Somebody is in the news recently for allegedly getting assaulted after uttering fighting words. It turns out fighting words are commonly excepted from protected free speech. Contrary to the elementary folklore, free speech appears not to be universal, but is thought to be based on the libertarian principles argued by Mill, that speech which does not do harm to others should not be proscribed. All right, so far this is all common knowledge. But is that all? Is free speech (harm or not) a flawed idea to begin with? There is an old and generally discursive article by Kendall called The “Open Society” and Its Fallacies, which challenges the tenets of Mill’s libertarian stance on speech at its core.
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That’s the gist of the title of this article criticizing Hu Shi’s advocacy of the baihuawen movement earlier last century. It says that far from reforming literature, in which it failed and was doomed to fail unbeknownst to the advocates, the movement unleashed a quiet revolution that overturned the classes in society. The elites lost their wenyan which separated them from the foolish masses and thus must allow the foolish masses, who are anybody who can read but perhaps not think, to participate and have their opinions be counted as equals.

This opening sets up this opinion later in the piece:

而对于一个健康、合理的社会来说，知识分子绝对应该是社会的唯一的统治阶级。
In a healthy, sensible society, the intellectual elite should absolutely be the society’s sole ruling class.

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