From a 2020 interview:
Jennifer Grossman [55:40]: Voicing an opinion that differs even slightly from the consensus can result in termination, cancellation, ostracism. So should one play the game of just kind of going along, or taking a principled stand, damn the consequences, justice? Howard Roark and John Galt did filing and struggling and obscurity. Does the context of having a spouse, children, or aging parents change that calculus? I know you hear that a lot from students too.
Stephen Hicks: That’s a hard question. And a perennial question. I think the bottom line is, you have to be yourself. You have to know what you stand for, what your values are, why you believe them. And you have to be willing to stick up for yourself and fight for yourself. Otherwise, if you sell your soul in piecemeal ways, you won’t like yourself, and you’re not going to achieve your values, anyway.
But it is a perennial problem that when you live in a society with other people who have different beliefs and different values—some of them will try to put you through hell and impose whatever social costs they can on you to try to get you to sell yourself out and shut down your beliefs and your values. So how do you handle that that problem?
Well, a couple of things I would say. One is, when you enter into social context, you choose your friends carefully. Choose your workplace carefully. And don’t hang out with, in any circumstance, people who are going to be unfair and impose these kinds of costs upon you. It should be a bottom line for rational civil decent people to understand that people can have differences of opinions, particularly on complicated issues. And that the way we are going to sort these things out socially is through rational, civil discussion. So if you’re dealing with people in your social circle, whatever your social workers who are not committed to that, find a way to disengage with from those people.
But that’s often hard to do, particularly if you are committed to a certain career. In a large institution, for example, or you’re a public figure, you don’t get to pick and choose as easily. Then I think the important thing is to establish your reputation as a certain kind of person. So if the first thing that people know about you is that you’re intelligent, you’re decent, you are civil, you are good at what you do—and that’s their baseline assessment of who you are—when they then realize that you have beliefs that are alien to theirs, and perhaps even offensive, they will cut you some slack. And they will be much more willing to get along with you.
But if you come across initially as a jerk who’s just announcing weird beliefs, then it’s not going to go so well for you.
The other thing I would say is: To the extent that your platform, at work or if you’re a public figure, is a public one and other people are watching—you will have a lot of initially silent support. When we have more conformist cultures where there’s a lot of pressure on people to toe a party line, it is the more courageous people who are willing to stand up when needed. We need more of those people to stand up and make a reasoned case for whatever it is that they believe in. Otherwise, the conformists are just going to prevail. And then we end up in an authoritarian circumstance.
But you will, to the extent that you do have a reasoned case and you are making it courageously, you will have a lot more support than you initially think that you have. And you will also encourage other people to stand up. That’s how you will create a counter-movement.
The full interview is here:
Related: Galileo, defending science against religious authoritarianism, in the Philosophers Explained series.