The Right to Be Wrong, and the Right to Watch You Be Wrong

The strangest modern delusion is that having an opinion automatically grants you an audience. That speaking creates an obligation in others to listen. That your voice, by virtue of existing, deserves to cut through the noise and land somewhere significant in another person's consciousness.

This is not how voices work. This is not how consciousness works. This is not how the physics of attention operates in a world where everyone has learned to speak at once.

You can believe the earth is flat. You can believe vaccines contain microchips. You can believe that your particular wound gives you special access to universal truth. You can believe that your political alignment makes you more moral than your neighbours. You can believe that your spiritual practice has dissolved your ego whilst simultaneously demanding that everyone acknowledge your enlightenment.

You have the right to carry these convictions with the full weight of your being. The earth will continue its rotation regardless. Your opinion will not flatten it, no matter how fervently you press.

But here is where the confusion breeds, where the entitlement metastasises into something uglier than simple wrongness. You begin to believe that your right to speak creates a corresponding duty in others to absorb, to validate, to take seriously what you have decided to make audible. You mistake volume for substance. You mistake repetition for persuasion. You mistake being heard for being listened to.

The right to ignore you is not oppression. It is mercy.

When someone chooses not to engage with your conviction that ancient aliens built the pyramids, they are not silencing you. They are exercising their own fundamental right: the right to protect their attention from ideas that waste it. The right to decline participation in your fantasy. The right to let your words fall where they may, without feeling obligated to catch them.

This is not about correctness. This is about the basic economics of consciousness. Attention is finite. Time is finite. The capacity to genuinely consider new information is finite. And you, with your opinion, are competing with every other voice that has ever learned to speak loudly enough to be heard.

Most of what gets called censorship is simply people choosing not to listen. Most of what gets called persecution is simply other people exercising their own right to walk away from conversations that serve no purpose beyond making you feel important for having spoken.

The marketplace of ideas is not a department store where every product gets equal shelf space. It is an ecosystem where survival depends on usefulness, on coherence, on the ability to serve something larger than the ego that birthed it. Most ideas die because they deserve to die. Most opinions fade because they were never solid enough to cast shadows.

Yet we live now in a time when the mere act of disagreement gets reframed as violence. When choosing not to platform obviously false information becomes an attack on freedom itself. When the refusal to take seriously what is demonstrably nonsense gets painted as intellectual tyranny.

This is what happens when the right to speak becomes confused with the right to be taken seriously. When having an opinion becomes confused with having something worth saying. When the democratic principle that all voices deserve to be heard becomes twisted into the absurd notion that all voices deserve to be believed.

You can speak. Others can ignore you. Both of these things can be true simultaneously without creating a contradiction that needs resolving. Your right to broadcast your conviction that the moon landing was staged does not create an obligation in others to pretend this conviction has merit. Their right to dismiss what is clearly nonsense does not diminish your right to continue believing it.

The tension is not between freedom and oppression. The tension is between your desire to be important and reality's refusal to reorganise itself around your needs.

Some opinions are demonstrably wrong. Some beliefs are so disconnected from evidence that engaging with them seriously would be a betrayal of intellectual honesty. Some ideas are so poorly constructed that they collapse under the weight of basic scrutiny. Acknowledging this is not authoritarianism. It is hygiene.

The earth is not flat because you believe it is flat. Vaccines do not become dangerous because you fear them. Climate change does not disappear because acknowledging it makes you uncomfortable. Your financial struggles do not improve because you blame them on immigrants. Your loneliness does not heal because you join conspiracy theories that make you feel special for knowing secrets.

Reality persists regardless of your relationship with it. And other people's refusal to pretend otherwise is not persecution. It is simply other people choosing to remain tethered to what is actually happening.

This does not mean you should stop speaking. This does not mean your voice has no value. This means you should stop expecting the world to reorganise itself around your comfort. Stop demanding that others pretend your unfounded beliefs deserve the same consideration as expertise earned through decades of study. Stop conflating your right to speak with a right to be agreed with.

The most liberating thing about having the right to be wrong is that it frees you from the exhausting performance of always being right. You can hold your opinions lightly. You can speak them without demanding they be received as gospel. You can be curious about why others disagree instead of wounded that they do.

And others can listen or not listen. They can engage or walk away. They can take you seriously or treat your words as background noise in a world already oversaturated with voices competing for attention that feels increasingly scarce.

This is not oppression. This is not censorship. This is not the death of free speech.

This is simply what happens when the right to speak meets the right to choose what deserves the irreplaceable resource of genuine attention. Most of the time, in most circumstances, with most opinions, the answer is no.

Your voice matters. But it does not matter more than someone else's choice not to listen. Your right to speak does not create an obligation in others to care. Your opinion does not become more valid simply because you have made it audible.

The earth remains round. Your opinion remains yours. And everyone else remains free to treat it accordingly.