The 4th Value: Free Speech and Self-Fulfillment
Out of the Eight Values of Free Expression, the one that stuck with me the most is Individual Self-Fulfillment, also called self-actualization.
This idea comes from a legal scholar named C. Edwin Baker, who taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and was known as one of the country's leading First Amendment scholars.
In his book Human Liberty and Freedom of Speech, published in 1989, Baker pushed back on the idea that free speech mainly matters because it helps society find truth through debate. Instead, he said speech matters because of what it does for the individual person saying it, tying it to human dignity, agency and autonomy.
As one summary of his work put it, Baker believed speech is protected not because it produces some collective good, but because of what it's worth to the person expressing it.
I have epilepsy, and for a long time that wasn't something I talked about openly.
There's a real fear that people will start treating you differently once they know, like you're fragile. So, when I started thinking about what self-fulfillment through speech actually looks like, I didn't have to look far.
I had already lived it.
Usually, people talk about free speech like it's a delivery system, just a way to hand information from one person to another. Baker flips that. To him, speech is part of how you actually become a person.
You don't only use language to describe a self you already understand completely; you use it to figure that self out in the first place. Justice Thurgood Marshall said something similar when he wrote that free expression serves not just the needs of society but the needs of the human spirit, a spirit that demands self-expression as part of developing ideas and a sense of identity.
That's exactly what happened when I finally talked about my epilepsy out loud instead of keeping it to myself. Saying it plainly made the condition feel like something I owned instead of something I was hiding from.
A while back I found out a girl I knew had just been diagnosed with a different chronic illness. I remembered exactly what that first stretch feels like, the fear, the not knowing what your life looks like now, feeling like nobody around you understands what's going on in your body.
So, I made myself speak up. I told her about my epilepsy, what it's actually been like living with it, the stuff nobody warns you about and the stuff that actually helps. It wasn't easy, talking about it still doesn't come naturally to me. But I did it anyway, because I knew what it might mean to her.
That moment is Baker's theory in action, as far as I'm concerned. I wasn't trying to win an argument or convince anyone of some bigger truth.
I was using my voice to put something about myself into the open, and in doing that I ended up giving someone else a little less fear and a little more company.
That's the part of self-fulfillment I think gets left out of a lot of these discussions. It's not just about expressing who you are, it's about how that expression can end up connecting you to someone else who needed to hear it.
Of all eight values, this is the one that feels the least abstract to me.
I experience it not as a citizen keeping an eye on government power, but as someone who found out firsthand that saying a hard thing out loud can hand someone else a little bit of strength. Self-fulfillment might not be the loudest value on the list, but it's the one I can actually point to in my own life and say, yeah, I've lived that.
