Self-Censorship

There appears to be a deep-seated revulsion towards having information censored whether it is words blacked out on a government report or the media completely ignoring an issue/perspective. Regardless of whether it is noticeable, censorship is unparalleled in its prevalence within human life. While we might accept certain levels of censorship within politics, security, sex life, toilet life and the media, most of us are completely unaware that we censor every other aspect of our lives. It is self-censorship that has stripped away our ability to perceive, appreciate and expand into multiple realities. We have become so adept at self-censorship that most of us are unaware of what information is being lost. Self-censorship occurs on multiple levels, inexplicably within our thoughts, our feelings, our perceptions, our construction of time and the time we spend asleep. People must learn to understand why they self-censor and how to begin to explore what has been buried.

Self-censorship occurs on three levels:

The natural subconscious, the habitual subconscious and the conscious.

The first and deepest level of self-censoring processes have developed as part of our survival and can be thought of as natural subconscious self-censoring. An example of natural subconscious self-censoring is when a person walks into a room, they may notice the clock, the bookshelf, the light, the music and may remain completely oblivious to the stains on the carpet, the missing chess piece or the crack in the window. On this level, each one of us observes what is, for whatever reason, most important for us to observe and censors out the information deemed unnecessary.

How often is it that you feel the texture of the fabric of your shirt, skirt or pantaloons? You are always feeling it but the feeling (in all its non-importance) is censored by your subconscious. Compare this to our natural focus on faces and predators whereby we would find it mostly impossible to ignore a jaguar in a room we just walked into. This level of self-censoring is based around energy efficiency, we simply must conserve energy for life threatening information and reduce it for ambient sensations.

So while there are many things that we can get away with missing, there are entire careers and lives based on uncensoring this information. Consider a chess player, beyond the theoretical knowledge of set moves exists an active mind that must consider every piece important. They must see each piece in action and its possibilities, rather than just focus on what is typically deemed ‘important’. Similarly, any form of detective work such as science requires a mind that is open to not only what is considered subconsciously important but to opening our perceptions to allow information deemed ‘unimportant’ into awareness. This stretching and flexing of human awareness (a luxury of an environment whereby we can move our focus from jaguars to quantum mechanics) allows us to explore new frontiers of existence.

The secondary level of censoring is our habitual subconscious which arises from the constructions of our society and social habits.

Take for example the famous riddle:

A man and his son are in a fatal car crash, instantly killing the father and critically injuring his son. When he is taken to the ED surgery, the doctor looks down at the child and says
“I cannot perform surgery on this child for he is my son”

How is this possible?

This riddle is meant to bring awareness to peoples inherent sexism. Most people are tripped up because when they imagine a doctor, they imagine a man and therefore complicate the answer by trying to imagine how it was possible for the child to have two fathers (completely plausible today but under further questioning they are both biologically related). If we are to imagine that at any one point in time we have access to any piece of our stored neural information and subsequently a problem is placed in front of us, it is in our best interest to immediately censure all information that we have never connected to the subject of the problem before. If someone asks us how to change their tire, it is probably a waste of valuable neural energy to reach into the depths of your geography classes and more efficient to connect through everything car related. Undoubtedly this form of relatedness referencing can be incredibly bias and constricting.

Most of this censoring occurs without our noticing and can be thought of as subconscious compartmentalisation. If we compare the earth to our brain, then all the lands surfaces are our stored memories and the lines on the map which draw state boundaries are our secondary level of censoring. We create imaginary borders between information to make our recall more efficient. In the same way that borders are imaginary and will shift under societal pressure, our brain draws up the connectivity between subjects based on the values of society. One may attribute a miraculous event to god — as strange events share close connection with spiritual knowledge. By allowing one’s brain to wantonly compartmentalise and connect, we censor our ability to explore beyond our mental habits. If we take events for granted, then we may never be able to see the true causalities within life.

The third level is the conscious censoring. Through this process, we actively suppress information that we either do not want or do not deem important. Take for example the feeling of jealousy, it is one of the most commonly suppressed emotions. When jealousy is experienced it is rare for a person to not attempt to cover up their jealousy either externally or internally. This active suppression may be due to shame or it not being the ‘right moment’ to feel. People may become so adept at suppressing their emotions that they become unaware that they are even feeling. Furthermore, we may actively censor people that we do not deem important enough to interact with. Consider how often people walk past someone who needs help, is begging for money or someone we don’t want to talk to. We decide that an interaction is too uncomfortable for us and then pretend they do not exist.

This level of self-censoring is the one that most people have some form of awareness of. We reflect it commonly in media through characterising people ‘realising’ that they are in love with someone or ‘exploding’ from suppressed frustration. For whatever reasons that we chose to suppress certain emotions and to induce others it has become a large part of our social life.

These three levels of self-censorship make up our day to day experience of life. The nuances between each human will decide their values and movements. If one of us is aware of the pain and suffering of another human being then we may value human rights, if we are aware of the natural environment around us then we may value environmentalism etc. There are many methods that we can undertake to naturally or unnaturally uncensor one of these levels.

There is one defining example of self-censorship that has been encouraged on almost all levels by the western world. This sizable chunk of censored life takes up approximately 1/4 of our lifetime and even though we may spend more time doing it than all the hours of work, time traveling and training our bodies, it is seldom discussed seriously. It is so well censored that every single person experiences it and is either shamelessly unaware or afraid of talking about it. It is dreaming that has been snatched away from our collective consciousness.

If you are one of the many people who claims to never have dreams, or to rarely dream then you are one of the many people who simply does not remember. Studies have shown that everyone engages in dreaming and that the only difference is between those that remember and those that do not. If you do not consider this to be earthshaking then you are severely dismissing the consequences of actively censoring a process of undeniable significance to complex life. The process of dreaming occurs for hours within our time spent asleep and dream recall is a process that can be trained.

Many people consider dreams to be nonsense or perhaps even childish. An entire workforce may discuss the irrelevance of a stock report or who hooked up at an office party but no one will come and talk about the dream they had where their entire being was shattered while they watched their family being executed. Dreams have tangible and emotional impacts upon those that can recall them. Yet if one was to say that a dream changed their life, they would quickly be dismissed. Every aspect, every part of this chunk of our life is shut down and stomped on by those that are too afraid to explore this realm.

While everyone is willing to take notice of how many cups of water they drink a day due to health reasons, it is one of our greatest shames that we do not attempt to remember our dreams. That we are willing to censor such a huge part of our life should bring sadness to the hearts of all. If a doctor was to tell you that you had forgotten every single morning of your life surely it would have such an impact. If society had granted us a forum, a private conversation as children to encourage us to remember our dreams then this world of life would have remained open to us. If we weren’t afraid to ask someone what they dreamed of last night, we would be encouraging a fuller human experience.

The only way to understand our human experience is to explore every moment of our existence. Clues, solutions and meaning can be extracted from places deemed worthless by society. We should not forget that during the genesis of western philosophy in ancient Greece, a time where people could begin to explore the meaning of existence and the exploration of emotions, slavery was an unspoken reality. People would explore the boundaries of language, love, happiness and death but none that we have recorded in their millions of scrolls and lessons turned their attention to the chasm of human suffering that is slavery. They self-censored an entire portion of the world so that even the most cynical philosophers didn’t rise to criticize the institution of human slavery. This blindness is our inheritance, we self-censor and allow huge chunks of life to be veiled by shadow. It is as if we live in a house with hundreds of rooms but only ever enter the few that we know.

There can be no doubt of the importance to explore these shadowed rooms. We may be able to make the marathon run from birth to death by only exploring the few rooms that we do such as the relationship room, the job room, the sports room etc.

Have we truly lived if we have not at least peeked within each room and experienced each part of our life?

There is and will only ever be one you. That we should censor so much of that experience and live only specific parts of our lives is a crime that we shouldn’t dare commit any longer. Our self-censoring habits have existed for so many years now that there is no guarantee that they still hold the value they did earlier. We should uncensor if only just to reassure the continuation of that particular habit. There must be times that we accept the pains, horrors and tragedies of life, yet it is understandable to cover them up. However there is no doubt that the efficiency of our self-censoring is connected to the growing speed at which we as adults live life. It is a shared experience of those in post teenage years that time is speeding by year by year, yet we should re-frame our perspective. It is not that time is flowing faster, it is that we are censoring more and more information and living less and less of our lives. As children, the novelty of emotion, life and relationships was a barrier to our self-censoring habits. We had no choice but to experience second to second life. Now that we are adults, there are so many experiences that we do not want to experience and just cover them up.

While this may be perceived as an incredible skill to be able to speed through time behind a desk and to just live on the weekends let us not forget that there are thousands of other experiences that we have subconsciously suppressed. It is not just the censoring of work, but the censoring of sadness, the censoring of sexuality, the censoring of breath, the censoring of sickness, the censoring of dreams, the censoring of confusion, the censoring of taste, the censoring of fullness, the censoring of creativity, the censoring of love and the censoring of humanity.

It is now your choice to revisit the rooms that you have long left closed. It is your choice whether to shorten or expand the experience of life.