Banning offense doesn't protect us—it imprisons us, here's the three-headed beast responsible.
We used to know that truth could hurt, that truth should hurt because beliefs that lies have a way of stubbornly clinging to us and dragging us into all kinds of trouble. Somewhere in the last twenty years, we decided that the good work of the truth—to offend us—was the problem, and we built an anesthetic culture around making sure offence stops happening. This has become, itself, one of the lies we believe.
Here's the test: if a claim may never offend you, then it never really came from outside your mind. It was just your own reflection, talking back in your ‘safe space’. Real truth has to be able to push against what you already think—your preconceptions or misconceptions, or it isn't doing anything, it’s merely your own opinion. This is the first step in critical thinking: can I get over the offense in order to weigh this new thought objectively? Of course not all offense is truth, and I make no such claim. Treating all offense as a social crime is the evil I’m addressing here.
John Stuart Mill “it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”
So why did we start treating offense like the enemy? I think three things ganged up on us, and they don't just sit side by side—they feed each other into a three-headed beast of social control that’s kind of difficult to kill.
First, we criminalized offense. Not always by law, though sometimes that too—mostly by social consequence, character assassination, cancel culture (social media really puts the ‘nation’ in ‘character assassination’). Say the politically incorrect true thing and you don't get debated as you used to, you get destroyed by a culture that enjoys the destruction. Once disagreement itself becomes dangerous, honesty gets expensive real fast.
Second, once honesty is expensive, we start trading it for reputation. This is the oldest temptation there is: tell your tribe what keeps you safe, not what's true. Paul didn't have that option. He wrote that he'd stopped trying to please men the moment he started serving Christ, and he meant it—he catalogued the beatings, the imprisonments, the abandonment, the constant nearness of death that came from refusing to trade the message for his own safety. Even those who love us may try to talk us out of paying the cost of truth. Most of us aren't tested that hard. Most of us fold for a lot less.
Third, we needed a philosophy for the folding, Bentham handed us utilitarianism. "I'm not avoiding the truth, I'm doing the most good" sounds noble, enlightened, right? But "the most good" isn't a gospel idea—it's a self-substantiated calculation, and nobody's ever agreed on the scale it's calculated against. The gospel doesn't ask you to optimize outcomes for the greatest number, neither does it tell you that ends justify means. It asks you to love the person in front of you, even when that costs you something and helps no statistic at all. The gospel is all means no matter the cost of the ends.
This zeitgeist is a living ancient being, actively manipulating us.
Put these three together and you get a closed loop, a three headed Cerberus preventing the escape from the hell you’ve created for yourself: offense becomes forbidden, so truth becomes costly, so we need a moral-sounding excuse to avoid paying that cost. Each one needs the other two to keep running. Relativism at least says that there's no truth to betray. This evil trinity is far worse: we keep the idea of truth as a personal servant, and teach each other to abandon truth as a master, an absolute virtue. We settle for the next best thing to a clean conscience, a seared one.
Don’t misunderstand me. This zeitgeist is not a spirit in the sense of mere collective groupthink or a generational archetype. It is a living ancient being, actively manipulating us—or trying to—with the goal to steal, kill, and destroy. It is not sociology alone, it is an enemy pulling on social strings in the dark.
You can watch this play out in real time anytime someone gets cornered by an honest question and answers by claiming injury instead. The question doesn't have to be cruel to trigger it. It just has to be honest and unwelcome. The beast doesn't care which. Victimhood has become the defense against the truth which would kill Cerberus if they’d let it.
Here's my diagnosis, let all things offend your thinking objectively before you decide on whether or not it is the truth. We've built a social smoke alarm so sensitive it goes off when we breathe heavily enough, and now nobody can sleep for the screeching noise, and nobody trusts the alarm when a real fire actually starts. The fix isn't a more sensitive alarm, it’s a better-calibrated one—and calibration here means less sensitivity to offense, not more. Smoke alarms are a good idea, so are civic rights, but they can become the very thing they were made to protect against, so has the policing of speech by society or law become.
Offense is a normal part of life and often useful for determining our alignment with the truth.
The solution is not to lobby congress, it’s far more practical than that. It is teaching kids—and ourselves—that offense is a normal part of life and often useful for determining our alignment with the truth, because the truth offends exactly like lies do—which is why we have to think before we react, not after. Treating offense as the reliable detector of harm is a broken instrument that harms anyone using it. We must relearn to think critically about criticism, because crying foul at offense isn't safety, it's a slow kind of dying.
It means admitting that nobody is perfect just the way they are—that's not an insult, it's just true, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anyone grow, it keeps them in a miserable, hellish prison. And it means rejecting, flatly, the idea that any of us has a right not to be offended. Only God could plausibly claim that right, and He consistently waives it in His Grace and Mercy. Every time He lets us argue with Him, every time His prophets are allowed to push back and question, every insult to His Name, every time He lets us treat the cross as a stumbling block, every time He makes a polite suggestion instead of a command.
That's the real prescription. Not "be nicer about disagreement,” or the corporate “be kind,” and “don’t be evil”—which proved rather hypocritical for their originators. The gospel itself is offensive, on purpose, because the thing you're being protected from feeling is the very thing you must feel so that you can be saved.
Treating offense as the reliable detector of harm is a broken instrument that harms anyone using it.
Most people who said true, costly things weren't thanked for it while they were alive. Many, if not most, were killed for it. Can you say truly: “I'd rather die on the sword of truth than blunt its edge for my reputation?” The choice in front of all of us, every day, in much smaller ways than Paul and Jesus faced: blunt the sword so it doesn't cost you anything, or let it cut all the way through. If you choose the former you suffer hell on Earth and risk much more, you also blunt the truth for everyone coming after you. If you choose to speak the truth whatever the cost, the sword will be employed as a scalpel in the hands of God who will save your very life. It will also open the door of salvation to those coming after you, and cover over a multitude of sins.
I'd rather die on the sword of truth than blunt its edge for my reputation.
Speak the truth my friend.
