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

I was flipping through the FX channel yesterday and bumped into a rerun of the great Penn & Teller, Bullshit!. Penn and Teller are two famous magicians who perform in Las Vegas and have their own show, Bullshit!, which takes on politics, challenges the status quo, and tears apart fallacies and popular folklore. In this episode they closed with a magic trick: burning the American flag while talking about Freedom of Expression. Watch the clip before you keep reading:

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of America’s Founding Fathers. Politics itself doesn’t grab me much, but the philosophy behind it does. And there was Penn, burning the American flag live on TV.

You may not know this, but that act, common in public protests across countless countries, is considered a crime in much of the world. Not in the United States. The First Amendment guarantees Freedom of Expression, so it’s unconstitutional for the government to censor the gesture, treated as symbolic expression.

At the end of the trick, for those who don’t know it, Penn recites 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 simple: Freedom of Expression, the free circulation of ideas, is worth more than the flag that symbolizes it, and more than the institutions behind it. It’s a strong value, and it’s the ground a great society is built on.

That reminded me of another famous case, Hustler vs. Jerry Falwell. Falwell was one of those famous religious TV leaders, and Hustler is one of the biggest pornographic magazines in the US. The fight started with a parody of a Campari ad published in the magazine, running a fake interview where Falwell describes a bout of incest with his own mother, all washed down with Campari.

Falwell sued Hustler. The case climbed all the way 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 unto 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 dramatizes exactly this episode. Watch the oral argument in the video below:

For a society to flourish and sustain itself, it needs solid foundations. That’s why I admire the Founding Fathers so much, men who back in the 18th century had the vision to write masterpieces like the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

For me, all of this connects to the idea of Organizations in the broad sense, and companies in the narrower one. On a smaller scale, a company is a community, with its own culture, rules, laws, and government.

And it astonishes me how primitive the ideological foundation of these communities still is. Most look like a totalitarian government, by the textbook 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 plenty of companies with the definition above. Do you have the right to “freedom of expression” inside yours? Or are some opinions subject to punishment, especially when they look like the Falwell case?

In my opinion, a Mission and Values document, so as not to be totally useless, should look like the Bill of Rights and start, at the very least, with something on the level of the First Amendment.