A History of Cancel Culture & It's implications for Modern Society

Cancel culture is not specifically a product of the woke ideology. It originates from any doctrine that strives to create the perfect post-revolutionary society in the name of progress. It is only one of the many authoritarian policies enabling the implementation of the changes necessary for the realization of the revolution.

Cancel culture is the answer to the question: How can individuals be easily made compliant with the ideology?

In the Soviet Union during the communist era, Stalin was sending dissidents to the Gulags. In Nazi Germany, Hitler silenced his political enemies with the concentration camps. In Italy, Mussolini banned all rival parties and opposition newspapers and reintroduced the death penalty for serious political offenses.

Cancel culture, as per the examples above, is the series of coercive programs which aim to restrict, if not abolish, nonconformist speech.

Revolutions always perceive free speech as reactionary and the people attempting to raise a dissident opinion are identified as enemies or worst, accused of being the cause for the doctrine’s failure. 

Consequently, for the revolution to succeed, unorthodox individuals must be silenced.

In 1965, Herbert Marcuse, one of the most prominent members of the Frankfurt School, Robert Paul Wolff, an American political philosopher, and Barrington Moore Jr, an American political sociologist, published the essay “A Critique of Pure Tolerance” in which they discuss the political role of tolerance.

Marcuse specifically developed the concept of “liberating tolerance” i.e. tolerance for the ideas of the progressive left and intolerance for right-wing movements. Liberating tolerance is a criticism of pluralist democracy, the tolerance for all beliefs or opinions. Liberating tolerance is about discerning in accordance with one’s values; therefore, this concept is the justification of hostility and censorship of views deemed problematic.

Cancel culture is a postmodern remake of Marcuse’s liberating tolerance, a postmodern form of censorship, a sanitization operation led by the outraged so-called righteous mob against individuals or companies accused of holding questionable opinions.

Undoubtedly, in western societies nowadays, we fear less the censorship of the state or church compared to the political pressure from organized groups, the virtuous progressive mob, the new puritans. Besides, the modus operandi of censorship switched from the tribunals to demonstrations in the streets, the media, and most particularly social media. Different actors, places, and operating modes … notwithstanding, cancel culture proceedings always follow the same pattern:

The Accusation:

The woke mob, the moral guardians, have emerged as the new puritans thanks to the advent of social media. Committed to social justice activism, those progressives are at the forefront of the repression (and suppression) of conservative ideas. 

In line with Marcuse’s concept of liberating tolerance, the moral guardians have launched censorship operations, concealed behind their selective indignation, against political opponents or media deemed problematic (text, film, speech, etc.). Their viewpoint takes precedence over the factual content of the supposed controversial medium, the context, and the real intention of the author. They judged events in the distant past according to their present (revolutionary) values, without considering that morals and values evolve through the ages. Their outrage transcends space and time.

Subsequently, we can distinguish three main charges against individuals accused of wrongdoings:

1. An accusation relating to the conduct of an individual (but unrelated to the media): for instance when Harry Potter author, J. K. Rowling, was accused of making transphobic comments on Twitter. 

2. An accusation of immorality is cast on both the conduct of the individual and the media: Céline, one of the most celebrated French authors was condemned for both the subtext of his work and public statements viewed as tainted by anti-Semitism undertones.

3. Only the media or part of the media can be incriminated: The movie “Gone with the wind” was interpreted as being racist due to its stereotypes regarding people of colour.

For those new puritans, the moral guardians, the accusation alone is enough to confirm guilt.

Mass Outrage:

Social media consecrated the reign of emotion over reason through virtue signaling.

The moral guardians hastily take offense and voiced their grief on social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter by means of hashtag activism i.e. activism on social networks.

They claim that those non-physical abstractions deemed problematic (words, speech, or opinions) are comparable to physical violence. For instance, misgendering trans people, according to the progressives' moral guardians, is an act of violence.

Regardless of the reasons – virtue signaling, narcissistic personal validation, or real conviction – taking offense is ultimately a reflection of groupthink amplified by the artificial indignation of the crowd.

Cancellation

The moral guardians will then call for the cancellation of the accused, the ostracisation, boycott, and censorship from social networks and even from professional circles (pressure on employers). This is what happened to Rima Azar, an associate professor of health psychology, at Mount Allison University in Canada. On May 2021, she was suspended without pay and barred from teaching during the fall term following complaints from students about her personal blog, considered racist and discriminatory, in which she denied the existence of systemic racism or systemic discrimination in Canada.

Private companies and individuals, in fear of repression, conform to the new puritans’ demands. Social media companies, for instance, happily censor content deemed problematic by means of arbitrary user policies. As an example, President Donald Trump was still in office when he was banned from Facebook and Instagram, following outrage for his comments about the US Capitol riots.

The condemnation from social media companies lead to virtual death (loss of Facebook or Twitter accounts, inability to access your PayPal wallet) while the moral guardians conduct the sentence of social death (persecution, public shame, harassment of friends or family), and take the necessary measures to discourage others from defending the accused (threats of making them the next target).

Even if the offender decides to issue an immediate apology (regardless of the factual guilt), the moral guardians will proceed with the cancellation, pressure employers, and call for the erasure from digital platforms. The actress Roseanna Barr, for instance, despite apologizing for a tweet deemed racist and Islamophobe, had her show canceled by the network ABC.

In conclusion, similarly to the methods applied by Stalin during political purges in the Soviet Union (1936–1938), although without a concrete form of political assassination or imprisonment in the gulag, cancel culture allows the obliteration of those suspected of holding politically unorthodox thoughts, their elimination from digital platforms and public discourse.  

Cancel culture is a weapon, legitimized by the concept of liberating tolerance, used to combat through collective action, speech, or behavior considered to be offensive or problematic. It is a new kind of censorship exercised by the narcissistic woke crowd, the moral guardians, with the compliance of social media multinational companies (the political power no longer censors the media but social media censors politics).

In our postmodern fascist societies, dissenters are not liquidated, they are canceled.