I don’t think your theory is wrong – misery loves company, as we all know – and “relatability” has really come front and center as a litmus test for public figures. The conventional wisdom says Bush 43 won because people wanted to have a beer with him. I’ve never wanted to even *meet* let alone imbibe with any politician in my life. Just do the fucking job I voted for you to do, and leave me alone. So the whole “relatability” thing leaves me cold.
But while relatability is a piece of it I don’t think it’s all of it. I think many people have become very inward looking, very vaguely dissatisfied with their lives, and very entitled as a result. Most of these people already hold a pretty privileged position, so it’s a quandary. Late capitalism, living so much of our lives atomized and online, and a global pandemic are all isolating factors. But how you persuade a guy living in a McMansion who owns a boat to begin thinking, “I want to say the word “tranny” but I can’t, help, help I’m being repressed” remains a mystery to me.
I think it’s fear of displacement (“you will not replace us”), fear that their status hasn’t really been earned so it can be taken away at any time, fear of the “other,” and just free-floating fear. When you measure your life by the wrong yardsticks – how much money/stuff do I have, who is below me and who is above me on the ladder of society, what do other people think of me – you open yourself up to be prey to every kind of con out there.
Every now and again the Covid mists part and I think I glimpse stuff clearly.
My guess on the CancelCulture thing is that way too many folks have said vile, heinous things, racist, sexist, mean, violent things, and fears someone making them pay for it, some underling they have abused or said crap about, some vengeance crazed ex, some abusive liberal, like in D. Mamet's late oeuvre. They are the ones who's sensibilities are supposed to be considered...and they might be Running Scared...
A lot of 'em should be.
And the rise of tfg gave a certain license to folks who wanted to say anything they damn well pleased and suffer no consequences... Of course, I live where folks can say any damn stupid and vile thing they want: if you never saw Adult Swim's Squidbillies, the main character, a hillbilly squid, says stupid things that are eerily accurate to the discourse in the greasy cafes of Redneckistan...
It's not like they are going to actually hear much pushback, but the Fox/RightMedia/Conspiracysphere had them scared of having to use "the Wrong pronoun" or someone calling out their yelling "n*gger, n*gger, n*gger" as a political platform...
And I think that word 'cancel' does not mean what they think it means...I mean, if we/they are STILL reading about it upon every conceivable platform, where's the damn cancellation I was promised?
If you act like an asshole or say something really stupid it's really not a burden when someone says, " Hey. Stop acting like an asshole and saying stupid shit. "Sure, you are certainly free to be an asshole- I am free to tell you to knock it the fuck off.
We filter what we say all the time even when we are alone. That process in our own minds is a mirror of what happens socially. Arguably, the internal process comes from our learned experience, from what we learn from feedback, not just with speech but also broader experientially, what to do, how to do, what to say, how to say, to get what we want, achieve certain results.
We are trying in the context of so-called cancel culture to isolate a segment of that selection process for expressing ourselves. What are we considering? The impulse to say something for a reason, for a rhetorical impact, but also from a feeling, the desire for attention and also for control of how others consider something, a framing, a portrayal. The concept of "being canceled" is itself an example. There are as many ways of understanding what those words mean, what the concept being expressed is, as there are persons with personal experiences that inform their individual understanding of it.
At the heart of the matter is perhaps the set of clichés and well-worn almost meaningless concepts and the feelings behind them. No one listens anyway, and the shock value wears off after the hundredth monkey barks out the same harsh tones, one, more, time. Cue the fat lady.
Better Q: Why do sooo many people answer the question “Are you going to believe my lies are or the truth you see?” Incorrectly? Why do so many believe so much bullshit? Personally, as a defective human being, it’s not for me to do more than guess, I mean, I can’t know, but my belief is that for all the tough talk, we’re hardwired to be submissive.
As for the Edrosos’ theory, I’m not persuaded. As Roy notes (and I don’t doubt), the questions are... well, a problem if clarity is a goal. Too, as cancel culture -- again, a perverted term, speaking of clarity -- trickles down to the masses, it’s seen as holding people accountable when they offend. By offend, I mean both deliberately giving offense as well as stating something beyond the pale. (I was going to add that the right to be an asshole is going to be one of the last rights the SCOTUS junta will take away but then I realized that that right, as it were, is part of the foundation of this site in a way so sure, okay, maybe it can be okay.)
So little more than that: Assholes don’t want be held accountable and people have fears of being rejected for giving offense.
Which is cancel culture only in the debased, perverted sense of the term.
BTW: Those bleating loudest about being canceled aren’t actually being canceled.
"How free do you feel you are to express your viewpoint on a daily basis without fear of retaliation, censorship or punishment?"
In my experience, the people who feel most oppressed in this regard:
1.) Are the people who spend most of their time expressing their viewpoint, loudly and obnoxiously. And then wondering why others avoid them.
2.) Are people with utterly abhorrent viewpoints who feel oppressed because it's no longer socially acceptable to tell racial jokes or to "compliment" the receptionist on how nice her tits look.
3.) Are people who do not actually know what "cancelculture" is, but they've heard about it and they know it's bad, and they know that it's coming for them so they will SOON be unable to express themselves.
America is not a land of contrasts. It is a land of ever-declining intelligence and ever-increasing stupidity.
I mean, people have sort of always bought this bullshit, right? For example, not being able to say the n-word can be traced straight back through civil rights and Jim Crow to the Peculiar Institution. Likewise, Joe the Plumber grumbling that he can’t say “tranny” is an improvement (relatively speaking) over how being openly gay or trans just a few decades ago was a ticket to getting beat up or killed. I suspect that all too many of the people bitching about cancel culture today would be quite happy to go back to the “good old days” of beating up gays, and lynching and enslaving people of color.
I think a lot of people take their cultural cues from right wing media and “respectable” outlets like the NYT and NPR, and the people running those places are consumed with cancelculture for their own reasons—either because they’re awful people politically, or because it’s easier to write about the alarming cancelculture problem at Oberlin than it is to cover, say, a rolling conservative coup.
Plus, even if they don’t belong to such rarefied clubs as the NYT op-ed page, they’re still comfortable and don’t want that comfort disrupted by any social justice stuff, or they fear something in their own past—something not ill-intentioned, and something they’re probably unaware of—will become the newest target of CANCELCULTURE, and they’ll find themselves banished to the outer darkness like Al Franken and Garrison Keillor—or even that nice Andrew Cuomo and Bari Weiss.
Re: Jordan Peterson—the other day in the Fun Half of The Majority Report, Sam Seder and crew had a grand old time sending up Jordan Peterson’s overwrought self-crucifixion diatribe, which he inexplicably thought wise to record and disseminate.
Savonarola was canceled when he was hanged and burned by the Florentines. Hitler was canceled when he killed himself instead of letting the Red Army take him captive. When one of these snowflakes undergoes something similar, then I might concede that they have a point.
First of all, I was happy to hear that Jeff Bezo's $500 million yacht was stuck in a boatyard in Holland because it was too big to fit under a bridge, but not because I think for a minute that it makes me just like him because I once built a dinghy in my basement that wouldn't fit out the door, but because I think he's an asshole. If he wasn't an asshole, I might have empathized, given my own over-sized vessel history. So some celebrity woes make me happy because some celebrities are assholes, and others I might think in passing, "Oh, that's too bad. Let's check the baseball scores."
Secondly, the whole idea of the word "cancelculture" and the fact that we're all using it, to the point that people who wouldn't know the difference between a tenured professor and a professional tennis player can opine positively or negatively about it, proves Gingrich's Law (which I just made up), that any word - old, repurposed or created - can be inserted into the minds of Americans as a bad thing they should be opposed to and worry about and have an opinion about, preferably along with a distaste for liberals and Democrats. Think about it, "cancelculture" makes no sense, especially in the way it's applied to actual things that happen. No culture is cancelled when someone is taken off social media, or even loses their job. If it were, what culture would that be? The culture of white American pseudohistory? And cancelled? What has been so eliminated from our purview that it can be said to be cancelled? These rightwing assholes, as Roy and others have pointed out again and again, never go away. Gingrich is still around and I just made up a law in his name. My point is, every time someone uses these terms, we give them life and not in a way that has any connection to what they really mean. "Woke" - who wouldn't rather be awake than asleep to the reality of the world? Assholes, that who. "CRT" - if you're going to propose a theory about race to apply to the study of American history, why wouldn't you want it to be critical (in the sense of examining, not as negative)? Oh, not if you're an asshole. I'll force myself to look at this NYT article and if the comments are still open, say there is no such thing as "cancelculture" and they might as well ask random boobs if they're against jabberwockies. Some percentage will undoubtedly say they are.
Anyway, gas prices have been going down for three weeks, so I guess we won't be hearing about the agony of the gas buying public on network TV for a while.
I'm not sure people really need a reason to believe anything they believe, other than that the thing they believe is in circulation and believed by others. That's the power of the ruling class, that they get to put ideas out into wide enough circulation that they get believed by millions of people simply because they're believed by millions of people.
I often see the effectiveness of this particular brand of centrist/conservative equine enema solution has had in our mentalité whenever I read student writing. I so often find a claim that this particular movie/book/poem/whatever "just couldn't be made right now" because of some scene or language or characterization that they know now that people find objectionable. Sometimes I find it encouraging in that they understand that there's consequences to language and representation. But usually it's a kind of "this just shouldn't exist" — and they get that way, I think, because media whinging about cancel culture forestalls actually interesting & socially responsible conversationsabout inclusion and ethics from happening.
Those papers are almost always extended & enriched & made relevant by just asking "why the fuck should anybody care" (or, more pedagogically perhaps, "why is it important that we notice and what is your action item here").
But I have to say it's not exactly anything new. I'm a medievalist as you all know (grouchy as they come) & it's always been a habit for a student in considering piece of literature like Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Prologue," which discusses misogyny, domestic violence, the antifeminist tradition in medieval scholastic discourse and throw ones hands up and say well that's just how they did things back then. With the implication that "we do things better now" & that's all that needs to be said. It reveals both of a lack of desire to engage with the relics of patriarchy, but also a reflexive insistence on cultural or social progress, right? We take it for given that because women can now vote or have credit cards, they're free. Which isn't really true as we all see & are seeing.
Post Dobbs, I would be interested to see how many students find that complacency challenged and are a little easier to convince that the questions of past oppressions or exclusions are actually important to understand.
I see among the latest trends in elite media: 1) “why don’t the rabble know their place when it comes to wages/protests/etc” and 2) anti-trans “thought” pieces. You might call it Serf & TERF.
I wonder how these polls would turn out if, instead of the vague phrase, "express your viewpoint" they gave a list of expressions and asked "How comfortable are you saying these things in public?" The list would start with the n-word, of course, got to pay respect to ones elders, and then run on down through the f-word and the b-word (bonus pay for the poor souls who'd have to read this list over the phone.)
And then, after people indicate their level of discomfort over saying these specific things publicly, comes the followup: "Do you think it's a good thing or a bad thing that you should feel uncomfortable saying some of these things in public?"
I don’t think your theory is wrong – misery loves company, as we all know – and “relatability” has really come front and center as a litmus test for public figures. The conventional wisdom says Bush 43 won because people wanted to have a beer with him. I’ve never wanted to even *meet* let alone imbibe with any politician in my life. Just do the fucking job I voted for you to do, and leave me alone. So the whole “relatability” thing leaves me cold.
But while relatability is a piece of it I don’t think it’s all of it. I think many people have become very inward looking, very vaguely dissatisfied with their lives, and very entitled as a result. Most of these people already hold a pretty privileged position, so it’s a quandary. Late capitalism, living so much of our lives atomized and online, and a global pandemic are all isolating factors. But how you persuade a guy living in a McMansion who owns a boat to begin thinking, “I want to say the word “tranny” but I can’t, help, help I’m being repressed” remains a mystery to me.
I think it’s fear of displacement (“you will not replace us”), fear that their status hasn’t really been earned so it can be taken away at any time, fear of the “other,” and just free-floating fear. When you measure your life by the wrong yardsticks – how much money/stuff do I have, who is below me and who is above me on the ladder of society, what do other people think of me – you open yourself up to be prey to every kind of con out there.
Every now and again the Covid mists part and I think I glimpse stuff clearly.
My guess on the CancelCulture thing is that way too many folks have said vile, heinous things, racist, sexist, mean, violent things, and fears someone making them pay for it, some underling they have abused or said crap about, some vengeance crazed ex, some abusive liberal, like in D. Mamet's late oeuvre. They are the ones who's sensibilities are supposed to be considered...and they might be Running Scared...
A lot of 'em should be.
And the rise of tfg gave a certain license to folks who wanted to say anything they damn well pleased and suffer no consequences... Of course, I live where folks can say any damn stupid and vile thing they want: if you never saw Adult Swim's Squidbillies, the main character, a hillbilly squid, says stupid things that are eerily accurate to the discourse in the greasy cafes of Redneckistan...
It's not like they are going to actually hear much pushback, but the Fox/RightMedia/Conspiracysphere had them scared of having to use "the Wrong pronoun" or someone calling out their yelling "n*gger, n*gger, n*gger" as a political platform...
Bullies, and mobs, are basically scared.
"ROYAL SCANDALS" "O.J. SIMPSON"
Always up to date, that rag.
And I think that word 'cancel' does not mean what they think it means...I mean, if we/they are STILL reading about it upon every conceivable platform, where's the damn cancellation I was promised?
"Americans know it exists and feel its burden. -"
If you act like an asshole or say something really stupid it's really not a burden when someone says, " Hey. Stop acting like an asshole and saying stupid shit. "Sure, you are certainly free to be an asshole- I am free to tell you to knock it the fuck off.
We filter what we say all the time even when we are alone. That process in our own minds is a mirror of what happens socially. Arguably, the internal process comes from our learned experience, from what we learn from feedback, not just with speech but also broader experientially, what to do, how to do, what to say, how to say, to get what we want, achieve certain results.
We are trying in the context of so-called cancel culture to isolate a segment of that selection process for expressing ourselves. What are we considering? The impulse to say something for a reason, for a rhetorical impact, but also from a feeling, the desire for attention and also for control of how others consider something, a framing, a portrayal. The concept of "being canceled" is itself an example. There are as many ways of understanding what those words mean, what the concept being expressed is, as there are persons with personal experiences that inform their individual understanding of it.
At the heart of the matter is perhaps the set of clichés and well-worn almost meaningless concepts and the feelings behind them. No one listens anyway, and the shock value wears off after the hundredth monkey barks out the same harsh tones, one, more, time. Cue the fat lady.
Better Q: Why do sooo many people answer the question “Are you going to believe my lies are or the truth you see?” Incorrectly? Why do so many believe so much bullshit? Personally, as a defective human being, it’s not for me to do more than guess, I mean, I can’t know, but my belief is that for all the tough talk, we’re hardwired to be submissive.
As for the Edrosos’ theory, I’m not persuaded. As Roy notes (and I don’t doubt), the questions are... well, a problem if clarity is a goal. Too, as cancel culture -- again, a perverted term, speaking of clarity -- trickles down to the masses, it’s seen as holding people accountable when they offend. By offend, I mean both deliberately giving offense as well as stating something beyond the pale. (I was going to add that the right to be an asshole is going to be one of the last rights the SCOTUS junta will take away but then I realized that that right, as it were, is part of the foundation of this site in a way so sure, okay, maybe it can be okay.)
So little more than that: Assholes don’t want be held accountable and people have fears of being rejected for giving offense.
Which is cancel culture only in the debased, perverted sense of the term.
BTW: Those bleating loudest about being canceled aren’t actually being canceled.
My 2¢ (as opposed to $70/year).
"How free do you feel you are to express your viewpoint on a daily basis without fear of retaliation, censorship or punishment?"
In my experience, the people who feel most oppressed in this regard:
1.) Are the people who spend most of their time expressing their viewpoint, loudly and obnoxiously. And then wondering why others avoid them.
2.) Are people with utterly abhorrent viewpoints who feel oppressed because it's no longer socially acceptable to tell racial jokes or to "compliment" the receptionist on how nice her tits look.
3.) Are people who do not actually know what "cancelculture" is, but they've heard about it and they know it's bad, and they know that it's coming for them so they will SOON be unable to express themselves.
America is not a land of contrasts. It is a land of ever-declining intelligence and ever-increasing stupidity.
I mean, people have sort of always bought this bullshit, right? For example, not being able to say the n-word can be traced straight back through civil rights and Jim Crow to the Peculiar Institution. Likewise, Joe the Plumber grumbling that he can’t say “tranny” is an improvement (relatively speaking) over how being openly gay or trans just a few decades ago was a ticket to getting beat up or killed. I suspect that all too many of the people bitching about cancel culture today would be quite happy to go back to the “good old days” of beating up gays, and lynching and enslaving people of color.
I think a lot of people take their cultural cues from right wing media and “respectable” outlets like the NYT and NPR, and the people running those places are consumed with cancelculture for their own reasons—either because they’re awful people politically, or because it’s easier to write about the alarming cancelculture problem at Oberlin than it is to cover, say, a rolling conservative coup.
Plus, even if they don’t belong to such rarefied clubs as the NYT op-ed page, they’re still comfortable and don’t want that comfort disrupted by any social justice stuff, or they fear something in their own past—something not ill-intentioned, and something they’re probably unaware of—will become the newest target of CANCELCULTURE, and they’ll find themselves banished to the outer darkness like Al Franken and Garrison Keillor—or even that nice Andrew Cuomo and Bari Weiss.
Re: Jordan Peterson—the other day in the Fun Half of The Majority Report, Sam Seder and crew had a grand old time sending up Jordan Peterson’s overwrought self-crucifixion diatribe, which he inexplicably thought wise to record and disseminate.
Savonarola was canceled when he was hanged and burned by the Florentines. Hitler was canceled when he killed himself instead of letting the Red Army take him captive. When one of these snowflakes undergoes something similar, then I might concede that they have a point.
First of all, I was happy to hear that Jeff Bezo's $500 million yacht was stuck in a boatyard in Holland because it was too big to fit under a bridge, but not because I think for a minute that it makes me just like him because I once built a dinghy in my basement that wouldn't fit out the door, but because I think he's an asshole. If he wasn't an asshole, I might have empathized, given my own over-sized vessel history. So some celebrity woes make me happy because some celebrities are assholes, and others I might think in passing, "Oh, that's too bad. Let's check the baseball scores."
Secondly, the whole idea of the word "cancelculture" and the fact that we're all using it, to the point that people who wouldn't know the difference between a tenured professor and a professional tennis player can opine positively or negatively about it, proves Gingrich's Law (which I just made up), that any word - old, repurposed or created - can be inserted into the minds of Americans as a bad thing they should be opposed to and worry about and have an opinion about, preferably along with a distaste for liberals and Democrats. Think about it, "cancelculture" makes no sense, especially in the way it's applied to actual things that happen. No culture is cancelled when someone is taken off social media, or even loses their job. If it were, what culture would that be? The culture of white American pseudohistory? And cancelled? What has been so eliminated from our purview that it can be said to be cancelled? These rightwing assholes, as Roy and others have pointed out again and again, never go away. Gingrich is still around and I just made up a law in his name. My point is, every time someone uses these terms, we give them life and not in a way that has any connection to what they really mean. "Woke" - who wouldn't rather be awake than asleep to the reality of the world? Assholes, that who. "CRT" - if you're going to propose a theory about race to apply to the study of American history, why wouldn't you want it to be critical (in the sense of examining, not as negative)? Oh, not if you're an asshole. I'll force myself to look at this NYT article and if the comments are still open, say there is no such thing as "cancelculture" and they might as well ask random boobs if they're against jabberwockies. Some percentage will undoubtedly say they are.
Anyway, gas prices have been going down for three weeks, so I guess we won't be hearing about the agony of the gas buying public on network TV for a while.
I'm not sure people really need a reason to believe anything they believe, other than that the thing they believe is in circulation and believed by others. That's the power of the ruling class, that they get to put ideas out into wide enough circulation that they get believed by millions of people simply because they're believed by millions of people.
I often see the effectiveness of this particular brand of centrist/conservative equine enema solution has had in our mentalité whenever I read student writing. I so often find a claim that this particular movie/book/poem/whatever "just couldn't be made right now" because of some scene or language or characterization that they know now that people find objectionable. Sometimes I find it encouraging in that they understand that there's consequences to language and representation. But usually it's a kind of "this just shouldn't exist" — and they get that way, I think, because media whinging about cancel culture forestalls actually interesting & socially responsible conversationsabout inclusion and ethics from happening.
Those papers are almost always extended & enriched & made relevant by just asking "why the fuck should anybody care" (or, more pedagogically perhaps, "why is it important that we notice and what is your action item here").
But I have to say it's not exactly anything new. I'm a medievalist as you all know (grouchy as they come) & it's always been a habit for a student in considering piece of literature like Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Prologue," which discusses misogyny, domestic violence, the antifeminist tradition in medieval scholastic discourse and throw ones hands up and say well that's just how they did things back then. With the implication that "we do things better now" & that's all that needs to be said. It reveals both of a lack of desire to engage with the relics of patriarchy, but also a reflexive insistence on cultural or social progress, right? We take it for given that because women can now vote or have credit cards, they're free. Which isn't really true as we all see & are seeing.
Post Dobbs, I would be interested to see how many students find that complacency challenged and are a little easier to convince that the questions of past oppressions or exclusions are actually important to understand.
I see among the latest trends in elite media: 1) “why don’t the rabble know their place when it comes to wages/protests/etc” and 2) anti-trans “thought” pieces. You might call it Serf & TERF.
I wonder how these polls would turn out if, instead of the vague phrase, "express your viewpoint" they gave a list of expressions and asked "How comfortable are you saying these things in public?" The list would start with the n-word, of course, got to pay respect to ones elders, and then run on down through the f-word and the b-word (bonus pay for the poor souls who'd have to read this list over the phone.)
And then, after people indicate their level of discomfort over saying these specific things publicly, comes the followup: "Do you think it's a good thing or a bad thing that you should feel uncomfortable saying some of these things in public?"