Religion is a Mental Illness

4 of 5 Americans believe words can be violence. Here’s why they’re wrong

In a disturbing new poll, my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has found that 80% of Americans agreed at le

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Anyone who confuses speech with violence has likely never been punched in the face. I have been many times, and I have to tell you: It hurts in a way no insult ever could.

Unfortunately, not everyone understands this. In a disturbing new poll, my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has found that 80% of Americans agreed at least slightly that "words can be violence." 

But it’s even worse than that. Nearly half of Americans say the phrase "words can be violence" either "mostly" or "completely" describes their thoughts.

I know intimately why this is not just wrong, but a real threat to our democracy.

The scariest moment of my life happened in my sophomore year of high school. I remember the exact date: March 14, 1991. I walked out of school to see one of my friends covered in blood. 

He had picked a fight with a kid and had been badly beating him. Turns out the kid had been bullied a few too many times. He snapped, stabbing my friend close to his sternum. I was pretty sure my friend was going to die – and if the knife had gone in at a slightly different angle, he would have.

This was not a battle of words, and that almost cost my friend his very life.

Whether or not we have personally experienced violence, we are all uncomfortably close to the unparalleled bloodshed of the 20th century – the trenches of World War I, the bombings of World War II, the Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward, and so much more.

Violence is real, and it is horrible. 

That’s why it is an insult to anyone who has ever suffered from it to argue that words can even compare. I’m not saying words aren’t potent and powerful. I wouldn’t do the work I do defending freedom of speech if I thought that. Words have the power to change the world.

And I’m also not saying physical pain is all that matters. I’ve been very open about my own struggles with depression and suicidal ideation. But words don’t draw blood or break bones, and that difference is critically important.

FIRE has been tracking this "words are violence" phenomenon on campus for years.

We saw the argument made full-throatedly in the wake of the violent response to conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in 2017, when a student paper at UC Berkeley – the school where the free speech movement was born – published article after article arguing that Milo’s hate speech demanded violent retaliation. 

That same year, Northeastern University psychology professor and author Lisa Feldman Barrett penned an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that because words and violence can both cause a stress response, there’s no clear distinction between the two.

In 2021, an editorial in Case Western Reserve University Observer reasoned that protesting outside an abortion clinic is "inherently violent." In 2022, Cornell students disrupting an Ann Coulter event shouted, among other things, "Your words are violence." Just last year, the pride office at the University of Colorado Boulder warned that misgendering could be "considered an act of violence."

But if you’re among the 8 in 10 Americans who agree that words can be violence, I ask you to consider this: Words remain the best alternative to violence ever invented. 

In July, a would-be assassin’s bullet came within a fraction of an inch of killing one of our two major presidential candidates. It tragically ended the life of a firefighter and father – and shortly after, the shooter was killed as well. All this happened before the eyes of supporters and even children.

That alone should remind us that speech – even horrible, hurtful and hateful speech – is not violence. Violence is a very different thing. And when that violence turns political, all bets are off. 

One of the core differences between a liberal democracy and authoritarian states is that we don’t settle our differences with violence. We do so democratically with words. We must preserve this at all costs. 

Tensions are high in the nation right now, which is why it’s even more important to remember the difference between words and actions. People get understandably heated in the final days of an election, but confusing words for weapons ensures violence. This is a recipe for disaster, particularly when six in 10 Americans fear post-Election Day violence. 

We must remember in these tribal times that the bright line between action and speech is one of the best things humankind has ever devised. As an unknown thinker adored by Freud once said, "Civilization began the minute someone hurled an insult rather than a stone." 

If most Americans forget this distinction, it’s going to hurt way more than we expect. 

Greg Lukianoff is president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the co-author, along with Rikki Schlott, of the new book, "The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All—But There Is a Solution."

“My own view is that words are words and bullets are bullets, and that it is important to keep this straight. For you do not have to be Kant to see what comes after ‘offensive words are bullets’: if you hurt me with words, I reply with bullets, and the exchange is even.” – Jonathan Rauch, “Kindly Inquisitors”

Person on TikTok: “Let me explain why misgendering is an act of violence.”

Person at rally: “We’re here today not because we don’t know how to take a joke, we’re here because we’re concerned that the jokes are taking lives.”

Person in classroom: “We don’t want you to speak here. Your remarks are violence. They’re threats. You cannot be speaking here. Thank you very much.”

Pro-life activist: It’s a baby. What if someone is raped and she gave birth and she decided to kill her three-year-old child?” (phone kicked out of her hand)

So that's backwards, pernicious, dangerous, and stupid, and it comes as a result in some ways of a good thing. The good thing is that violence over the long term has been on a steady decline. We're nearing a spike now thanks to the Woke. But prior to this, for a long term, violence has been on the decline. For a lot of people in the United States, they don't really have that much experience with actual violence. And that's a good thing. I don't want people to have experience with violence, but that leads them to labeling something like language as violence.

Language is not violence. And we don't want to minimize what real violence is. When someone puts their hands on somebody else and refuses to take them off, when someone physically rapes someone, or assaults someone, or punches someone, or sets them on fire, or shoots them…that is a very, very serious thing. Words are not violence. Silence is not violence. Violence is violence. It's a very serious thing and it needs to be kept distinct from that.

The cure, especially for political violence, is to talk. The options that we have as human beings, if we have completely different ideas about how public policy should be, are to communicate with each other, and to reach some sort of consensus, either through politics or in the academy. That's what should be going on. It should be a dialog.

The worst thing you could possibly do is shut down that dialogue, refuse to allow that dialogue, because then all you've done is you've opened it up for the only other option, which is violence. You're actually creating violence by labeling words as violence and by trying to stifle freedom of speech or stop someone else who has an idea from talking. You're actually making it more likely that there will be real violence. And real violence, like I just said, is a very distinct and different thing from words. And that should never be forgotten.