An Analysis of Cancel Culture

In several previous Zeroth Position articles, I have argued that social media platforms, payment processors, and other technology companies should be prevented from denying service to people who are not engaging in illegal behavior on the grounds that their form of business organization cannot exist without the coerced support of the masses, and that the proper way to rein in this behavior is to revoke their incorporation and right to do business as a legal entity separate from the individual persons involved in the company as punishment for denying service.[1–6] These arguments have received no rebuttal for the many months since I began publishing them, and there is little else to say on these subjects that has not been covered already in the six articles referenced. Meanwhile, no significant policy action has been taken against the technology companies, and their efforts to suppress dissidents, especially those of a rightist persuasion, have only escalated, presumably in an effort to tilt the outcome of the 2020 United States presidential election in a progressive liberal direction.

Another previous topic addressed in this publication is the practice of doxxing, which is the public revelation of clandestine personal information for the purpose of making that person a target of violence, threats, harassment, fraud, and other criminal conduct. I argued that given the level of harm done and the lack of proper judicial punishment for the offense, it is no more immoral to hunt down and kill doxxers than it was to hang cattle rustlers and horse thieves in times past. In fact, the particulars of those crimes bear far more resemblance than one might expect, as do the desired outcomes by those performing the extrajudicial killings (namely, an end to the crimes, imposition of a social norm against them, and the introduction of effective intrajudicial punishment as deterrence against future crimes).[7]

Still another problem that has not received specialized treatment in this publication as of yet is the physical deplatforming of controversial public speakers, especially at university venues. The beginning of the practice dates to the 1940s in the United States[8] and the 1970s in the United Kingdom[9] as a means of countering American communists and British fascists, respectively. In the former case, a rule of the University of California system stated that “the University assumed the right to prevent exploitation of its prestige by unqualified persons or by those who would use it as a platform for propaganda.”[8] In the 21st century, deplatforming became much more common, with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education documenting 438 attempts between the year 2000 and the time of this writing to disrupt guest speakers or get them disinvited to campus, with 205 successful and 233 unsuccessful. Of these, according to FIRE, 265 attempts were made by people to the political left of the targeted speaker, 125 attempts were made by people to the political right of the targeted speaker, and 48 were not classified in this manner.[10] Commencement speakers in particular have been targeted for deplatforming by student groups on campus[11–13], presumably for their relatively high profile and lack of support structure on campus.

All three of these issues have a common link in the form of “cancel culture,” which is the public shaming, denouncing, and ostracizing of individuals (and sometimes the groups adjacent to them) who voice unpopular opinions[14], which in practice usually means anything that is insufficiently compliant with the progressive Left. This may include doxxing, content reporting raids, physical and/or digital deplatforming, economic boycotts, defaming, cyberbullying, and other methods. Though these phenomena and the psychological mechanisms behind them are nothing new, it is important to delve deeper to examine both sides of an act of ostracism as well as what is different now compared to times past.

1. The Political and Intellectual Frameworks

Let us begin with the Jouvenelian model of social order, for there is very little grassroots activism that occurs without some level of elite backing. As C.A. Bond explains,

“At times, it is [the central societal] Power which aligns with the periphery as a means to strengthen itself and weaken the subsidiary power centres; at other times, it is the subsidiary power centres which engage with the periphery to undermine and overtake the primary Power. Whatever section is aligning with this periphery, it should be noted that without this alliance between a power centre and the periphery, the periphery is itself basically irrelevant. Without the assistance of a centre of power, any action by the periphery is, by virtue of lacking institutional embodiment and political protection, at best sporadic and ineffective. A popular protest, rebellion, or any other form of dissenting action by the periphery, if it has no support from an element in the power structure, will quickly fade into irrelevance; if it does have this support, it will find itself supplied with resources, exposure, protection, and institutional embodiment.”[15]

In the Jouvenelian model, commoners who move to ostracize someone are acting on behalf of elites who want that person or institution to be excluded from the societal mainstream, whether or not they realize that they are so acting. Put another way, malcontents on social media would be irrelevant if social media platforms, payment processors, and other institutions did not care to ally with them and governments did not at least tolerate them. Their complaints would fall on deaf ears and their lack of real power would prevent any attempts at direct action from being successful if it were the case that no central Power or subsidiary power wished to work with them.

This explains how cancel culture is happening at a political level, but not why. In the Jouvenelian model, ideas arise spontaneously but are then subject to selection by power centers which may or may not find a particular idea to be useful for its purposes. If the elites in charge of a society and/or the subsidiary institutions would benefit from an idea becoming popular, then they will use their power to advance that idea. Otherwise, the idea will be ignored or suppressed, depending on how much perceived harm the established elites anticipate could come their way should said idea become popular. This is quite similar to the Darwinian process of natural selection of random genetic mutations by non-random means, except that the selection mechanism is intelligent in this case.

As such, we are looking for an idea at the root of cancel culture that has been selected by Power to aid in its growth while appealing to some peripheral group. This intellectual backing for suppression of dissenting views by the progressive left takes its most direct inspiration from the work of Herbert Marcuse. In his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” Marcuse writes,

“Surely, no government can be expected to foster its own subversion, but in a democracy such a right is vested in the people (i.e. in the majority of the people). This means that the ways should not be blocked on which a subversive majority could develop, and if they are blocked by organized repression and indoctrination, their reopening may require apparently undemocratic means. They would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior–thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives. And to the degree to which freedom of thought involves the struggle against inhumanity, restoration of such freedom would also imply intolerance toward scientific research in the interest of deadly ‘deterrents’, of abnormal human endurance under inhuman conditions, etc.”[16]

In other words, Marcuse advocates that opponents of the expansion of Power in the name of protecting disadvantaged minorities should have their liberties curtailed. His notion of freedom is par for the course for a Marxist; you are “free” to think as they do and do as they say, for it is he and his ilk who will decide what the “new and rigid restrictions” are. Marcuse then describes the methodology that is currently at work in cancel culture:

“While the reversal of the trend in the educational enterprise at least could conceivably be enforced by the students and teachers themselves, and thus be self-imposed, the systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions and movements could only be envisaged as results of large-scale pressure which would amount to an upheaval. In other words, it would presuppose that which is still to be accomplished: the reversal of the trend. However, resistance at particular occasions, boycott, non-participation at the local and small-group level may perhaps prepare the ground. The subversive character of the restoration of freedom appears most clearly in that dimension of society where false tolerance and free enterprise do perhaps the most serious and lasting damage, namely in business and publicity.”[16]

Following this blueprint almost to the letter, university students and faculty organize to deny a platform to wrong-thinkers while large-scale pressure is exerted against free enterprise and public figures to impose a new view of tolerance that is “militantly intolerant” of those who oppose the leftward march. This is the self-imposed cordon sanitaire around the ivory tower as well as its means of projecting influence through the rest of society. While Marcuse makes this seem like a benevolent effort to redress historical and current injustices, the result in practice is the victimization of innocent people and net curtailment of liberty as centralized Power expands to dominate subsidiary institutions.

Marcuse was not the first member of the leftist vanguard to seek to thumb the scale of public opinion by institutional means. Edward Alsworth Ross is found doing so as early as 1901:

“The better adaptation of animals to one another appears to be brought about by accumulated changes in body and brain. The better adaptation of men to one another is brought about, not only in this way, but also by the improvement of the instruments that constitute the apparatus of social control. In the same way that the improvement of optical instruments checks the evolution of the eye, and the improvement of tools checks the evolution of the hand, the improvement of instruments of control checks the evolution of the social instincts. The goal of social development is not, as some imagine, a Perfect Love, or a Perfect Conscience, but better adaptation; and the more this adaptation is artificial, the less need it be natural.”[17, emphasis in original]

Ross shows some skepticism about the long-term effectiveness of such efforts in the pages following this quotation, as well as some scientific racism and eugenic thought that ensures his work is forgotten by the Left today. Even so, the seed of authoritarian social control was planted at least this long ago.

2. The Neurological Framework

In order to understand the effects of ostracism on a person, we must consider a part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area (hereafter VTA). This is a group of neurons located on the floor of the midbrain close to the midline, and is designated an “area” rather than a nucleus or cortex because it does not have clear boundaries that separate it from adjacent parts of the brain. The VTA sends information to the amygdala, cingulate gyrus, hippocampus, nucleus accumbens, olfactory bulb, and prefrontal cortex. The pathways from the VTA to each of the aforementioned areas use dopamine as their primary neurotransmitter.[18] Input comes to the VTA through GABAergic inputs and glutaminergic afferents. (GABA stands for γ-aminobutyric acid, the chief inhibitory neurotransmitter in adult mammals.) GABAergic inputs come from the nucleus accumbens, rostromedial tegmental nucleus, and ventral pallidum.[19] Glutaminergic inputs come from the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, lateral hypothalamic and preoptic areas, laterodorsal tegmental nucleus, pedunculopontine tegmental nucleus, prefrontal cortex, subthalamic nucleus, and superior colliculus.[20]

The VTA is intricately involved in the natural reward and punishment system through the selective release of dopamine. This includes associative learning, avoidance, cognition, emotions, fear conditioning, motivation, and orgasm.[21,22] Malfunctions in the VTA are the cause of several psychiatric disorders including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Parkinson’s disease, and schizophrenia. They also play a role in drug addiction.[22] Different parts of the VTA are responsible for reward and punishment; the meso-ventromedial dopamine system is activated by noxious stimuli, while the meso-ventrolateral striatal dopamine system is activated by rewarding stimuli.[23]

When a person is ostracized by their social group, that person suffers a significant drop in dopamine levels. The rest of the group will likely maintain their levels, although some may receive a lesser boost relative to the drop in the ostracized person for pulling up themselves by pushing down someone else, and others may receive a lesser drop if they would have preferred not to ostracize the person but went along to get along. It is important to remember that biology is fundamentally amoral; what triggers these rewards and punishments is not necessarily aligned with one’s individual preference, or with what is eucivic in the current environment. It should also be noted that excluding a certain member from a group can be beneficial or even necessary for the survival of the group. The same neurochemical processes occur in a person’s brain today when deplatformed on campus, banned from a social media site, or refused service by a payment processor that occurred in our ancestors’ brains if they suddenly found themselves facing dangerous Ice Age megafauna without the help of a tribe. Namely, the VTA signals the hippocampus, which senses a threat and signals the amygdala to activate the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. This is known as the stress response or the fight-or-flight response.

From here, there are short-term and long-term consequences. In the short-term, adrenaline and cortisol are released, blood pressure becomes elevated, the pupils dilate, and glucose is released to provide energy.[24] The stress response also dulls higher cognitive processes, as the parts of the brain responsible for it are concerned with self-preservation rather than reason. This makes sense in evolutionary terms, as overthinking a potential danger can give a predator a decisive edge over prey. Thus, the organisms without a stress response that suppresses higher brain functions are selected against. Note that because these parts of the brain are instinctual rather than thoughtful, the ability to distinguish which perceived threats are true threats is diminished. In physical cases, such as confrontation of public speakers, the stress response increases the likelihood that political disputes will escalate into violence.

Over the long-term, the stress response causes allostatic load if it is activated too frequently. Chronically elevated blood pressure becomes heart disease and hypertension. Chronically elevated blood glucose becomes insulin resistance and diabetes type II. Other stress-related health problems include anxiety, depression, digestive problems, headaches, lack of concentration, memory problems, sleep problems, and weight gain. Given the excessive amount of perceived threats, it should be no surprise that the aforementioned health problems are more prominent now than in times past, and that heart disease is the leading cause of death for Americans of all ages.[25]

3. The Practical Framework

Most of the participants in cancel culture have neither read Marcuse nor encountered the Jouvenelian model of human orders despite marching in lockstep with them. They are also unlikely to be familiar with neuroscience. As such, let us move down to the level of their awareness and consider the practical effects of ostracism on those who engage in it and on those who are excluded.

3.1. The Ostracizers

Ostracism is often touted as an immediately nonviolent approach to dispute resolution. (Although violence may eventually follow, the act does not necessarily initiate the use of force.) In that sense, it is superior to aggressive violence to the extent that the ostracizers remain peaceful (which they do not always). However, there are many disadvantages to using this method. First, to ostracize someone is, at least, an implicit claim that there are irreconcilable differences, regardless of whether or not there actually are. If true, then agreeing to disagree and going separate ways is likely the best course of action. But if false, then friendships, business relations, and other building blocks of social order are destroyed for no good reason. Regardless, the underlying conflict is left unresolved, and suppressing the symptoms of an unresolved problem usually will make it worse later. Especially in liberal democracies, ostracism can escalate a conflict, as both sides seek to rally public opinion in their favor while ostracizing more people for being associated with the first ostracized party. Furthermore, the political incentives in a democracy favor punting a major problem to the next administration, partly because the politicians have only the usufruct of the nation without ownership in the capital stock, and partly because there tends to be political advantage in using a problem as a campaign issue rather than solving it. At worst, this can turn the perpetual cold civil war inherent in a democracy into a hot war.

Second, the act of ostracizing one’s opponents can bring attention to them. This is especially true in public disputes, and can backfire on the ostracizers if it is found to have been done under false pretenses. This is known as the Streisand Effect, named for the incident in which Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com in 2003 for violation of privacy for putting a picture of her house on the Internet.[26] The picture had only been downloaded six times before the suit, two of which were by Streisand’s attorneys. The publicity generated by the suit led to the picture being downloaded over 420,000 times, which was the opposite of her desire.[27] Likewise, when a person is “canceled,” some people will look into that person’s history and intellectual contributions. If these are found to be reasonably virtuous, rigorous, and truthful, then the attempt at ostracism is likely to backfire.

Third, ostracism can create a coalition of rivals where none existed before. Unless the ostracism escalates to the level of genocide, the shunned people will still exist. They will have every reason to band together, as they have been cast out by what is now revealed as a common enemy group. The stronger the taboo against associating with them and the more hostility is shown to them, the stronger the bonds between the ostracized people will become, simply for reasons of mutual survival, protection, and benefit. Groups of elites and commoners alike can ultimately create an opposing group of people who have the potential to replace them in their social station if they ostracize the wrong people. Failing this, the united pariahs can form a troublesome insurgency that gives the original group much grief, far more than would have been suffered by letting them remain in polite society.

Fourth, ostracism is used by entryists as a divide-and-conquer political strategy. This method is known as salami tactics (from Hungarian Szalámitaktika) from its use by the Hungarian Communist Party to take power in the late 1940s. The goal is to eliminate political opposition slice by slice until it no longer meaningfully exists. The implementation begins by infiltrating opposition parties. Once inside, the infiltrators cause divisions and create factions that produce intraparty strife which will eventually allow the party to be dismantled from the inside out. Hungarian communist leader Mátyás Rákosi portrayed his opponents as fascists or fascist sympathizers in order to defeat rightists, then centrists, then less radical leftists, until all that remained were either communists or those willing to collaborate with communists.[28,29]

Finally, ostracism is a double-edged sword. One cannot sever societal bonds unilaterally; any such action will impose a barrier upon the exchange of goods, services, and ideas in both directions. This may appear to be beneficial at first; the ostracizers have strengthened the cohesion of their group and purified their ideology by purging dissenters. But this sense of asabiyyah is false; blaming a scapegoat and sacrificing it is only effective if it really is the root of all societal ills, and human society is almost never that simple. What happens instead is a phenomenon known as the Overton Bubble, which bears discussion at length. Noam Chomsky describes the impetuum purpose thus:

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”[30]

The area inside of these limits is commonly called the Overton Window, and those who step outside of these limits too boldly and/or frequently are targets for cancel culture. When the Overton Window is combined with an ideological echo chamber and reinforced by copious amounts of virtue signaling, it can become thick and opaque, hardening into an ideological pocket universe which can only be entered or re-entered with great difficulty. This Overton Bubble can form when a group polices the range of allowable opinion to such an extent that no one inside can have an accurate understanding of what is happening outside, as simply knowing enough about views outside the bubble is sufficient cause for being canceled. In the worst cases, this can lead the people inside to believe that everyone thinks and views the world as they do, a condition which Charles Krauthammer describes as the mirror-image fallacy or plural solipsism. He writes:

“The mirror-image fantasy is not as crazy as it seems. Fundamentally, it is a radical denial of the otherness of others. Or to put it another way, a blinding belief in ‘common humanity,’ in the triumph of human commonality over human differences. …Its central axiom is that if one burrows deep enough beneath the Mao jacket, the shapka, or the chador, one discovers that people everywhere are essentially the same. …If the whole world is like me, then certain conflicts become incomprehensible; the very notion of intractability becomes paradoxical. …To gloss over contradictory interests, incompatible ideologies, and opposing cultures is more than anti-political. It is dangerous.”[31]

If the group inside an Overton Bubble is a ruling elite, then this can leave them (and everyone else in their society) in a terrible predicament. As Neal Devers writes,

“If some thoughts are unthinkable and unspeakable, and the truth happens in some case to fall outside of polite consensus, then [the] ruling elite and their society will run into situations [that] they simply [cannot] handle.”[32]

When the polite consensus fails, solutions (if they exist) are found by those who are willing to reject the consensus and try other ideas. It follows that wise elites would be exceedingly careful about allowing such a polite consensus to form. This cannot be completely suppressed; an elite must have some ideological basis that reinforces their claim to legitimacy. However, they would take active steps to suppress it as much as possible, even if it would appear to deny them a measure of power in the short-term. But the allure of power and short-term gains prove too tempting to most mere mortals, and the incentives inherent in democracy are counterproductive in this regard.

3.2. The Ostracized

With the perspective of ostracizers analyzed, let us turn to the ostracized to examine their reactions. As discussed in the previous section, ostracizing several people can bring those people together. A recent New York Times article with the subtitle “Depriving people of a platform works — in unexpected ways” explores this phenomenon. John McDermott explores the experiences that several academics, comedians, and other public figures have had with being confronted with outrage mobs, finding that a sort of counter-culture has emerged among this “class of people — journalists, academics, opinion writers — canceled for bad, conservative or offensive opinions.”[33] The role of Quillette in giving a platform to the canceled and helping with reconciliation in such disputes is highlighted, and the importance of such institutions cannot be overstated. But the article comes across as hollow and purblind because all of the supposedly canceled people are still able to work and have social lives, partly due to a degree of fame and renown that the average person does not have and cannot acquire, and partly due to their transgressions being slight. None of the people quoted at length are accused of crimes that might justify a canceling, though McDermott does mention Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein as the other end of the spectrum from those being discussed. (The falsely accused are noticeably absent from this spectrum.) Neither are any of those quoted in the article far out of step with mainstream culture; their “bad, conservative or offensive opinions” were mainstream 20 years ago, which is not true for those with reactionary and/or foreign opinions. Such outsiders are also less likely to find a platform at Quillette and similar outlets in the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web.”

As Ashley Rae Goldenberg explained in a Twitter thread about her own experience with doxxing and the experiences of commoners who have been canceled,

“There are so many stories of ‘small’ people whose lives have been ruined by being ‘canceled’ that you’ll never hear about because it never made news. …If you are already famous somehow—you’re a writer or a professor or any other sort of academic or personality—you being ‘canceled’ will make headlines. If you’re an average college kid like I was, or like so many like me, you won’t get that same treatment. I’m not invited to the ‘canceled people parties.’ But I still have to face the ramifications every single day of having my personal information out there and having huge first page Google results threads calling me a bigot and a racist. I don’t get the headlines fighting back. There are so many people who have been victims of outrage culture you know absolutely nothing about because they were just your average Joe when it happened to them. They’re the real people suffering. Not the academics and big name writers who get to hang out and get brunch. While all of these famous ‘canceled’ people get to attend the same galas together and receive praise and awards and favorable headlines, there are real average people out there who have to suffer the rest of the of their lives with no way to fight back because of being canceled. …With no one coming to our aid, and no big headlines in the New York Times and the Washington Post to defend us, our Google presence is a scarlet letter we have no way to fight. It’s nauseating when famous people say they understand when they got good press off getting ‘canceled.’ …It’s revolting that people who have gotten awards, recognition, and praise off the backs of being canceled are now getting interviewed for pieces about oh, how hard it was to be canceled! Now we all attend the same black tie parties teehee! They have no idea what it’s like. …It’s infuriating when people like me have to worry about never being employed again or having friends because of their Google results, while famous people get to go to black tie galas to get awards from other ‘canceled’ people whose book sales soared after they went on Fox.”

This leads into the real problems with cancel culture. The natural inclination (though not the only inclination, as will be discussed in the next section) of those who suffer when Marcuse’s vision is carried out is to retaliate. The revulsion articulated by Goldenberg above frequently manifests as social unrest, from anti-establishment political movements to violent street protests to domestic terrorist attacks. Let us consider each of these responses.

First, some people will organize in an effort to take power for the purpose of giving those who ostracized them a taste of their own medicine. This phenomenon is more common on the Right, given the dominance of the Left in institutions of power throughout time memorial. This explains the rise of the alt-right and nationalist populism in recent years. Both are the result of segments of the population feeling alienated from their societies and governance structures, and their treatment by the corporate media adds insult to injury. The political philosophy behind these movements is nothing new, going back at least as far as the Right-Hegelians and arguably back to Counter-Enlightenment thinkers such as J.G. Hamann and Joseph de Maistre. The participants are not necessarily aware of the intellectual history involved; they may simply feel the pressures of ostracism and wish to get even. Though it may be possible for a resurgent Right-Hegelianism to achieve a balance of political terror and a peace through mutually assured destruction with progressive liberals, this is a dangerous game to play. Given unchecked power, the death and destruction that has been wrought by leaders embodying Right-Hegelian ideas is second only to that wrought by the culmination of Left-Hegelian thought in the various branches of Marxism-Leninism. Of course, Right-Hegelian resurgence will produce a unification of establishment leftists and centrists (many Left-Hegelians) in resistance to this undead nemesis. To the extent that Right-Hegelians visibly fail, they will accelerate leftism as it uses the Hitlerian Geist as a pretext for advancing its agenda ever faster.

Second, those who feel similarly but are unsatisfied with political efforts, whether out of principle or practice, may take to the streets. In recent years, there have been a number of violent clashes between right-wing and left-wing groups, most notably in Berkeley, Calif., Portland, Ore., and Charlottesville, Va. So far, this has had predictable results. The leftist groups have enjoyed at least tacit support from local and state officials, if not outright backing. The rightist groups are periphery-only operations, and are thus suppressed by force of law. The rank-and-file police officers may wish to apply force differently, but have followed orders to stand down against leftists and shut down rightists thus far. The occasional terrorist attacks performed by right-wing extremists are cited as justification for such suppression, while the violence of Antifa against peaceful people has gone unpunished except for a few high-profile cases. Although no objective of the true Right can be reasonably accomplished by attempting to demonstrate crowd power, especially without elite backing, this is not well understood among the Dissident Right at present.

Finally, it is necessary to discuss the potential for domestic terrorism. On the process and progression of what would now be called “canceling” someone, Ross writes,

“One lives to-day by the practice of cooperation at various removes from the self-sufficing stage of industry. Most of one’s well-being comes through cooperations that are advantageous to both parties, some comes as aid that benefits one but does not burden the other, and some comes in the way of succor and implies a sacrifice. Now the instinct of an angry community is to refuse cooperation. First to be withheld are neighborly offices; then ‘accommodations’ cease; finally even the cooperations of mutual benefit are refused. The merchant loses his customers, the clergyman his parish, the clerk his office, the lawyers his clients, the laborer his job. This may go on till boycotting tradesmen refuse to sell an egg, a loaf, or a candle to him who is under the ban. Thus one by one are severed the roots that spread into the social soil, little by little the ligature is tightened, till communication ceases and the dead member drops from the social body.”[34]

Those who are truly “canceled,” in the sense of being deplatformed, rendered unemployable, and disallowed from participating in regular commerce, probably will not be rendered literally dead in this modern age. However, they will be put into conflict with society and backed into a corner. Conflicts have only three forms of resolution: reason, exit, and force. Disputants may discuss their differences and negotiate some agreement, they may agree to disagree and go their separate ways, or they may fight until the winner imposes upon the loser. Those who are canceled are denied the public use of reason and the means to support themselves. Exit may not be available, in that there may not be another place to which one may go or another social or economic circle that one may join. This leaves only force as a means of dealing with the dispute at hand while removing the normal set of incentives for not resorting to violence, as the aforementioned ostracism both severs the social bonds that once kept them connected to society and leaves them with little or nothing left to lose. Let us consider two examples of such responses, one fictional and one real.

A short story titled “The Denouncer” by Daryush Valizadeh, better known as Roosh V, is a fictional account of a young man named Brad who is rendered unemployable after he makes a racially insensitive post on social media because a social justice blogger named Katie, who writes for a social justice blog called The Denouncer, publicizes his name and employer to get him fired. Without the ability to support himself, Brad gradually loses his independence and freedom until he feels that his lot in life is ruined beyond repair. He borrows money to travel to New York City and meet the young woman who he blames for ruining his prospects. The man commits a murder-suicide against Katie, then the story concludes with the beginning of another such case, as a policeman gets fired for his commentary on Katie’s death as a result of publicity from another blogger at The Denouncer.[35] Valizadeh’s writing skills leave something to be desired, and the story is full of stereotypes and misrepresentations of reality, but he articulates a series of events that is plausible in a general sense, so much so that it is surprising that nothing like it has yet happened in response to a coordinated attack by social justice warriors.

There has been at least one attack already carried out by a person who felt ostracized. Shortly after noon Pacific time on April 3, 2018, Nasim Najafi Aghdam (Persian: نسيم نجفى اقدم‎), 38, traveled to the headquarters of YouTube in San Bruno, Calif. and shot three people with a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol before turning the gun on herself. Everyone except Aghdam survived the shooting, though one was critically wounded.[36,37] Several YouTube employees shared live updates from the headquarters on Snapchat and Twitter as the shooting unfolded.[38] Aghdam was an aspiring fitness personality and PETA activist who immigrated from Iran to the United States in 1996.[39,40] She posted content in Azerbaijani, English, Persian, and Turkish on Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, and YouTube, some of which went viral in her native Iran.[41,42] She wrote on her website that “Youtube filtered my channels to keep them from getting views!” and that the company had demonetized most of her videos.[43,44] On the morning of the attack, police met with Aghdam because she was sleeping in her car in a Walmart parking lot, but did not suspect what was to come.[45] In an email to employees following the shooting, Google CEO Sundar Pichai called the shooting an “unimaginable tragedy,”[46] and perhaps it was at the time. No one had yet escalated to a direct physical attack on a social media headquarters in response to perceived censorship before Aghdam, and judging by the content of her videos, she was clearly suffering from mental health issues.

The technology giants should have interpreted Aghdam’s attack as a warning of what may happen to them if they anger the wrong people. If they continue to suppress and demonetize content while shadowbanning and deplatforming users, eventually there will be someone who responds violently, especially if such corporate censorship is coupled with a broader coordinated “canceling” of a person. The next attack could come at any time, with any of a broad array of weapons, at any headquarters of a social media company, payment processor, crowdfunding site, search engine, or website hosting company, and will be performed by a person who will not be positively identified until it is too late. Police failed to identify Aghdam as a threat just hours before her attack, and may well do the same with the next attacker. The result may be horrific, as most potential domestic terrorists are far more capable than Aghdam was. Unfortunately, Aghdam’s actions and the possibility of far worse has not only failed to motivate a detente, but the major social media companies and payment processors have accelerated their efforts to target dissidents, just as the writers at The Denouncer are shown failing to learn a lesson.

Ostracism can also contribute to terrorism in an indirect manner. Just as the ostracizers can seal themselves inside of an ideological bubble, a similar effect can occur on the outside. After a “canceling,” people who were once exposed to a healthy intellectual diet of diverse thought and opinion can find themselves surrounded by extremists who reinforce and amplify existing hatred while feeding them conspiracy theories, justifications for violent action, and instructions for carrying out mass casualty events. Without the antidote that a broader community can provide against poisonous ideologies, those who are receptive or sympathetic to them are more likely to become radicalized and incite a catastrophe.

4. Strategy and Solutions

With these facts, possibilities, and concerns in mind, what should be done? One path to better health, both individually and communally, is to step away from the toxic environment of public discourse. This can be necessary to avoid allostatic load and reduce one’s stress to manageable levels that will not impair one’s long-term health. But doing so rewards bad behavior by ceding ground to those who are making the environment toxic. Furthermore, the battle is incentivized to continue at a biological level because those who successfully “cancel” someone receive a dopamine boost for their apparent victory in group dynamics, and retreating is a self-cancel to some extent. If the center retreats, then the environment will only become more toxic as extremists of all types are not challenged or separated. If one fringe retreats while others do not, then the peace of mutually assured destruction is lost.

Another plan is to create alternative parallel institutions and spaces where dialogue can be more productive and “canceled” people can form new communities. This has already occurred to some extent, though creating the infrastructure for alternatives is considerably more difficult when website hosting companies, payment processors, and establishment media unite against a start-up venture. This ability to go elsewhere is of vital importance because censorship is a power that someone will ultimately wield, this power is more ripe for abuse than almost any other, and the only peaceful resolution is exit. However, such places can become hotbeds of radicalization and staging grounds for violence, especially if dominated by any particular political fringe.

The greatest problem is that although modern technology has granted an ostracized person more means to survive a “canceling,” it has also granted them more means to retaliate. A tribe of Iron Age agriculturalists that chose to expel someone outside the city walls to fend for themselves against the hyenas had not to worry that said person would produce a rifle and kill dozens of them, or drive a truck bomb into the town hall and kill hundreds of them. Indeed, such events would be completely alien to their reckoning. Some of those who advocate for arms control are attempting to restore this world-historical norm, but this is only one vector among many. This genie cannot be put back into its bottle in a general sense without a loss of technology that could only accompany a new Dark Age, and the potential for one person to inflict death and destruction upon many will only grow as technology advances.

The most effective strategy is to suppress and punish those who attempt to shut down peaceful discourse. This is necessary because simply asking people to stop doing what their ideology demands of them will be ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. They will either ignore polite calls to stop canceling people or accelerate their efforts out of spite. It is necessary to enumerate and enforce real consequences upon those who abuse the levers of social control. (That all are estopped from complaining about a taste of one’s own medicine is a plus, though it is of secondary importance.)

At present, institutions of power are both ill-equipped to stop cancel culture and thoroughly infiltrated by those who are causing the problem. This requires a political strategy, both to wrest power away from those who are using it destructively and to change its nature so that it does not incentivize societal conflict. Obviously, this must be an anti-democratic strategy, for it is political democracy that is ultimately responsible for creating the divisions and diffusing the formal power that results in a culture of ostracizing fellow citizens over political differences. Because a democratic system grants each citizen who is eligible to vote a small piece of political power, each person can — at least in theory — mobilize other people into a voting bloc to advance a political agenda that would use state power in a manner hostile to another group of people. This makes each politically active person an unofficial soldier in the aforementioned democratic war, and thus a target for retaliation if one speaks out in a manner unpopular with another faction. It is this dynamic that produces the degeneration of political discourse into cancel culture and the ills that follow from it. If power were vested in a central figure, such as a king, then there would be no purpose in an outrage mob targeting a person, as neither they nor their potential target would have any political power, and all involved would know it. Additionally, any wise king would use his power to suppress such activities because they serve only to lower his property values and rents while threatening his rule.

Both neoreactionaries and right-libertarians have made headway on this strategic problem, though the desired endgames of each differ considerably in scale and substance. Neoreaction tends toward imperial governance and may forcibly eliminate cancel culture, reflect it back on those who caused the problem, or both. Neoreactionaries advocate a passivist strategy of building an alternative power structure that can take over when the current elites fall into crisis. Libertarianism, on the other hand, seeks to shrink the geographic and demographic scale of governance as much as possible. Libertarians would seek to solve cancel culture primarily through exit, though private property owners are small-scale monarchs in libertarian theory and would presumably act as above. Libertarian strategy is currently disorganized to the point of inefficacy, though more are coming to see the wisdom of neoreaction in this regard.

For the sake of mitigating domestic terrorism and other social unrest, let us hope that one of these efforts is successful soon, as it is only a matter of time until canceled people take drastic action if events continue on their current course.

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