Getting Discomfortable with Cancel Culture

The podcast is back after a little hiatus (more on that in the next episode), to tackle an issue that has been coming up in the news a lot lately and which people often bring up with me thinking they know what my opinion will be.

And while I am of course not a proponent of cancel culture, as I know that shame is not an effective strategy for getting through to people, I increasingly think that decrying cancel culture is a misdirection. 

When it comes to many social justice topics, the only associated issue that really affects me personally and emotionally is often the threat of shame and cancellation. This can easily become a distraction from the larger, arguably more important issues. 

For example, racism. As a white man, the only issue surrounding racism that really threatens me personally is the spectre of shame and cancellation for being a racist. And because we are essentially biased by our own emotional reactions, it will feel to my body like shame and cancellation are therefore the most “important” and pressing issues related to racism. My emotions will propel me to fight against this threat, which is, of course, a distraction from the real problem of racism.

I see a lot of people getting caught up in this exact same misdirection and it presents a big opportunity to refocus our concerns such that we aren’t blinded by our own emotional perspective where we can’t see the forest for the trees. 

But cancel culture is still an issue in itself, albeit an arguably less pressing issue than some of the social justice movements it often obscures. I think we can still work against cancel culture, but it requires a skillful strategy that doesn’t just hypocritically shame the shamers or cancel the cancellers. Given that I believe we shame others with our own shame, my approach is to deal with the shamers as the victims of shame, rather than the perpetrators of shame. Instead of cancelling the cancellers, we can empathize with them and help them heal their own shame so they no longer need to go around projecting their shame onto others.