We shouldn't automatically assume that it's necessarily the state that's imposing a curtailment on freedoms and free speech. Far too many people, nowadays, are quite happy to ban, cancel, and to no platform people, simply because they don't like what they have to say. They have a totalitarian mindset that hankers for more laws, bans, and proscriptions.
Already, some universities are removing books that are deemed to have 'challenging content' and are putting 'trigger warnings' into books so as not to offend the emotional sensibilities of their students. This is hardly what I would call preparing someone for the vicissitudes of adult life. They say they are not opposed to free speech but are "intolerant to intolerance." But as the writer and journalist George Orwell said, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not what to hear."
The French have a saying - "Moutons de Panurge', 'Panurge's Sheep'. This describes an individual that will blindly follow others regardless of the consequences. It refers to people who do the same thing as others and follow the fashion.
In the story by Francois Rabelais, 'Gargantua and Pantagruel', Panurge ('knave' or 'rogue'), buys a sheep and then as a revenge for being overcharged, he throws the sheep into the sea and the rest of the sheep in the herd, follow the first over the side of the boat, in spite of the best efforts of the Shepherd. That's what we're dealing with; it's not the people but the 'Sheeple'.
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