I have seen the same thing, but I think the cause is more that maybe the overwhelming majority of people can’t meaningfully do abstraction? Like they blow a gasket between conceiving of individual actions and beliefs vs policies related to actions and beliefs?
So people like this will say sentences like “censorship is wrong” but implicit in the sentence for them is “censorship of correct and/or my information is wrong” because the sentence in their mind must be concretely about something like “correct information”. There’s no way for them to easily think the thought “censorship is wrong in the abstract.”
This also feels related to being able to use “veil of ignorance” type reasoning. I don’t think they know how to imagine being not only a different person, but an unknown person.
I also don’t think they know how to imagine being wrong in some sense, not in the epistemic humility sense (although, yes, that too, much of the time), but in the “suppose I’m just deeply confused about everything, how would I want to be treated? How might I recover?”
I think all these are bottlenecked on a mental abstraction ceiling, and I think all these things work together to contribute to the effects you noted.
The way American public schools (and I presume other schools) teach kids about censorship and propaganda probably has something to do with it. It's not "propaganda" unless it's telling lies. And it's not "censorship" when it seems justified. Propaganda is taught to be synonymous with the promulgation of falsehoods, but in reality propaganda will tell the truth whenever the truth is convenient to the propagandist. To a propagandist, truth and fiction are simply tools to be used whenever either helps the propagandist accomplish their objective.
I agree, probably almost no one truly believes censorship is wrong in the abstract. Similarly, very few people believe in absolute freedom. I’m not sure there are really any belief systems where those two things can be really consistent. There is a real issue with people wrap themselves up as absolutist ideologues while spouting “illegal for thee, but not for me.”
So people like this will say sentences like “censorship is wrong” but implicit in the sentence for them is “censorship of correct and/or my information is wrong” because the sentence in their mind must be concretely about something like “correct information”. There’s no way for them to easily think the thought “censorship is wrong in the abstract.”
This also feels related to being able to use “veil of ignorance” type reasoning. I don’t think they know how to imagine being not only a different person, but an unknown person.
I also don’t think they know how to imagine being wrong in some sense, not in the epistemic humility sense (although, yes, that too, much of the time), but in the “suppose I’m just deeply confused about everything, how would I want to be treated? How might I recover?”
I think all these are bottlenecked on a mental abstraction ceiling, and I think all these things work together to contribute to the effects you noted.