Cancel culture

February 28, 2020 by Fred Allebach

Cancel culture is a phrase that denotes the active ignoring of a person who for various reasons, has gotten on your shit list. In cancel culture proper, the cancelled person is frozen out of social media.

This is really nothing new. Our social world is made up of shifting alliances and enmities. People have fallen out with each other forever. I became more aware of cancel culture from participating in a recent county workshop on race and equity, where it was noted that a high school Chicano studies program in Tucson was cancelled by the AZ state legislature for being “anti-American.”

At a personal level, incidents happen and lines get drawn that can lead to cancellation. If folks are not willing or flexible enough to come back to the table, things go downhill. Sometimes people are just not reliable partners. You can either let it go and move on, or blame and get into it.

 Neighbors are always potential trouble because they never go away; unlike social media, you can’t just cancel them –all the trivial territoriality is always in your face. NIMBYism is just neighbor feuding turned to a tribal level.  

Enmity has to be fed, and the feeding happens by allowing the object of scorn to live in your head. You don’t hate or love those you don’t care about at all. Active hate and scorn can take a toll on your own happiness, and end up hurting you as much as the other.  

Enough times, the hatred and cancellation of others becomes a litmus test for one’s own associates. In-group talebearers demand that you take on their enmity and cancellation. Social relations can be a minefield of likes and dislikes demanding to be validated. I have a policy here, as a modern individual… I reserve the right to make my own enemies.

One way to handle social turmoil is what I call the I-5 right hand lane strategy. Instead of staying in the left lane and getting caught up with all the speeders and tailgaters, just slow down and stay in the right lane, extract yourself from the whole mess. Don’t play the game. It’s not personal; tailgaters just go and do the same thing to the next guy. Make intractable situations a one-way street that you control and disengage from. This is a cancellation I guess, or a pruning of social situations to protect your own sanity.

Political enmity and cancellation are related. When people adopt, or are enculturated into a political perspective, it’s quite similar to being a rabid sports fan. Others have similar loyalties, and bitter purity arguments ensue about who is better and why. Liberals and conservatives have about cancelled each other out, yet both are valid human tendencies. With historical, ethnic, and national myths, people studiously work to ignore, invalidate, and delete anyone else’s story.

Cancellation relates to moral foundations theory; if you’re not in and pure, you’re a heretic. The ultimate cancellation is to be burned at the stake as a witch.

 Locally, alternate universes of facts collide in spectacular fashion: Montini dogs, hillside homes, hotels, homeless location, housing projects, the UGB, all replete with contests of values, appeals, lawsuits, and frosty cancellation of the other side. Even the proponents of justice fall out and cancel: climate and social justice find ways to fatally disagree.

Deep instinct drives all of this. Within groups, Individuals compete, and groups turn into tribes to compete with each other. Human history has been one big fight over the control of resources. We are animals after all, and survival, now masked by words and concepts, is our number one goal. Yet we are evolving, and if we don’t get smart and get along, we’ll undo the very basis for anyone’s success.

 Salvation can be found in the Maya concept of In lak ech, “you are my other me.” When we see our own humanity in others, that opens the door to the in-group evolved compassion that can help to overcome our cancel culture, selfish tendencies. Will our tendency for compassion be greater than our propensity to cancel each other out? And if so, can we bring In lak ech to bear so we all become one tribe, where no one is a stranger?