Free Speech

I remember when I was a young budling entering into the world of health and wellbeing. I remember being slapped down almost constantly to the point of PTSD with some of my colleagues. The main reason was that I had quite a lot of biases and prejudices, and probably still do.

The world of Mental Health, Wellbeing, Charity & Giving is quite a complex world, even more complex and frustrating if you're a man and tend to say it as it is. If a telephone box is rusty red then I opt for the shortest route and quickest explainer. It's rusty red.

But sometimes this isn't the best course of action because who knows how the telephone box got that way? Maybe it rained constantly and through no fault of its own began to rust, therefor instead of being bright red, it's gone a bit rusty. And it's a shame, and it's not the box's fault.

Okay, now that's an inanimate object and I'm just giving you a stupid example but I worked in this sphere for almost 20 years and when working with people you really needed to detach yourself from reality at times. Like when we would have people in from the prison service. It did not matter what they had done, only that they would go out in a better place.

The beginning of my journey was shaped with all sorts of oopsies and faux pas. Like for example you couldn't just laugh hysterically when someone made a blonde joke out in the open. And yes, they were fair so dick jokes were out of the question too. Essentially you weren't allowed to make any type of reference to anything stereotypical whatsoever.

I mean, I get it, we weren't exactly working in an open office with a bunch of well adjusted professionals, we were mostly working with people that had more childhood and adult psychological trauma than someone that were to catch Marky in the shower naked.

A certain amount of care and tact was needed. We needed to be careful about what we said. Especially when working on people's self confidence and self worth. It was fair I guess.

As a sad consequence, and a sort of bi-product of this silence, we had to keep our dark sense of humours at bay. And if you watch me in the Man Cave then my humour is a bit like Trumpmans, although I'm just probably not as open as him about it.

This ends up being a form of control -- where everyone is at the behest of the most ill. The more complex a person we had in, the more silent we had to be about things. I mean, in a workplace, and in such a situation I'd agree why this is needed, but only because of the work that we were doing.

What really surprises me is that workplaces are slowly going this way too. The big ones. People are silencing themselves because they are scared that they will get written up for saying something offensive. I've read it about working at Google for example; there's a very hostile atmosphere between those that can say what they want (the mainstream narrative aligns with them), and those that have to silence their beliefs just to keep hold of a job.

As a consequence and direct result -- those that are free to say anything they want to without limiting what they say have all the power, regardless of what mindhurdles they tell you. They have the weight of the company behind them. It's their word against yours, and you are the wrong sort of person my friend.

And that doesn't sit well with me. The reason I maintain a value of free speech in the man cave is so I will always be held to account. There will never be any retribution for calling me [whatever] either.

But sometimes it's not about me either. There will always be great ideas pulled out of a conflict between members, people are inspired to send me ideas, however shit they may be -- and that to me is a healthy working environment.

If you only let one people say what they want, and the rest have to shut up because of some illusionary persecution then you'll never create any new ideas. It stifles creativity. It stifles progress.

So that's why there will always be free speech in the cave and we will bend for no-one.