Charlie Hicks – Author

Welcome to this weeks blog post, and if you are a new reader, Welcome and I hope you enjoy reading it. If your a returning follower, thank you for coming back.

This week has been a bit of an eye opener for me. If you remember from my previous post, I said I was going to go off-piste and reading from a different genre. Well I can tell you I did and still am. I found a copy of the Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han (ISBN 978-0804795098) and I found myself drawn in further and further by the concepts he was explaining, that depression was due to an excess of positivity, and that our culture of ‘Can Do’ and Achievement was actually harming us not only individually but as a society on the whole. As I writ this blog I still have about a quarter of the book to go. And whilst I don’t usually read philosophy as a rule, (probably because I think it is boring). I went down a little rabbit hole and started to read another philosophy book, a very ancient book. The Apology of Socrates by Plato. Another thing struck me, that even after nearly 2500 years , it still has a resonance that rings true to this very day. We call it the Cancel Culture now, but Socrates was tried for hearsay because he had upset a few people with his ideas. earlier this week I was reading about the Online Safety Act here in the UK. It made me think of parallels with Aeropagitica by John Milton first publish in 1644. Here Milton argued the fundamental principles of ‘A Right to Freedom of Speech and Expression’ and how censorship in any form is ultimately a destructive thing. I know that many will say that the Online Safety Act is mainly aimed at the Porn industry, but it isn’t; it covers the whole of the internet in such a way that you would have to identify yourself in order to access anything that the UK Government deems un-savoury. What the United Kingdom Government has done is to censor the internet on a scale that would make any despot dictator proud of achieving, it is mind boggling, and then I happened on a YouTube video which details how this new act wasn’t originated from Parliament or public debate. If you interested I have put a link in box below. And this got me returning to Milton, and the premise at the time he wrote the Aeropagitica, that all published written work would have to be licensed or censored. Is this truly the way the internet is going, did we live through its wild west days and the golden age of the internet, only to have this fountain, this treasure to be censored and controlled by the elite. I do hope not.

There is a philosophy that states “Everything happens for a reason” Aristotle. As I write this blog and reflect on the week that has been, I have seen a pattern. My journey to another genre has opened my eyes and allowed me to rationalise and think about things and how they are are all interconnected across time and space. What started out as a simple experiment, has become a life changing event for myself. I have grown, I have appreciated and understood a different way of thinking, and I have accepted that the arguments put forward have merit not just on their own but as a large part of the collective argument around the subject of censorship.

Maybe, just maybe I was destined to undertake this journey, that it happened for a reason. Who knows, but I do know one thing, my little experiment had unexpected side-effects, and if I’m being really honest. I Liked Them!