Censorship and Self-Censorship: Social Good and Personal Evil (On the Example of Museum Practice)

A freedom-loving citizen who thinks of himself as an intellectual imagines censorship as something from the times of the stifling tsarist regime, an unambiguous restriction of freedom and development. However, the experience of societies where individual behavior and social communications are free from censorship shows that its absence is not synonymous with freedom. The absence of censorship means, among other things, the absence of boundaries, both mental and social. The result of the lack of boundaries can be general psychosis, uncontrolled verbal and behavioral aggression. The article examines the negative and positive aspects of censorship from the perspective of the philosophical views of J. Mill, Z. Freud, and M. Foucault. The authors of the study chose an approach that excludes an unambiguous assessment of the phenomenon of censorship. The article focuses not so much on state censorship as on internal factors in an individual’s assessment of the harm or benefit of the information being broadcast and also on the "tyranny of the majority", striving for the averaging of demands, manifestations, and actions - despite the fact that ideas of individualism, uniqueness, etc. are articulated externally. To illustrate the ambiguity of the role of censorship, the experience of the museum sphere is used, which currently has a significant influence on the historical, intellectual, and cultural development of people and communities.