SpiritWoman, that's a heavy thought. The advocates of complete freedom of speech and press ("media" today) asserted confidently that if we were completely free to combat error we had nothing to fear from error, malefactors, evil... And yet, from the great ideas of the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, and the founding ideas of the United States, we are...here, today--and America is the very best case. Great and promising ideas, really the essential truth in philosophy, have been displaced by postmodernism. And at least in the West, the ideas of the Enlightenment lost to Postmodernism in an essentially free exchange of ideas. In a nutshell, of course, Ayn Rand explained this as the unwillingness, the lack of courage, to challenge the all-powerful Christian moral tradition of altruism, reinforced by the German version of it... You could say, I guess, that the time periods we are talking about are very brief in mankind's history and progress surges and recedes as it progresses...