> What's so bad about being exposed to the public id

I dunno, wake up and look outside.

Indeed, it's important for people to not think so academically about viewpoints all the time. There are ideals, and then there is the real world. It's fine to have ideals about things like absolute free speech in all domains, but it must be balanced against the constraints, rational and irrational, of society at large which never constrains its behaviours to anything resembling the ideal.

It's a classic question of the world not being black and white. Either people accept this greyness and work within it to produce the most desirable result possible, or fruitlessly wonder why nobody else is able to see what apparently is so patently visible to your eyes only.

and it is exactly the shifting of the Overton window into that machiavellian realpolitik approach that has the empire invading and performing coups since at least ww2, causing millions of lives lost and reverberation effects for generations to come. The same for any number of major constitutional issues such as the justice system, regulatory capture, etc.

We need more idealism, not less. Tempered with pragmatism is one thing, but the problem is then one is encouraged to temper that idealism a bit more, and a bit more, and one more time, until the original ideal is more a memory than anything.

For me this mostly stems from a lack of knowledge or respect for history.