look mom, an old white cisgender straight dude from history who’s NOT a piece of shit!

JSM is fucking awesome. He was campaigning for women’s rights in the 1800s; was fiercely in love with his wife, Harriet (whom he prefaces all his work with dedication to her contributions and brilliance - they wrote On Liberty... together); and he was a liberal thinker who believed in universal education, birth control, and equality between the sexes. More men like JSM please.

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Mill argues that “wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument; but facts and arguments, to produce any effect on the mind, must be brought before it”. Guess he didn't foresee a world of constant fake news where "facts" are just disregarded, eh? I also just don't buy that the populous is both smart enough to eventually understand the right side of any argument they hear, but too dumb to band together to make the best laws if given power. If the majority is so “mediocre”, how can they possible create a society where liberty is well-preserved by the law?

My biggest problem with the book was the half-assed argument that government intervention is justified for self-destructive behaviours, because self-destructive behaviours have consequences to society even if they’re done in private. Mill even admits that he doesn't know how to solve for this! Should have left this essay in "drafts".

Mill is a real one for making this easily digestible for a modern audience.

While this is an old book, it is one of the pillars of the utilitarianism approach.

The book itself presents like an ethics manual. Some things can be traced back to the foundational principles of religions. It puts a lot of eyes on how the individual behaves and how it should commit toward the welfare state.

It is a must to understand how the way we navigate in society was predicted and planned almost 200 years ago. Like you or not, some of the movements we see in societies today (from the capital to the state), are just implementations of a form of this speech.