⚠️ This is Part 3 of the trilogy intro to my book. Confused as hell? Thought so.
Catch up first: Part 1 | Part 2
(Before you say something arrest-worthy without context.)

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Schrödinger’s Protection Principle

In 1935, Erwin Schrödinger proposed the now-famous-but-oft-misunderstood Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment:

A cat is placed in a sealed box.

• Inside is a radioactive atom with a 50% chance of decaying within an hour.
• If it decays, a Geiger counter triggers the release of poison gas, killing the cat.
• If it doesn’t, the cat remains alive.
• Until you open the box, you don’t know the outcome.

The popular misconception is that this thought experiment shows that the cat is “both dead and alive”—though this is exactly the opposite of what Schrödinger was trying to say. Allow me to explain.

Schrödinger posed the thought experiment as a reductio ad absurdum, which is a fancy way of saying that it is an argument that uses an opposing arguer’s reasoning against the opponent him- or herself. That’s like if Mom says, “Finish your meal. There are starving children in Bangladesh,” and you, being the annoying philosophy college student who just discovered logic, respond, “I’ll finish my cigarettes too. There are children who can’t smoke in New Zealand.” A successful reductio uses the opponent’s logic against itself to show the absurdity of your adversary’s argument, thus proving your point. For Schrödinger, the point was that the reasoning of some quantum physicists was wonky because it leads to the absurd, contradictory conclusion that the cat is both dead and alive, and so his opponents’ understanding of quantum mechanics must be wrong. To say that Schrödinger proved that a cat can be both dead and alive is like saying that you just proved that everyone should smoke cigarettes because of smokeless New Zealand kids.

Now here’s where we get to some freshman philosophy: Just because we don’t know whether a claim is true or false doesn’t mean that the claim is both true and false or neither true nor false. To misunderstand this obviousness is akin to saying, “I can’t know if Agent Dickface is reading this until it is revealed to me, so I guess he is both reading and not reading this. Or he is neither reading nor not reading. So Agent Dickface exists in a weird quantum superposition; nothing makes sense.”

Instead, a proper understanding should make us say something along the lines of “Agent Dickface is either reading this or not reading this. I don’t know which, but that doesn’t matter because he doesn’t care.”

How does this relate to free speech?

Any speech is either protected or not. That people get confused and freak out about the status of their speech does not mean it is both protected and unprotected. It does not mean that it is neither protected nor unprotected. It doesn’t mean they should shut up. It just means they need to take a Xanax and figure out how to say whatever they want without getting arrested.

This is the ethos of this book, the final and most important pass at the “what’s the point” question. 

In the next few chapters, we will explore why it is at best questionable and at worst illegal, in most situations, to utter:

“I am not threatening anyone, but I still enjoy the idea of Donald Trump being dead sooner rather than later, and what I enjoy is my freedom of thought, so you can go fuck yourself, Thought Police.”

We will also see why it is, on the other hand, usually legal to utter:

“I had a dream. Last night, I dreamed that Donald Trump was dead sooner rather than later, and for some reason I felt a sense of happiness and calm in that dream, and that’s my dream, and my freedom of conscience, and I wonder for purely intellectual purposes whether I would feel just as peaceful and blissful if that dream were to come true.”

And it is usually okay to say this:

“If and only if Donald Trump didn’t mind me killing him would I kill him, and if I did, I would thoroughly enjoy it because it’s totally consensual, so kill people with kindness and peace out, brotha.”

So buckle up, Agent Dickface. This isn’t a manifesto. It’s just a book. Probably.