Free speech isn’t just a legal right. It’s a psychological necessity.
That’s why today’s culture of silencing, shouting down, and canceling isn’t just a political problem—it’s a mental health one, insists Greg Lukianoff, a lawyer by training who is president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Lukianoff has spent 25 years defending campus speech. He’s also a survivor of suicidal depression, and what saved him wasn’t censorship. It was cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).
“CBT changed—and probably saved—my life,” he says. “And CBT has a lot in common with freedom of speech.” CBT works by challenging distorted thinking patterns, and so does free discourse. When we suppress ideas, we suppress opportunities to test reality.
Free Speech Is How We Find Truth
“The way we figure out truth is a process of checking and rechecking,” Lukianoff says. “And it doesn’t work if you just talk to people you already agree with.” In other words, if you want to know the truth about the world, you have to let people contradict you. Free speech isn’t just a liberty, it’s a tool for cognitive calibration, Lukianoff told a recent TED audience. .
His observation mirrors a core principle of CBT: cognitive restructuring. To grow, we must be willing to examine and challenge distorted thoughts. Research shows that tolerating ambiguity and cognitive dissonance is essential for critical thinking and emotional regulation.
When we shield ourselves from opposing viewpoints, we may think we’re trading truth for comfort. But that comfort is short-lived.
Free Speech Makes You Smarter and Stronger
Cancel culture, Lukianoff contends, is an expression of cognitive fragility. In 2024, Israeli lawyer Shlomo Bar-Yoshafat was scheduled to give a talk at the University of California Berkeley. Nearly 200 protesters showed up with the explicit intent to shut down the talk. They broke into the building where the talk was taking place, smashed two windows and a door, and forced the evacuation of the building and the cancelation of the talk. Several attendees reported being called antisemitic slurs and were physically assaulted.
Leaders of that protest organized the cancellation attempt because, they said, they believed what they referred to as the speaker’s “genocidal values” presented a “threat to the safety and well-being of Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students on campus.”
Such “mob censorship,” Lukianoff says, results in moral and logical inversions—threatening and harming others while claiming to defend safety and well-being. It’s also where cancel culture and cognitive fragility collide.
As Lukianoff observes, today’s students are often taught to avoid distressing ideas. But avoidance doesn’t help anyone. Experiential avoidance—dodging unwanted thoughts or feelings—actually increases anxiety and emotional reactivity.
In CBT, exposure to feared stimuli reduces their emotional charge over time. The same goes for speech. “Avoiding uncomfortable ideas doesn’t make you safe,” Lukianoff warns. “It makes you fragile.”
Free Speech Protects the Powerless
“Free speech has always been for the powerless,” Lukianoff says. Figures like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela all championed freedom of speech. Civil rights icon John Lewis used to say that without freedom of speech, the civil rights movement would have been “a bird without wings.”
What all those transformative figures understood was that “free speech was not the weapon of the powerful,” Lukianoff says. “It is the best check on power ever invented.” It aigns with the concepts of psychological empowerment and internal locus of control—having a sense of agency and believing that you can influence your world.
Those concerned about protecting marginalized voices aren’t always aware that silencing others doesn’t protect the people who don’t want to listen; it just leaves them in the dark. We can’t change minds when we can’t hear what they think. And, as Lukianoff says, “You are not safer for knowing less about what people really think.”
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Even Bad People Can Have Good Ideas
However hard it is to accept, Likianoff says, “even bad people can have good ideas.” (The corollary is also true: Even good people can have bad ideas.) Life would be so much easier if bad people were always wrong and good people were always right. But that’s just not how the world works.
Cancel culture, however, thrives on moral rigidity. It treats people as either good or evil—and makes ideas guilty by association with people we don’t like. Such a mindset is rooted in what social psychologist Philip Tetlock calls the “intuitive prosecutor” model of cognition: We defend our side and condemn the other, when we should be open to criticizing our own side and being persuaded by the other.
The result is moral exclusion: the idea that certain people don’t deserve to be heard. Once someone is seen as morally polluted, their arguments are dismissed—even if valid.
Mental Health Requires Mental Freedom
If we want a culture that nurtures mental health, we need the strength to hear, challenge, and grow from what makes us uncomfortable.
When conservative pundit Anne Coulter was scheduled to speak at Cornell University a few years ago, students who disagreed with her views shouted at her, “Your words are violence.” “About half of Americans, by some estimates, believe that words can be violence.” Lukianoff said in his TED talk. But that’s an obvious falsehood. In fact, he says, “free speech cures violence.” And a culture of free speech makes us safer.
Nor does suppression strengthen us. Dialogue does. But dialogue can’t happen when people harass and intimidate others while falsely calling it “free speech.”
Freedom of speech fosters truth-seeking. And it also fosters what psychologists call cognitive flexibility—the ability to entertain multiple viewpoints, adapt to change, and tolerate discomfort.
If we can’t tolerate hearing what’s wrong, we’ll never figure out what’s right—not in politics, not in culture, and not even in our own minds.