A thought thought is one thing, but a thought expressed is another altogether.
The idea of free speech mandates that you should be able to express your thoughts, however crude or vile. But in the current climate, the de-facto reality is that you cannot. If you happen to have thoughts not sufficiently aligned with what is deemed acceptable by the standards of the day, you run the risk of being socially rejected, or in modern parlance - cancelled. That has perhaps to some extent always been the case, but the situation today is that the window of acceptabilty is tending towards one moral extreme and is at the same time shrinking. What’s more, what you say can be instantly and inadvertently amplified on a fear-inducing scale. Navigating this climate is increasingly hard for someone who sees the value in a plurality of perspectives.
Granted, expressing your thoughts has always been associated with a risk of saying something unacceptable to those around you. As such, I have always had a high threshold for expressing myself, being anxious about how it would fly in the social environment I happen to be in. My psychological weakness aside, I have always valued being able to say what I think. I’ve perhaps become better at doing so with the years, but I now find myself increasingly holding my tongue and apprehensively choosing my battles. One misstep can make you not only socially unacceptable, but virtually unemployable and in effect unable to fully participate in society.
But silencing your thoughts in this way has consequences. It means you will only express them once they are so polished that they go through the world without any friction whatsoever. But we can not have such high standards for thoughts without killing the essential idea of being able to speak freely - so that a coarse thought may be polished and refined until it expresses something approximating truth or beauty. A seemingly stupid or innocuous thought can be the kernel of something profound. Just like a statue starts with a piece of quite uninteresting rock, it’s the act of chiseling that brings out the beauty. But unlike the artist, most of us are not skilful enough to shape our crude thoughts without the collective intelligence of those around us. Thus, one of the the most viable ways to chisel your thoughts to profundity and truth is by simply expressing them.