Not having a voice: the physical and metaphorical

This week I have sounded increasingly like an emphesyma patient, coughing, hacking, and generally croaking to get just a few words out. It has in no way been pretty, but it has taught me a valuable lesson on the importance of voice, both in the physical and metaphorical senses of the word.
In it's basest essence, a voice allows a creature to communicate with others of it's kind. Whether it is a mating call or the simple ability to articulate what you want and need, a voice provides an immeadiate means of taking the vastness of each individual's intellect and distilling it into the important information that needs communicated in an instant. It binds societies together, allowing the commerce of ideas to go forth uninhibited. It is a reflection of who we are.
The loss of physical voice, however temporary, immeadiately curtails your ability to interact with your environment. It tragically constricts your ability to control what happens or even how it happens, when you cannot articulate something as simple as, "I need a glass of water."
But the loss of voice in a metaphorical sense is far more damaging, as the Founding Fathers amply recognized. Once you lose the ability to freely exchange your ideas, however wrong, revolutionary, foolish, or ingenius they may be, you give up a bit of your soul, your divine fire, your ability to determine your own destiny in a real way. And in giving up this most precious of gifts, you create a space for tyrannical ideas, thoughts, and language of one group to supersede that of general discourse of the many.
Unfortunately, it appears that the nature of man is to form groups who try to supress this discourse and thus the most dangerous thing that any congregation of people must be wary of is the ideology. If we consider an ideology to be a "complete vision" of how things should be done, it becomes easy to see that a group backed by an ideology, especially if not given to compromise and adjust said ideology to fit the needs of a dynamic Universe, can easily verge on the tyrannical, with but the gentlest push.
In my brief life, I have been a member of or participated in a number of groups that have moved down this dangerous path of curtailing voice. In each case, rituals were very important and superceded actual communication of ideas. Additionally, whether it existed formally on paper or not, the organization always has a group of elders of some sort who feel that due to time in service, annoiting from god, etc., they were more wise in the ways of what should happen than other members of the group. Initially, when an individual among the group raises a voice of opposition, a member of these elders will come and speak to that individual to try to re-orient him/her into proper lines of thinking, being, etc. However, if this fails, the group escalates it's behavior and may angrily call out the individual or begin shunning the individual. The motivations behind these behaviors are quite simple and clear: the individual should give up whatever vain notions they have of things being different or risk losing one's tribe.
Of course one could argue that there is a time and place where these behaviors act as valuable protections to the whole of any species employing them, but these times and places are restricted, IMHO, to those few moments where life and limb are at stake. The problem coincident with that statement is that many well meaning people can assume the sky is falling and curtail an individual's choices, when in fact there is no harm in being different under the circumstances involved. Religious and political zealots can fall into these later categories, as can well-meaning groups of people who do not understand the importance of difference and change in a community.
In it's essence people who try to suppres voice in the name of preservation of culture are trying to hold back the rush of time and stop the unwieldy hand of evolution, not only of species, but of environment, of people, of culture and community and in so doing they can create the very death knell of the culture/society they are trying to create, preserve, or transmit.
The transmission of voice, both physical and metaphorical is necessary, no vital, to mankind. It is by the chaotic, bumpy, road of transmitting ideas that we as a human species communicate, grow, and adapt to an ever changing environment and it provides the capacity to allow those in any community to deal with those constant changes around them and among them. And the second that we turn against this, and embrace dictating our ideas, traditions, and culture to others, we put at risk those values which we aspire to hold most dear: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.