From libraries and censorship to intellectual humility and the gap between narratives and reality, this week’s FAIR Perspectives explores what it takes to remain open to ideas that challenge us.
Before the 1850s, only a few elite scholars and subscribers could access original materials in exclusive archives, keeping important information away from regular people. When public libraries started to grow in the mid-19th century, they still did not offer this access to everyone; instead, they were used to manage behavior and society. As a result, everyday citizens have never had a system that gives them unfiltered access to the entire historical and intellectual record.
Today, government and activist actions still limit this access by censoring collections and promoting 'approved narratives', which goes against Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By not allowing the public to see unfiltered primary sources—a privilege once held by elites—important knowledge remains hidden behind institutional barriers, stopping true intellectual freedom.
Traditional cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal classification made the full range of human knowledge clear, allowing patrons to see the complete structure of available information, even if a specific title was missing.
The old Dewey system made it obvious when a book was missing because every subject had a permanent spot on the shelf and in the catalog, so anyone could look and see a clear gap where a title used to be.
Modern DEI-driven curation frameworks replace this openness with ideological censorship "weeding' and selective acquisition to remove books based on changing political criteria. Unlike traditional oversight or clear censorship, this systematic removal leaves no trace its all digital (And now because the Dewey system is not used You don't even have ordered shelves To see the spaces created), erasing the visible record of what has been taken away and denying everyday citizens the unedited access to primary sources that was once reserved for elites.
And it's interesting to note the amount of Liberians that were killed in revolutionary Russia. When the Bolsheviks seized power, they immediately recognized libraries as vital instruments for ideological control and began systematically purging collections, banning classic philosophy, and arresting or executing intellectuals and information workers who resisted state curation. Librarians and archivists who attempted to preserve independent catalogs or protect unedited source material faced imprisonment, exile, or death as the state transformed every repository into an organ of party propaganda. True freedom of information requires that libraries remain entirely open, transparent, and completely free from political interference.
Soviet libraries maintained a hidden, restricted-access section called the spetskhran that operated entirely apart from the public catalog. This secret collection held banned philosophy, banned political texts, and unedited foreign literature stripped from public shelves. Access required special state security clearance or explicit authorization from political authorities. This setup created a two-tiered reality where ordinary citizens were fed sanitized state propaganda while political elites and trusted apparatchiks retained private access to the real historical and intellectual record.
If we want to stay free. Our libraries have to stay free. Maintaining that freedom requires protecting public libraries as completely transparent, unmonitored, ideologically free spaces where the entire record of human thought remains visible to everyone as a true marketplace of ideas, ensuring that access to unedited information is never again locked away or silently erased. - "inclusion" is the last thing they want!
Without an open library, the everyday person is stripped of a weapon
In a totalitarian state, an ordinary person with a neutral library can challenge the regime. However, today, libraries are moving away from traditional numbering systems like Dewey, claiming it's for "access." This change is a marketing tactic that undermines clear organization. Many believe this is a kind update to make books easier to find or to improve "outdated methods." However, this shift actually helps totalitarian regimes hide the truth. It removes the visible signs of censorship by replacing fixed shelf numbers with changing displays, making it harder to notice when a book is missing. A universal system like Dewey organizes all human knowledge fairly and transparently. and is used by many countries, not just Western ones. Moving away from it doesn't promote inclusion; it weakens the ability to reveal hidden truths.
To understand the importance of an open system, picture your family during the Holodomor famine in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, when 3 to 5 million people died, or during the Great Purge from 1937 to 1938, when 700,000 were executed and millions were sent to the Gulag. You haven't heard from your relatives in months. The newspapers say nothing. The government denies everything. You sense something terrible happened, and you need to discover the truth.
In an alternative world where communists didn't close down the library system and kept a clear catalog like Dewey in place—even though in reality, librarians who tried to keep such systems were sent to the Gulag—you walk through the history section to find answers about your missing family. You go there because you trust the library as an independent place run by knowledgeable professionals, not political agents. You expect to find the truth, including records, primary sources - Newspaper clippings Articles. Books, and counterarguments that expose the real-world failures of the regime's ideology. If you just walked into a newspaper office as Joe Bloggs and claimed people were disappearing based on personal gossip, no one would publish it and you would be ignored. But when you walk in with verified, tangible proof backed by the prestige and trust of an independent library, the newspaper can publish it, turning private grief into undeniable public evidence that an injustice happened and can be fought against.
If a transparent, non-ideological classification system had been used, the shelf numbers would reveal:
947.0841 – The October Revolution and the Civil War (1917–1922)
947.0842 – The interwar period, forced collectivization, and the 1932–1933 Holodomor famine (purged by the regime)
947.08422 – The 1937–1938 Great Purge and mass political trials (purged by the regime)
947.0843 – The Great Patriotic War / World War II (1939–1945)
The numbers would jump abruptly from 947.0841 straight to 947.0843, completely bypassing the exact years and numbers assigned to the terror and the famine. You do not need to be a history professor or a high-ranking party member to notice it. Any ordinary person glancing at the spine numbers could see the missing block. Standing before that stark, visible omission brings a sudden, sharp jolt of validation—the physical gap proves your family's trauma and the vanished millions are real, breaking the state's total isolation and gaslighting. When an ordinary person retrieves verifiable data from a non-partisan library, that proof carries the institutional credibility required to be published in a newspaper and believed by the public. Totalitarian regimes reject open, fixed numbering systems because a permanent map of human knowledge exposes what has been deleted from the record, using closed systems instead to ensure that information control is built directly into the catalog.
Instead, walking into a public reading room in Moscow or Leningrad during communist times, you would see a sanitized collection:
Marxist-Leninist Classics & Party Organs: Shelves packed wall-to-wall with the collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, alongside current issues of Pravda and Izvestia.
Approved Soviet Literature: Novels centered on socialist realism, heroic industrialization quotas, and sanitized histories of the Great Patriotic War.
The Noticeable Absence: For anyone old enough to remember what existed before the purges or who lived through the unrecorded history, seeing an unbroken, sanitized shelf where millions are swallowed up induces a crushing, suffocating terror of absolute isolation—leaving you entirely alone with a truth that the state has completely scrubbed from existence. For everyone else raised entirely under the regime, it looked completely normal because they had never known anything else.
If a library is captured ideologically, it becomes completely useless for this purpose. An ideologically captured library does not store unvarnished truth; it curates approved stories, scrubs uncomfortable facts, and replaces real history with political social engineering. When the institution becomes ideological, the everyday citizen is stripped of their weapon, left completely isolated against state lies without an external anchor to prove reality.
To access the books that were actually purged or locked away, you had to leave the public rooms and attempt to enter the spetskhran (special storage section), which required strict state security clearance and specific authorization:
Special Pass (Propusk): You needed an official, highly restricted entry permit issued only after a rigorous background check by the local Communist Party committee or the KGB.
The Internal Passport and Endorsement: Presenting a standard internal Soviet passport was not enough; you required a formal letter of recommendation or an explicit project authorization proving that your academic or state security duties absolutely required access to "harmful" or "ideologically hostile" foreign or historical texts.
Armed Control: Entry to the spetskhran involved passing through locked doors and checkpoints monitored directly by security personnel, ensuring that ordinary citizens were kept entirely separate from the real historical and intellectual record while being fed state propaganda in the public halls below.
Attempting to access a spetskhran text without proper state authorization or political approval carried severe, life-altering punishments. Ordinary citizens or even junior researchers caught trying to view banned philosophy, unvarnished history, or foreign literature faced immediate dismissal from their jobs, expulsion from universities, total blacklisting from professional life, and often arrest by the KGB under charges of anti-Soviet agitation, propaganda, or treason, leading to long-term imprisonment in the Gulag or internal exile.
Today, government and activist actions in the West still limit access by censoring collections and promoting approved narratives through institutional gatekeeping and social engineering, which goes against Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By not allowing the public to see unfiltered primary sources—a privilege once held by elites—important knowledge remains hidden behind administrative barriers, stopping true intellectual freedom. Traditional cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal classification made the full range of human knowledge clear, allowing patrons to see the complete structure of available information, even if a specific title was missing because every subject had a permanent spot on the shelf and in the catalog, so anyone could look and see a clear gap where a title used to be.
Modern curation frameworks replace this openness with ideological filtering, weeding, and selective acquisition to remove books based on changing political criteria. Unlike Soviet state security enforcement, this systematic removal operates within digital systems, but because traditional ordered classification shelves are being abandoned, it erases the visible record of what has been taken away and denies everyday citizens unedited access to primary sources.
Moving away from transparent classification systems and adopting opaque, ideologically driven curation frameworks replicates the core risk of past information control: it creates a modern, decentralized equivalent of the spetskhran, where everyday citizens are fed sanitized narratives while institutional gatekeepers decide who gets to see the unedited record. Fixing this requires rejecting ideological collection management entirely, restoring public libraries as completely transparent, unmonitored spaces aligned with Article 19, and ensuring that freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and unfiltered access to the entire record of human thought remain visible to everyone once and for all. We live in a true information age, and it's time to step out of the gatekeepers.
Before the 1850s, only a few elite scholars and subscribers could access original materials in exclusive archives, keeping important information away from regular people. When public libraries started to grow in the mid-19th century, they still did not offer this access to everyone; instead, they were used to manage behavior and society. As a result, everyday citizens have never had a system that gives them unfiltered access to the entire historical and intellectual record.
Today, government and activist actions still limit this access by censoring collections and promoting 'approved narratives', which goes against Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By not allowing the public to see unfiltered primary sources—a privilege once held by elites—important knowledge remains hidden behind institutional barriers, stopping true intellectual freedom.
Traditional cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal classification made the full range of human knowledge clear, allowing patrons to see the complete structure of available information, even if a specific title was missing.
The old Dewey system made it obvious when a book was missing because every subject had a permanent spot on the shelf and in the catalog, so anyone could look and see a clear gap where a title used to be.
Modern DEI-driven curation frameworks replace this openness with ideological censorship "weeding' and selective acquisition to remove books based on changing political criteria. Unlike traditional oversight or clear censorship, this systematic removal leaves no trace its all digital (And now because the Dewey system is not used You don't even have ordered shelves To see the spaces created), erasing the visible record of what has been taken away and denying everyday citizens the unedited access to primary sources that was once reserved for elites.
And it's interesting to note the amount of Liberians that were killed in revolutionary Russia. When the Bolsheviks seized power, they immediately recognized libraries as vital instruments for ideological control and began systematically purging collections, banning classic philosophy, and arresting or executing intellectuals and information workers who resisted state curation. Librarians and archivists who attempted to preserve independent catalogs or protect unedited source material faced imprisonment, exile, or death as the state transformed every repository into an organ of party propaganda. True freedom of information requires that libraries remain entirely open, transparent, and completely free from political interference.
Soviet libraries maintained a hidden, restricted-access section called the spetskhran that operated entirely apart from the public catalog. This secret collection held banned philosophy, banned political texts, and unedited foreign literature stripped from public shelves. Access required special state security clearance or explicit authorization from political authorities. This setup created a two-tiered reality where ordinary citizens were fed sanitized state propaganda while political elites and trusted apparatchiks retained private access to the real historical and intellectual record.
If we want to stay free. Our libraries have to stay free. Maintaining that freedom requires protecting public libraries as completely transparent, unmonitored, ideologically free spaces where the entire record of human thought remains visible to everyone as a true marketplace of ideas, ensuring that access to unedited information is never again locked away or silently erased. - "inclusion" is the last thing they want!
Without an open library, the everyday person is stripped of a weapon
In a totalitarian state, an ordinary person with a neutral library can challenge the regime. However, today, libraries are moving away from traditional numbering systems like Dewey, claiming it's for "access." This change is a marketing tactic that undermines clear organization. Many believe this is a kind update to make books easier to find or to improve "outdated methods." However, this shift actually helps totalitarian regimes hide the truth. It removes the visible signs of censorship by replacing fixed shelf numbers with changing displays, making it harder to notice when a book is missing. A universal system like Dewey organizes all human knowledge fairly and transparently. and is used by many countries, not just Western ones. Moving away from it doesn't promote inclusion; it weakens the ability to reveal hidden truths.
To understand the importance of an open system, picture your family during the Holodomor famine in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, when 3 to 5 million people died, or during the Great Purge from 1937 to 1938, when 700,000 were executed and millions were sent to the Gulag. You haven't heard from your relatives in months. The newspapers say nothing. The government denies everything. You sense something terrible happened, and you need to discover the truth.
In an alternative world where communists didn't close down the library system and kept a clear catalog like Dewey in place—even though in reality, librarians who tried to keep such systems were sent to the Gulag—you walk through the history section to find answers about your missing family. You go there because you trust the library as an independent place run by knowledgeable professionals, not political agents. You expect to find the truth, including records, primary sources - Newspaper clippings Articles. Books, and counterarguments that expose the real-world failures of the regime's ideology. If you just walked into a newspaper office as Joe Bloggs and claimed people were disappearing based on personal gossip, no one would publish it and you would be ignored. But when you walk in with verified, tangible proof backed by the prestige and trust of an independent library, the newspaper can publish it, turning private grief into undeniable public evidence that an injustice happened and can be fought against.
If a transparent, non-ideological classification system had been used, the shelf numbers would reveal:
947.0841 – The October Revolution and the Civil War (1917–1922)
947.0842 – The interwar period, forced collectivization, and the 1932–1933 Holodomor famine (purged by the regime)
947.08422 – The 1937–1938 Great Purge and mass political trials (purged by the regime)
947.0843 – The Great Patriotic War / World War II (1939–1945)
The numbers would jump abruptly from 947.0841 straight to 947.0843, completely bypassing the exact years and numbers assigned to the terror and the famine. You do not need to be a history professor or a high-ranking party member to notice it. Any ordinary person glancing at the spine numbers could see the missing block. Standing before that stark, visible omission brings a sudden, sharp jolt of validation—the physical gap proves your family's trauma and the vanished millions are real, breaking the state's total isolation and gaslighting. When an ordinary person retrieves verifiable data from a non-partisan library, that proof carries the institutional credibility required to be published in a newspaper and believed by the public. Totalitarian regimes reject open, fixed numbering systems because a permanent map of human knowledge exposes what has been deleted from the record, using closed systems instead to ensure that information control is built directly into the catalog.
Instead, walking into a public reading room in Moscow or Leningrad during communist times, you would see a sanitized collection:
Marxist-Leninist Classics & Party Organs: Shelves packed wall-to-wall with the collected works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, alongside current issues of Pravda and Izvestia.
Approved Soviet Literature: Novels centered on socialist realism, heroic industrialization quotas, and sanitized histories of the Great Patriotic War.
The Noticeable Absence: For anyone old enough to remember what existed before the purges or who lived through the unrecorded history, seeing an unbroken, sanitized shelf where millions are swallowed up induces a crushing, suffocating terror of absolute isolation—leaving you entirely alone with a truth that the state has completely scrubbed from existence. For everyone else raised entirely under the regime, it looked completely normal because they had never known anything else.
If a library is captured ideologically, it becomes completely useless for this purpose. An ideologically captured library does not store unvarnished truth; it curates approved stories, scrubs uncomfortable facts, and replaces real history with political social engineering. When the institution becomes ideological, the everyday citizen is stripped of their weapon, left completely isolated against state lies without an external anchor to prove reality.
To access the books that were actually purged or locked away, you had to leave the public rooms and attempt to enter the spetskhran (special storage section), which required strict state security clearance and specific authorization:
Special Pass (Propusk): You needed an official, highly restricted entry permit issued only after a rigorous background check by the local Communist Party committee or the KGB.
The Internal Passport and Endorsement: Presenting a standard internal Soviet passport was not enough; you required a formal letter of recommendation or an explicit project authorization proving that your academic or state security duties absolutely required access to "harmful" or "ideologically hostile" foreign or historical texts.
Armed Control: Entry to the spetskhran involved passing through locked doors and checkpoints monitored directly by security personnel, ensuring that ordinary citizens were kept entirely separate from the real historical and intellectual record while being fed state propaganda in the public halls below.
Attempting to access a spetskhran text without proper state authorization or political approval carried severe, life-altering punishments. Ordinary citizens or even junior researchers caught trying to view banned philosophy, unvarnished history, or foreign literature faced immediate dismissal from their jobs, expulsion from universities, total blacklisting from professional life, and often arrest by the KGB under charges of anti-Soviet agitation, propaganda, or treason, leading to long-term imprisonment in the Gulag or internal exile.
Today, government and activist actions in the West still limit access by censoring collections and promoting approved narratives through institutional gatekeeping and social engineering, which goes against Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By not allowing the public to see unfiltered primary sources—a privilege once held by elites—important knowledge remains hidden behind administrative barriers, stopping true intellectual freedom. Traditional cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal classification made the full range of human knowledge clear, allowing patrons to see the complete structure of available information, even if a specific title was missing because every subject had a permanent spot on the shelf and in the catalog, so anyone could look and see a clear gap where a title used to be.
Modern curation frameworks replace this openness with ideological filtering, weeding, and selective acquisition to remove books based on changing political criteria. Unlike Soviet state security enforcement, this systematic removal operates within digital systems, but because traditional ordered classification shelves are being abandoned, it erases the visible record of what has been taken away and denies everyday citizens unedited access to primary sources.
Moving away from transparent classification systems and adopting opaque, ideologically driven curation frameworks replicates the core risk of past information control: it creates a modern, decentralized equivalent of the spetskhran, where everyday citizens are fed sanitized narratives while institutional gatekeepers decide who gets to see the unedited record. Fixing this requires rejecting ideological collection management entirely, restoring public libraries as completely transparent, unmonitored spaces aligned with Article 19, and ensuring that freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and unfiltered access to the entire record of human thought remain visible to everyone once and for all. We live in a true information age, and it's time to step out of the gatekeepers.