May censorship, in the long term and unintentionally, foster the development of critical thinking? ?

Question

I was talking with some Chinese friends about  Yahoo Answers . 
I noticed how many answers are given here (in a totally confident way) from people completely uninformed about facts, or just  heavily influenced by a single and partial point of view (their preferred TV, preacher, hero or what they perceive as “tour  side”t). 
Often they answer following the pattern of “ everyone knows...; you can easily see... ;people cannot... “

The resulting feeling for me is that of having to do with people who had suffered a serious brainwashing: religious belief used purely as a shield, fanaticism, racism, a desperate  trial to identify external enemies or  a desperate attempt to identify themselves as an often non-existent, "us" .

China is a country governed in a dictatorial. Here censorship rules, and  the Far East itself, due to Confucian heritage, is a place where people are brought to consider individualism  as a negative value. Often people look at  themselves as parts (or molecules?) of a social system and not as individuals.  Meanwhile I never saw here the same cultural massification. 

I have always found people (in China and nearby)  to be  rational and reasonable, often more open to diversity. I do not want to say that these are open societies and cultures: Meanwhile, once you break the cultural and language barrier, there is a big surprise. 

It is a surprise,  because I felt that even in times of crisis, it should have bee more logical to find critical thinking where there was more free access to information ans less control. 

The response of my Chinese friends was more or less 
"It is wrong, because nobody, here, trusts what s printed on newspapers or stated on TV news  of his own party. 
There is only one party. 
No one here  trusts the official sources. We are all accustomed to critically interpret the signals coming from the power (the unsaid, what is written between lines, the news behind the half-truths), to check, re-check and find other sources to validate each and every information. 
When a website is unreachable or not working, or a word is not found in a search engine, we always check through proxies and other systems: it became an habit.
After all, censorship has forced us to critically approach information and to rely on a grass root democratization of information 
On your side, where censorship is often more of an economic than ideological  nature (in the hands of interest groups and the corporate world), thus showing often a nicer face, you let your critical sense to fall asleep, not thinking that the enemies of freedom and free information are always present, everywhere. " 
I apologize for the length of my  question. Meanwhile what do you think about the above statements?

? · Accepted Answer

The answer is absolutely 'fourty two'!
_______

Greetings to all the friends downstairs.

Cycwynner · Answer

Truth is a very flighty ware and in a great many places it is  being short changed.
I’ll give you a few examples:
Germany: in the seventies Western Germany started  encouraging  Satellite TV, because it was the only way to give East Germans, with a SAT dish, any other version that was not “official”.  The DDR news became a joke and people laughed themselves silly over it. On the other hand over a third of the population worked for the STASI (State Security) spying on their neighbours, friends and even relatives. This created such a terrible atmosphere, that very few were brave or foolish enough to state their opinions. A Kafkian World.
Italy:  there are hardly any  really “independent” news sources any more. Print is basically left wing, TV is split down the middle between the State (Government) and Private (Berlusconi), so people have taken to listening to both sides and making an average. Not easy to get the “truth”.
Britain: still has a great deal of independent reporting but is tormented by “politically-, racially-, socially- correct reporting. Which is also a distortion of “truth”. In addition there are some reporters and Media blatantly supporting and others  dead against the Government, Minority groups or just foreigners, so what kind of “truth” is being dished out.
USA: the Media is heavily controlled by power groups, who are brainwashing everybody with their own brand of “fundamentalism”. People are flocking to this kind of Forum (Q/A) just to get an independent opinion on what is really going on.
So compare this with China. “Censorship” is the lack of news. “Power Group Control” is the lack of unbiased news; “Correctness” is the distortion of news. 
It’s the same old story, sift, and sift and sift, you’ll get there in time.
Does censorship heighten your senses. I suppose so, but at what price.

Anonymous · Answer

Your question is extremely interesting and I find that, potentially, your statement could be true.
Often in fact, we seem to develop an interest for something, indeed when we are told NOT TO. I believe it’s human nature. Therefore I think it could be possible, for some people, not an entire country, to develop critical thinking that may take to a global change for the whole nation. Revolutions often do start this way.

On the other hand, you may have a country where freedom of speech is allowed, (just as long as you speak in a certain way) and not even realise just how much the government can “control” you.

Cosimo )O( · Answer

That is right. Here in the West too, we have censorship, both imposed and self-imposed. It goes by different names here, because we prefer to think it doesn't exist. I think there is a lot of hypocrisy about censorship, and about other similar phenomena too, like organised crime. A lot of this is about distracting attention from our own faults. We like to complain about the snow on our neighbour's roof when our own doorstep is unclean.

Yes, censorship does encourage critical faculties. And above all I think, it encourages us to moderate our own public statements. Oftentimes, the outline of truth reveals itself by the walls erected around it. And this is everywhere the case.

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May censorship, in the long term and unintentionally, foster the development of critical thinking? ?

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