How They Get You...
The mechanics of cancellation, which turn out to also be the mechanics of authoritarianism.
My interest in cancel culture started in earnest when I became the subject of a cancel campaign. A small group of people decided to harass me online, and to take that harassment to people associated with me. It was one of the most surreal and painful experiences of my life.
It was also, as it turns out, really good preparation for living in a hypernormalized culture as it careens toward authoritarianism. The surreality, the explicit demands to abandon your own experience in favor of the officially approved interpretation, the power plays disguised as moral superiority, the small group of people claiming the mantle of supreme authority - all of those things played in to my own experience. At the end of 2022, it was bizarre to watch 5 of 7 board members support me, and the two who didn’t react to the democratic process by taking to social media and publicly reject the democratic process to get their own way (as the MAGAs in Washington were creating unprecedented turmoil trying to elect a speaker for the house.)
I researched the process and tropes of cancellation pretty thoroughly (because, you know, processing trauma intellectually is far more fun than processing it emotionally. What? Who said that? Hush!) and in the process, I found a perspective that helped me make sense of what I was seeing on the national stage. As this phenomenon becomes more common in our increasingly divided world, I hope what I learned can help others either avoid, or at least survive, a similar experience.
There will be several essays in this series, but I think the place to start is with Natalie Wynn’s fantastic video (you can find the transcript here) that lays out some of the patterns you can see both in social harassment and in the political harassment affecting our country now.
Presumption of Guilt: A statement is put out that Someone is a monster, a predator, an abuser, a rapist - whatever version of boogieman will have the biggest impact on the audience. This statement is made with great confidence, even passion, by someone who is entirely committed to their narrative. We believe it, because questioning narratives isn’t the usual practice. Because this is a narrative implying danger, the negativity bias kicks in. After all, it’s safer to believe that someone is dangerous because, after all, people turn out to be monsters all the time in the stories we hear, right? We end up with a sense that, if we’re wrong, we’re in danger - or putting others in danger.
The current regime admits that the vast majority of people who’ve been picked up by immigration agents and sent to detention camps this year have no criminal record. In March, In a sworn declaration, ICE Acting Field Office Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Robert Cerna defended deporting people with no evidence of criminal activity, telling a court that ”The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat.”
On a more personal scale, it can be difficult to question claims that someone has suffered abuse from an evil person. If someone claims to be a victim, it’s bad form to question their suffering. The trouble there is that often times, interpersonal hurt is not caused by abuse of power, but miscommunication or mismatch of desire. I had someone tell me a friend was “evil,” recently, and when I asked a couple of questions it turned oug that after giving an initial donation towards this persons cause, my friend had failed to give additional money and stopped answering calls after told they were evil if they did not continue to donate.
In another case, my niece told me that she could not attend an event that had been the victim of an online harassment campaign. She had read something on social media - a piece I had also read - and what stuck in her head was that the event was bad. When she looked at the complaint again at my urging, viewing it with a more critical eye, she was able to see some of the clear contradictions in the complainant’s version of events - but her initial reaction was to see a call out post and assume that the person being accused must be guilty.
Abstraction: When we hear Someone is engaging in toxic and manipulative behavior, we begin to make assumptions about exactly what they have done. The details available through the whisper network or online are likely not very specific, or the specifics don’t entirely line up with the language used. Someone with a parking ticket is not generally referred to as a criminal, and if you hear someone has a criminal record you are unlikely to think of a parking ticket. If you pay attention over time, the details may shift. If you question the overarching narrative, you become part of the problem.
As if it weren’t bad enough that the regime is deporting people with no criminal record, they often refer to these people using words like “rapist,” or “murderer.” An essay on the White House Website is titled “sick politicians want killers, rapists roaming our streets.” This abstraction has the effect of dehumanizing the people being arrested and deported, and of trying to make any objection to such policies more difficult.
The same thing can happen in interpersonal circles. It’s considered very bad form to ask for details when presented with words like abuser and rapist - and that’s not entirely unreasonable. But it’s not entirely reasonable, either, especially when you are being asked to take some action on the basis of this characterization.
Essentialism: The next step down the road is to shift from criticizing what Someone did to who they are. They did not commit a crime, they are a criminal. They did not bully someone, they are a bully. We’ve heard a lot of this language the past couple years aimed at immigrants, and more recently at liberals or democrats. It’s not about what they’ve done, it’s that they are essentially and irredeemably evil. The bad actions don’t need to even have happened - they just might have been too smart to be caught, after all. Essentialism makes the assumption that each person is one thing, and one thing only.
The biggest danger of essentialism is that when we insist that people are only one thing, we do not leave space for, well, reality. As Taylor Swift’s new song Cancellation says, “Everybody’s got bodies in the attic.” When we insist people must be only good or bad, we leave no space for loving people who have done bad things. If we cannot love or even associate with people who have done bad things, we leave no space for learning, or for doing better. As the research on consent - or any basic awareness of the sexual assault scandals in institutions like churches - shows us, when people have to choose between believing someone they love is a monster or pretending what they’ve done is not so bad after all, most people choose love.
I’m all in favor of choosing love - and in fact I take a lot of hope in that human tendency. The thing we must not do is require perfection to find people worthy of love. Nobody is perfect, and we are all worthy of love - and sometimes our actions need to be changed and sometimes we need to make restoration based on them, and we need the ability to accept that both of these things can be true at the same time. Essentialism makes that impossible, and needs to be rejected on that basis.
Pseudo-Moralism or Pseudo-Intellectualism: In interpersonal situations, we hear people say that they want to warn others of the dangers of associating with Someone, or suggest that any contact with that person puts you in the category of essentially evil. Never mind that the actions involved may be common, may even be something the person themselves have done. You’d think this might disqualify them from judging other people for those actions - but it’s not presented in that way.
This acts as an amplifier for essentialism. It’s not just that that person is kinda bad, but they are evil at an existential level, and we must fight the evil. Clementine Morrigan, who has been writing and talking about these phenomenon for many years, says “I have read entire ‘call outs’ that loudly proclaim a person is an ‘abuser’ who must be outed for community ‘safety’ and then go on to list things which are clearly conflicts, mismatched needs, and hurt feelings. I have watched people be humiliated, slandered, isolated, controlled, and robbed of everything meaningful in their life when what they are being accused of is not abuse, and what is happening to them is.”
No Forgiveness: Of course, if someone is a monster and you are simply trying to protect the innocent public from them, forgiveness is impossible. People who are being shunned and exiled for whatever they are being shunned and exiled for must never be allowed to reenter the social group. This precludes the idea of someone learning from their experience, which is fine because the essentialist trope tells us that this isn’t about what they’ve done, it’s about who they are as a person, and that cannot change.
Another amplifier - once someone is determined to be evil, they will always be evil. People cannot change, we’re told. Like so many of the assertions of an authoritarian, the permanence of this is used as a cudgel to make the consequences of cancellation more painful for the subject of the campaign. The idea is to take away hope, permanently.
Guilt by Association: Wynn calls this the transitive property of cancellation. I see it on my social media feeds occasionally - posts saying “I have X# of mutuals with Somebody - if you’re one of them unfriend me now.” The idea that someone else is so bad that even a conversation with them taints others to the point where they must also be exiled.
This, too, is used to amplify the pain of exile - and also to discourage anyone from suggesting that the cancellation is the result of a mistake, a misinterpretation, or (as is frequently the case) conflicting priorities. Many many cancellations, especially of businesses, turn out to financially benefit someone behind the campaign. In other cases, they stem from a romantic or interpersonal conflict being reframed as intentional evil. No one is allowed to speak up for the person being condemned, because to do so is to join them in the condemned category.
Dualism: This is the theory that people are either good or bad - not some combination of both. From Wynn: “add to that essentialism, if a person says or does a bad thing, we should interpret that as the mask slipping; as a momentary glimpse of their essential wickedness. And anyone who wants to remain good had better be willing to publicly condemn anyone the community has decided is bad.”
Again, the binary choice we’re meant to simply accept as though things on this planet are all purely one thing.
Both conservatives and liberals will claim that only “the other side” does these things, but that’s not the distinction that matters. Tim Urban does a great job of describing the distinction between what he calls low level thinking (zealots) and high level thinking (scientists). Zealots are focused on being right, no matter what the facts say. Scientists are focused on learning the facts, no matter what their beliefs say.
As we watch the regime double down on their beliefs regardless of the facts, it’s important to understand the intellectual mechanisms that support that type of thinking, and to become adept at questioning the things you are told must not be questioned (especially the things you are told must not be questioned).
In practice, this is scarier than it sounds if you haven’t been through it. Also, when people make confident assertions, we tend to believe they can’t possibly be lying, because who would do that? What we discount, though is that they may be acting on bad information that they sincerely believe - in which case they aren’t good liars so much as they are bad critical thinkers. We cannot protect ourselves against these sort of authoritarian tactics by trying to keep our heads down, or by appeasing them. They come for individual people almost at random. Looking at the people who’ve been kidnapped by ICE this year based on being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and some of the consequences that they’ve faced reminds me of this graphic.
What we can do, though is to push back on those tactics across the board, in both our social and political worlds. Understanding the mechanics, and starting to recognize the patterns when I see them, has helped me, and I hope it will help some other people as well.