A universal and ineradicable feature of the human condition is our fallibility. We can be, and all of us sometimes are, wrong about things. Even when doing our best to be attentive, intelligent, dispassionate, judicious, and honest, we can draw conclusions that are unwarranted and unsound.
Our fallibility extends not only to minor, relatively unimportant matters; we can be wrong about big, profoundly important questions, too—questions of meaning and value; questions of human nature, the human good, human dignity, and human destiny. Even while sincerely regarding and proclaiming ourselves to be on the side of justice and human rights, we can be wrong—deeply, even tragically—about what justice requires or what are, in truth, human rights. And we can be wrong even when we are supremely confident in our convictions.
Consider that each and every one of us, at every conscious moment of our lives, holds in his or her head some beliefs that are false. That’s certainly not because we want to believe things that are untrue. It’s simply a feature of the human condition.
People of goodwill, intellectually and morally serious people of every shade of belief, have in common a desire to know the truth and to live by the truth. We want to avoid falling so deeply in love with our opinions, whatever they happen to be, that we prefer them to the truth. If something we believe, even if it’s a belief we cherish, is in fact false, we want to know that. We want to get ourselves in line with the truth, even if it means abandoning an opinion we had deeply held. Even when the truth is a hard truth, we’d rather know it than continue to embrace a falsehood, even a comfortable and comforting falsehood.
If, however, we are to swap out at least some of the false beliefs we hold for true beliefs, then not only must we respect the right of freedom of speech of people who wish to challenge our opinions, we must also—and this is more difficult—be willing to actually listen to their challenges and criticisms and engage them in an honest, truth-seeking spirit. This is the upshot of what it means to practice intellectual humility—a virtue without which true civil discourse, and therefore true civic friendship, is impossible.
It is important to understand what civil discourse is—and isn’t. Civil discourse is not mere politesse. It does not consist of merely listening politely and patiently while someone makes the case for a view that is contrary to one’s own opinions. In genuine civil discourse, each party to the discussion or debate allows himself genuinely to be challenged by his interlocutor. Why? Because the goal—shared by the partners—is not winning a victory for oneself or one’s party or tribe; rather, it is getting to, or deepening understandings of, the truth. Participants in civil discourse argue, sometimes passionately, but not with the ultimate objective of winning—as in competitive high school or collegiate debate. And so, the conversation partners consider and assess the arguments presented by their ostensible adversaries in their most favorable light. Each sincerely entertains the possibility that the view he or she currently holds is wrong and should be abandoned.
Of course, this can be very hard indeed.
Why? Because of another feature of the human condition. We human beings do tend to fall in love with our opinions. There are beliefs that we deeply hold and, indeed, cherish—especially moral, political, and religious beliefs—that we come to regard as so integral to who we are that we experience challenges to them as personal attacks or assaults on our very selves.
In other words, we human beings tend to wrap our emotions more or less tightly around our convictions.
Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s certainly not bad in itself. In a certain respect, it’s a good thing, and indeed a necessary thing. We need some measure of emotional investment in our convictions if we are to get anything done. And this is true not only when it comes to serving big, important causes that may require courage and sacrifices; it’s true of even mundane, but nevertheless important, matters. For example, it would be one thing to have the bare belief that it would be good to get the kids up in the morning, washed, dressed, fed, and sent off to school. But it takes some degree of emotional investment in that belief to actually get oneself to do the work of getting the kids up, washed, dressed, fed, and off to school. Those of you who are parents know what I’m talking about.
So, it’s not wrong—quite the contrary—to wrap our emotions around our convictions. Indeed, we should aspire to be people of conviction who are prepared to act (and sacrifice, and take risks, and bear burdens) for what we believe is good and right and true. And yet, if we wrap our emotions too tightly around our convictions, if we fail to leave at least a little distance between ourselves and our beliefs– enough to consider our fallibility and the possibility that we could be wrong and those who disagree with us and challenge us could be right, or at least partially right)—then we are on the fast track to becoming ideologues, dogmatists, and even fanatics. There are few vices that place freedom of speech and other basic civil liberties in greater jeopardy than ideology, dogmatism, and fanaticism.
What’s more, these vices are the great enemies of the very value that ideologues, dogmatists, and fanatics purport to be upholding, namely truth. They jeopardize truth and undermine the love of truth and the enterprise of truth seeking precisely because they neglect that central truth about the human condition with which I began these reflections, namely, the universal and ineradicable reality of human fallibility.
Truth and truth seeking are under threat today from two opposing impulses. One is the denial, be it formal or merely implicit, of the existence or possibility of objective truth. The spirit of relativism or subjectivism claims that there is no truth to be attained, and therefore none to be sought. Or that there is merely “your truth,” and “my truth,” but no such thing as the truth—at least about questions outside the domain of empirical inquiry—or that “truth,” so called, is simply the rule of the strong, of whoever can force his will upon others.
If there is no truth, then there is no reason to believe in or respect the rights of others, including their right to freedom of speech, or of thought, inquiry, judgment, conscience, and religion. Where there are competing or conflicting desires or perspectives, there is no point in having a conversation or trying to reason with one another, for if there is no truth there is simply nothing to reason about or toward. Contrary to what one hears at cocktail parties or in freshman philosophy classes, relativism—especially moral relativism—is the predicate not of tolerance, but of repression and authoritarianism. Where there is nothing to reason about, because there is no truth, there are no reasons for respecting liberty; there is only power.
At the same time, and now we get to the second great threat to truth, the belief in truth, when severed from an authentic, deep, not merely notional but genuinely existential acknowledgement of one’s own fallibility, poses no less a threat to liberty and to truth itself. Such a belief devolves into dogmatism. Those holding it see no reason to entertain challenges to, or criticisms of, what they deeply believe. They know the truth, or so they suppose, know it more or less completely and perfectly, and therefore have nothing to learn from those with whom they disagree. Their critics, as believers in and promoters of falsehoods, are to be regarded and treated as enemies of truth. They are certainly not to be engaged in the hope of learning from them; rather, they are to be defeated, even destroyed.
By contrast, someone who rejects both relativism, which denies the possibility of objective truth, and absolutism, which refuses to reckon with the reality and universality of human fallibility, will regard reasonable people of goodwill with whom he or she disagrees not as enemies to be conquered but rather as friends who engage each other with the shared goal of getting at the truth of disputed questions or more deeply understanding the truth. In the domain of politics, genuine truth seekers are bound together as civic friends, despite their differences of perspective or belief, by a common goal, a common good, namely the great good of truth. For the sake of this good, they respect and honor freedom of speech, even for those whom they judge to be profoundly mistaken, and engage each other in a truth-seeking spirit—that is, with a view not only to correcting the other’s errors, if, indeed, they are errors, but also learning from them.
Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. This is the text of remarks delivered at the 2026 ARC conference in London.
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In George Orwell's 1984, it was not enough for Winston Smith to simply mouth the words "2 + 2 = 5" because the Party’s ultimate goal was not outward obedience, but total psychological control.
PS— Your essay (which is brilliant) will not reach “true believers”, and that is the crux of the problem today.
Coincidentally, Jeffrey Nall just posted a collection of excerpts from Spinoza’s Ethics and Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. This was a wonderful collection of ideas behind two of my favorite contemporary texts by Jon Haidt and Danny Kahneman:
“We tend to believe our decisions are guided by logic and reason. But in Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman argues that our choices are heavily influenced by ingrained mental shortcuts and emotional biases. This is a fundamental challenge to traditional economic models of human behavior.”
“In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt explores the complex interplay between the unconscious and conscious aspects of the human mind. He illustrates this inner conflict through the metaphor of an elephant (emotional mind) and its rider (rational mind). Haidt provides insights from ancient wisdom and modern psychology on how to harmonize these contrasting elements.”
Taken together these four perspectives create a solid philosophical and psychological foundation for Professor George’s insightful observations and compelling argument.