1/ Every time I post about cancel culture on Instagram, someone asks “what about holding people accountable who spread hate and encourage discrimination & violence?”

2/ I have a few thoughts on this:

1. Do we even have a mutually agreed definition of hate, violence & discrimination?

There are people who think advocating personal responsibility = hate.
Or that words are violence.
Or being blocked on social media is discrimination.

3/ If we don’t have a mutually agreed explicit understanding of what words like hate, violence & discrimination mean, I don’t think it’s possible to have this conversation.

4/ These, and also racism, sexism, transphobia, are very serious words.

They are supposed to have weight to them. Some gravity.

And when we fling these words around & label people & things we don’t like, we lose that.

5/ It’s very important to know when actual hate, racism, violence, transphobia, and discrimination have happened. These are serious things.

Another reason why diluting the meaning of these words is dangerous, self serving & myopic.

6/ And 2. There seems to be this idea that people are essentially puppets who hear hateful views and blindly start enacting them.

(Or at least this is what we’re told the reason is.)

I don’t believe people are stupid. I think adults can discern for themselves.

7) This is safetyism is action. Shield people from ‘harmful’ views. Bubble wrap the world. Feed people the ‘right’ ideas and somehow society will fall into order.

This is lacking a fundamental understanding of psychology.

8/ Human nature has not been ‘controlled’ by anyone expect the human being themselves voluntarily.

You cannot remove hateful impulses by removing hateful stimuli. There will always be people who are driven by malevolence. Similar to cancel culture enacting our worst impulses.

9/ 3. The final idea is that people who secretly harbour ‘hate’ are emboldened.

There’s some truth to this, as we see in cancel culture. Some people are emboldened to bully & enact interpersonal violence because it’s socially acceptable.

And yet so many don’t.

10/ We stand up to it, we say no. We face the backlash. At great personal cost.

This is an illustration of how it’s less environment and more personality traits & temperament.

If this hypothesis was true we’d all have the same response to stimuli. We don’t.

11/ Because we are not blank screens. We are not all socialised the same way, either.

Individual personality variations exist.

Ultimately, it’s down to the individual, whether there’s ‘harmful’ stimuli or not.

End