British satirist Andrew Doyle will tell a Christchurch audience on Wednesday night that the instinct to silence people is not a political position but a human reflex most of those in power have never grown out of.

The event is the Free Speech Union’s No Offence Taken Tour. It runs from 6.30pm to 8pm at the Russley Golf Club, 428 Memorial Avenue, Burnside. It is the last of three New Zealand appearances, after the union’s annual meeting in Auckland and an event at Parliament.

Speaking to Free Speech Union board member Dane Giraud on the union’s podcast, Doyle set out the argument behind his latest book, The End of Woke.

“I think that authoritarianism is the human default, and I think if you need evidence of that, you just have the whole of human history,” he said.

“I think it is a childish impulse to want to silence those you don’t like.” He compared it to a small child spitting out food, an instinct people are socialised out of rather than born without.

“I still feel the instinct to spit out food I don’t like, but I know not to do it because I’ve been educated away from that.”

Doyle said the reflex of those in power after any tragedy was to reach for censorship.

“There might be all sorts of terrible things happening in the world that require rectification, but if your instinct is, well, we’ll just shut people up and then it’ll get solved, you obviously don’t know much about history,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s a single western government that isn’t to a degree authoritarian at the moment.”

Doyle is the creator of Titania McGrath, the satirical activist he invented online and later took to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the Duchess Theatre in London’s West End. He has a DPhil in English Renaissance literature from Oxford, created and presented Free Speech Nation on GB News for three years, and co-founded the London comedy night Comedy Unleashed. He is now based in Phoenix, Arizona, having left Britain about a year ago.

Tickets are available through the Free Speech Union.