Religious influences are not the only villain behind the censorship
legislation; there is another one: the social school of morality, exemplified
by John Stuart Mill. Mill rejected the concept of individual rights and
replaced it with the notion that the “public good” is the sole justification of
individual freedom. (Society, he argued, has the power to enslave or destroy
its exceptional men, but it should permit them to be free, because it
benefits from their efforts.) Among the many defaults of the conservatives in
the past hundred years, the most shameful one, perhaps, is the fact that they
accepted John Stuart Mill as a defender of capitalism.