This setup is the basis for one of the most famous ideas in game theory: the Prisoner’s Dilemma. If both stay silent, they get off lightly. If one testifies while the other stays quiet, the talker walks free while the other takes the fall. But if both testify, they each get a worse outcome than if they’d cooperated. Yet, people often choose to testify, not because they want to hurt each other but because they can’t trust the other person to stay silent. Acting in self-interest, they both lose.

This dynamic appears all over society. In international trade negotiations (e.g., tariffs), environmental policy, and even neighborhood squabbles, people face choices where cooperation is best for everyone — but only if everyone cooperates.

This logic also helps explain something more foundational than we often realize: our freedom of speech. In the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, mutual silence is the cooperative choice. But in a democracy, the cooperative act is exactly the opposite: it’s allowing others to speak, even when we strongly disagree. In both cases, cooperation means mutual restraint, but the form that restraint takes depends on the rules of the larger game.

Imagine a group of people building a society. They depend on each other for security and stability, but deeply disagree on religion, morality, politics and values. Everyone might like a rule saying, “People who disagree with me should be quiet.” But no one would accept being the object of such a rule. So, even without liking or trusting one another, they agree to a shared rule: no one gets to silence anyone else. Not because they love argument, but because they understand the only alternative is a constant fight for control over the Ministry of Truth.

Criminal organizations like the Mafia, faced with a constant stream of Prisoner’s Dilemmas, developed a cultural code of silence known as omertà. Everyone is expected to keep quiet — no matter what — if they’re caught. This norm isn’t negotiated in the moment; it’s drilled in from the start. The point isn’t just loyalty, it’s strategy: omertà helps the group avoid the self-defeating outcomes of Prisoner’s Dilemmas. The same logic applies to free speech in a democracy. If groups don’t agree in advance to a rule of mutual restraint, they’ll each be tempted to silence the other when they have the chance, leading to cycles of repression and instability. That’s why constitutional protections — and, at least as importantly, the cultural norms that reinforce them — must come first.

This is where a constitutional rule comes in. Like the cooperation outcome in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, mutual protection of speech is better for everyone, but it’s not stable unless it’s locked in ahead of time like omertà. Each faction, once in power, has an incentive to silence its critics. The only way to preserve free speech is to make it a rule that’s hard to change — by codifying it both in our written constitution and in our cultural identity as a nation of free people — a rule agreed upon before the power dynamics are known.

The architects of our own early constitutional moment knew they wouldn’t always agree. In fact, they disagreed constantly. But they saw that free speech wasn’t just another right. It was the

rule that made argument and compromise related to all other rules possible. It was the only way forward in a society built on disagreement.

Today, when passions run high and the temptation to silence others grows, we’d do well to remember the original logic behind free speech. It’s not just a celebration of truth or tolerance. It’s a survival strategy for pluralistic societies. It’s the tool that makes disagreement tolerable, and politics possible. That means defending it for others, even when we dislike what they say. It means resisting efforts to police speech through digital cancellation or deportation from whichever side happens to be winning. And it means respect and protection of the kinds of rules that ensure our society remains one in which people can live together despite their deepest disagreements.

If, on the other hand, we continue down the path of multifaceted suppression, we might find ourselves serving a long sentence — not behind bars, but in a society where no one trusts, no one listens, and no one is truly free.

Gavin Roberts is an associate professor of economics and chair of the economics department at Weber State University. He is a recipient of the Gordon Tullock Prize from the Public Choice Society and regularly shares his research locally, nationally and internationally. This commentary is provided through a partnership with Weber State. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent the institutional values or positions of the university.