[Off-Topic] Penn & Teller and Larry Flynt, on Freedom

I was watching the FX channel yesterday and by chance bumped into a rerun of the excellent show Penn & Teller, Bullshit!. They are famous magicians who perform in Las Vegas, have appeared on several TV shows, and have their own program, Bullshit!, which discusses politics, challenges the status quo, and breaks down fallacies and popular folklore. In this episode they ended with a magic trick, burning the American flag and talking about Freedom of Expression. Watch this excerpt before continuing:

It’s no news that I’m a big fan of the Founding Fathers of America. I’m not particularly fond of discussing politics, but philosophy interests me. In this show, Penn burns the American flag. I don’t know if you know this, but this act, commonly performed in public protests in countless countries, is considered a crime. But not in the United States. Because of the First Amendment, which guarantees Freedom of Expression, it’s unconstitutional for the government to censor this act because it’s considered a symbolic Expression.

At the end of the trick, for those who don’t know, he quotes the second stanza of the American anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner:

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep, Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes, What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam, In full glory reflected now shines in the stream: ‘Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The idea is that Freedom of Expression, the free circulation of ideas, is much more important than the Flag itself that symbolizes it, including its institutions. This value is very strong and extremely important for the foundation of a great society.

Thinking about this, I remembered another famous case on this subject, Hustler vs. Jerry Falwell. Falwell was one of those famous religious TV leaders. Hustler is one of the biggest pornographic magazines in the US. The point of contention was a satire of a Campari ad published in Hustler, where it shows a satirical interview with Falwell talking about incest with his mother, washed down with Campari.

Falwell sued Hustler. In the end, the case went to the Supreme Court, and the decision was unanimous, 8 to 0:

“At the heart of the First Amendment is the recognition of the fundamental importance of the free flow of ideas and opinions on matters of public interest and concern. The freedom to speak one’s mind is not only an aspect of individual liberty — and thus a good in itself — but also is essential to the common quest for truth and the vitality of society as a whole. We have therefore been particularly vigilant to ensure that individual expressions of ideas remain free from governmentally imposed sanctions.”

If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend the film The People vs. Larry Flynt which shows this episode. See the argument of the case in the video below:

For a society to flourish and sustain itself, it needs solid foundations. That’s why I’m a big fan of the Founding Fathers, who in the 1700s had the vision to write masterpieces like the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

In this case, all this thinking for me blends with the thinking about Organizations, in the broad sense of the word, and Companies in the more restricted sense. On a miniature scale, a company is a community, with its own culture, rules, laws, and governments. And in that sense it astonishes me how the ideological foundation of these communities is still very primitive. Most still resemble Totalitarian Governments, according to the definition:

Totalitarianism is a political system where the state, usually under the control of a single political organization, faction, or class, recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever it wishes. Totalitarianism is generally characterized by the coincidence of authoritarianism (where ordinary citizens have no significant part in the state’s decision-making) and ideology (a perverse scheme of values promulgated by means of institutions to direct most aspects of public and private life).

Totalitarian regimes or movements maintain themselves in political power by means of an official ideology and propaganda disseminated by state-controlled media, a single party controlling the state, cults of personality, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of free discussion and criticism, the use of mass surveillance, and the use of state terrorism.

Sound familiar? I guarantee you can describe many companies with the definition above. Do you have the right to “freedom of expression”? Or are some opinions subject to punishment, especially if they resemble the Falwell case?

In my opinion, a Mission and Values document of a company, so as not to be totally useless, should resemble the Bill of Rights and start at least with the same thing as the First Amendment.