s Faustus, but its origins can be traced to the earliest translations of the Bible into English).

In 1646 Thomas Browne published Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very many Received Tenents, and commonly Presumed Truths. The age of print ushered in a new republic of letters, which declared war on false beliefs, and made significant gains against them. This war became inseparable from the rise of a modern, secular, scientific culture, which concerned itself primarily with empirical information, with what it came to call ‘facts’. Now, in the age of the internet, it looks as if that war is being decisively lost.

The citizens of the republic of letters (unlike the first Protestants) never imagined they would eliminate false beliefs here, there, and everywhere. They simply thought they could exclude them from the world of learning. They were, quite simply, elitists. It’s no accident that Brant, Burton, and Browne larded their texts, and even their titles, with Latin phrases. Literacy may have been widespread in 18th-century England, but few could afford copies of Hume or Smith. JS Mill may have defended freedom of speech and lifestyle, but he also thought it appropriate that university graduates should have extra votes in general elections. The elite knew who they were – they could read and even write Latin. (Proficiency in Latin was a requirement for entry to Oxford and Cambridge universities until 1960.)

Something new has happened in our culture. The relationship to self-deception and blatant lying has changed. Truth has been replaced by lived experience, by ‘my truth’, by ‘truthiness’, and even by what we might call in-your-face lying. We see it not only when Trump lies, which he does all the time, but also when the White House assured us that President Biden was ‘fit for duty.’ ‘Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?’

We live in an era of fake news and Orwellian speech, and face new calls for censorship, which is intended to serve a double purpose: to expose selected fake news as a lie, and to uphold approved examples of Orwellian speech as unquestionable. One of the first acts of the new UK government’s Minister for Education, Bridget Phillipson, was to cancel implementation of a law protecting free speech on university campuses. There have been calls from on high for Britain’s Online Safety Act to be toughened up. Yvette Cooper, the UK’s Home Secretary has promised to crack down on those ‘pushing harmful and hateful beliefs’. (In the UK there is no written constitution, and so no constitutional right to free speech. Speech is protected, within limits, by the European Convention on Human Rights.) Calls for censorship have become respectable. Yet everyone knows that censorship is often stupid and arbitrary.

What might be the response to these new calls for censorship? The standard response is to claim that, in a battle between lies and truth, the truth will win, so censorship is unnecessary. ‘Who ever knew truth put to the worst in a free and open encounter?’ asked John Milton. Milton could assume that providence was on the side of truth; more recently the tendency has been to appeal to ‘the marketplace of ideas’. ‘If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal in 1855, and somehow this has become ‘Build it and they will come.’ The truth will always prevail. (This is broadly true in science, where theories are a bit like mousetraps: they either work or they don’t.) But the confidence that good ideas would drive out bad has never been grounded in a coherent account of how ideas are disseminated and adopted (a point that has been forcefully made in recent articles by Faramerz Dhaboiwala).

It is striking that it is not until 1919 that there is talk of a ‘free trade in ideas’ and the seemingly obvious (to us) term ‘the marketplace of ideas’ does not occur until 1953. (Both originate with the US Supreme Court.) It is not a coincidence that talk of a market in ideas postdates the Bolshevik Revolution and crystallises during the Cold War: the concept of a marketplace of ideas served to justify a universal franchise within a market economy. That marketplace has since given way to memes. Richard Dawkins invented the term ‘meme’ in 1976, before the invention of the internet, before the IBM PC. But Dawkins’ best-seller, The Selfish Gene, was a book born out of the computer modelling of Darwinian evolution, and it was a short step to consider how one might model the evolution and replication of ideas.

With hindsight it’s apparent that the confidence that good ideas will drive out bad depended upon a marketplace that was dominated by newspapers, radio stations and publishers owned by people who shared commitments to the market and to democracy. The limits to free speech were thus as much sociological and economic as legal, for only a minority had access to the means of communication. Hence the Bolshevik conviction that you start a revolution by setting up a party newspaper.

We no longer live in that world. There have been three great phases of censorship in the West. First, there was heresy hunting, which became systematic in Europe with the founding of the Dominican order in 1216 and was initially aimed at rooting out the Cathar dualist heresy. Before the printing press, heresy hunting worked: the last French Cathar was burnt in 1321. Then there was state censorship. Licensing of publication began almost as soon as the printing press was invented around 1440. Licensing of plays in England goes back to 1581. Printers and booksellers, theatres and companies of actors are relatively easy to locate and control. In Europe press censorship was pretty effective, until shortly before the French Revolution.

The internet has transformed communication. It creates new opportunities for concealing communications – think of the disappearance from government phones of WhatsApp communications conducted during the covid crisis, despite repeated promises by the first ministers of England, Scotland and Wales to cooperate with the judicial enquiry. Above all, it transforms the dissemination of ideas. The internet is everywhere, unlike theatres and bookshops; it is fast, unlike printing; much of it is free; and almost anyone can use it to communicate ideas and information to other people. Censoring the internet requires, therefore, intensive ‘moderation’ or the blocking of particular sites. Suppose the suggestion that Twitter be banned in the UK was taken up: anybody with a VPN would still be able to access it; only a full Chinese programme of state control could block access to X in the UK.

Just like the printing press, the internet is a force for both good and bad. Brant, Burton, and Browne were innovators in the world of print publication, and the internet also has successful innovations which have stood firm against the spread of misinformation: Wikipedia is a striking example. But the decentred, democratic character of the internet means that quality controls are much harder to maintain than in a world of print. Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius ullum (‘Rumour – no other evil travels faster’), wrote Virgil. ‘Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late,’ wrote Swift. ‘A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.’ The sentiment is not new, but the falsehood flies faster than it did and the world has shrunk.

The new information age thus creates new problems both for those advocating free speech (lies really are spreading faster and further) and for those advocating censorship (one can’t burn a meme). Free speech has become harder to defend, but at the same time censorship has become harder to implement. The issues are confused because arguments for and against censorship are so often unprincipled. Moves to censor fake news run into the obvious difficulty that all sides are at it, so they become in effect calls to allow one’s own fake news to be disseminated (‘The President is fit to serve’) while one’s opponent’s (‘The election was stolen’) is censored. This is the frequently noted paradox of cancel culture – few people get upset when their opponents are cancelled, but most are outraged when their allies are. The ‘era of culture wars is over’, said Lisa Nandy, the UK culture secretary, a sentiment declared by both left and right, with both sides assuming the other is always to blame. No sooner had she spoken than a full-scale culture war broke out in the UK over whether people with XY chromosomes should be eligible to box as women in the Olympics if their passports declared them to be female.

What is to be done? How to respond to performative lying and the deliberate dissemination of false news? How do we respond to the broader crisis whereby the old elites have lost their legitimacy? How do we explain people’s growing willingness to be deceived? The last question is, I think, the most important one.

If people want to be deceived it is because they are profoundly dissatisfied with the world as it is, and see no viable route to improvement. It is because they remember what seems (at least with hindsight) a better world, of tight-knit communities and shared values, that they turn to fantasy solutions and welcome performative lying. The great age of rising standards of living was also the age of the marketplace of ideas; truth telling goes hand in hand with optimism. So ideas alone, without growing prosperity and community cohesion, won’t solve the present crisis. Those who advocate an end to growth seem willfully blind to the likely social consequences. The middle and working classes are being asked to pay for the pursuit (the, under present technological conditions, impossible pursuit) of net zero. Thus, our society is riven by a fundamental contradiction: it promises the dream of prosperity, and at the same time (to take a small but telling example) the UK government cancels winter fuel payments for pensioners.

That’s the big problem; but within it lies the immediate problem of free speech versus censorship. Those of us who believe that we need more free speech not less need to step away from the casual platitudes (such as ‘the marketplace of ideas’) on which we have relied. The fundamental argument for free speech is simple. Winston Churchill said that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all the others. Free speech, given the imperfections of human nature, is the worst way to manage disagreement, except for all the others.

There have to be limits. The first book-length defence of freedom of publication is Elie Luzac’s Essai sur la liberté de produire des sentimens (1749). Luzac took the view that no belief could be regarded as well-founded unless it was prepared to face opposition, and so those who believed in a soul, for example, must listen to, and debate with materialists. The book is therefore a polemic against ‘No Debate’, and the principles expressed would become those of JS Mill. But Luzac admitted there were circumstances in which censorship was necessary: a government could only claim a right to censor if it had first allowed the need for censorship of a particular topic to be subjected to public debate. Only in an open society (to use Karl Popper’s terminology) could censorship be legitimate.

Western societies have had three methods of dealing with intellectual disagreement: education, which always involves a measure of indoctrination (see Thomas Kuhn’s account of ‘normal’ science); censorship; and public disputation. Public disputation, which lay at the heart of the university system throughout the middle ages, rarely resolves intellectual conflict in the short term, but of the three it is the only one which carries within it a bias towards change and, indeed, towards progress. That bias was muted as long as disputations were principally concerned with how to interpret Aristotle, but came to the fore as soon as he ceased to be the only authority.

Competition between ideas may be much less efficient than competition between enterprises, and bad ideas may often thrive, but competition makes possible creative destruction, innovation, and, on occasion, progress. It’s easy, of course, to think that competition between ideas will be unaffected by the latest proposals for more censorship – that only hate speech is under threat –but note the UK Home Secretary’s reference to ‘harmful beliefs’ (I remember when, only recently, arguing that Sweden’s response to the covid epidemic was sensible constituted advocating a harmful belief).

Mundus vult decipi; if the truth is to triumph we need to create a world (through economic growth, through education) in which people don’t want to be deceived but are willing to, as we used to say, face the facts. We (in Europe and the United States) are in the early stages of a developing crisis, where immigration is the flash point, and law and order, free speech, and democracy are at risk. Our politicians are not up to scratch. Only practitioners of kayfabe can forget that the principles exposed by Keir Starmer in 2020 or Kamala Harris in 2019 are very different from the principles they espouse, with apparently equal sincerity, now. We need new intellectual leadership. And less censorship, not more.