Are Americans afraid to speak their minds? According to a recent study, "the land of the free and the home of the brave" has become a place of self-censorship. Two-thirds of us say that we are afraid to say what we believe in public because someone else might not like it.

These dispiriting results come from a study that tracked 1 million people over a 20-year period, between 2000 and 2020. The shift in attitude has led to 6.5% more people self-censoring rather than speaking their minds. That is a huge shift for measurements of attitude in a short time.

To be sure, we humans have apparently always been afraid of being cast out of the tribe. It’s an ancient instinct that presumably came from the very real threat of death if you were exiled from the cave in the Paleolithic Era. You might have survived 48 hours; we humans were not an apex species at that point. If the saber-tooth tigers didn’t bite you, the woolly mammoths would stomp you to death.

So, our fear of rejection by the crowd is ultimately a practical one, based on ancient realities. Now we face ghosting, canceling, and, perhaps worst of all, ghost-canceling. None of those fates actually threaten to kill in quite the same way as a saber-tooth tiger, but it sure feels that way if you are 14 and your friends stop texting you.