Google Moves Into the Business of Thought Control

Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident-turned-president, wrote a famous essay about the life of the mind under a system of totalitarian control. He invoked the example of a greengrocer who puts a sign in his window saying, "Workers of the world, unite!" -- not believing in it and perhaps not even knowing what it meant, but ritually accepting it as the officially sanctioned worldview. He wrote of a brewery worker who was punished for dissenting without meaning to -- by trying to make beer more efficiently, thereby calling into question whether the communist approach to production was anything but optimal.

Under such a system, many questions must never be asked, even by accident. The beauty of this arrangement is that the system never needs to show that the dissident's ideas are false. The mere act of posing the question is illegitimate. By extension, the answers would be neither true nor false: They too would be illegitimate.