Suddenly, the price of speaking one's mind has gotten very high. You may agree on every issue save one; dare to share your independent or dissident view—and you might shut down the conversation or lose all your friends.

Since this kind of censorship and self-censorship has been going on for some time, people who want to stay out of trouble write under pseudonyms, smile carefully at meetings and dinner parties, but do not say what they really think, there is too much at stake.

I call this the crisis of individualism and the destruction of independent thinking. It is the death knell of free thought, free speech, critical inquiry, and Western civilization (at its best) as we have known it.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/05/22/crisis-individualism/