Cancel Culture

When most people think about cancel culture, they tend to focus on how it is a form of punishment and how it can be abused. I suspect that there are a few reasons for this:

• News stories tend to focus on the target(s), not the mob.
• The primary goal of the mob is to ruin the target’s social life as much as possible.
• When cancel culture is perceived to be justified, the mob is fixated on how much they hate the target.
• When cancel culture is abused, most people empathize with the victim. Humanism is instrumental to this. Humanists strongly value empathizing with perceived victims.
• The punishment from cancel culture can potentially be very harsh.
• People don’t always believe that the targets deserve their punishments. Nearly everyone can recall someone who they believe was unfairly punished.

However, cancel culture isn’t merely punishment. Most mobs aren’t aware that the act of canceling someone or something is a goal in and of itself. Cancel culture is better described as aggregated freedom of association. Canceling occurs when many different people re-evaluate their relationships with a target all at once, usually in response to the target’s actions, comments, or beliefs. The exercise of one’s freedom of association is the first and most important objective of cancel culture. Sometimes, it’s the only objective that can be accomplished.

The second objective is to punish the wrongdoer. While this is what people tend to think about the most, it’s not always an objective, nor is it always possible. Sometimes, people may want to publicly disassociate from the target in order to save their own reputation, not necessarily because they want to punish the target. Other times, the target may too socially powerful to be harmed by cancellations to the extent that the mob desires.

Ideally, cancel culture should provide positive social value for society. It is socially good to cancel people who have done something that is socially bad. A functioning society prevents people from doing socially bad things. Thus, the third rationale of cancel culture should be to prevent wrongdoings in the future.[1]

People should not be canceled for merely having different values, unless their values are antisocial in and of themselves. Everybody has different values in a society. If everybody insisted on canceling each other over the smallest things, then nobody will cooperate with anybody, and society would fall apart. A successful society is supposed to align everybody’s values, so that people will cooperate with each other peacefully.

If people might be canceled for expressing themselves, then they can’t make rational arguments to defend their values. Nor should they be expected to. Society cannot figure out the best values, if people are canceled for expressing their values. That’s why it’s not rational to cancel people over non-antisocial behavior.

All of these objections misunderstand what cancel culture is and what it’s supposed to do. Once again, cancel culture is about freedom of association more than it’s about punishment. In a free society, the individual’s right to freedom of association always overrides the victim’s preference to not be canceled. It not possible to control how people feel about others and how they want to express themselves. From a social standpoint, there are no good reasons to restrict how people express themselves, unless their expression would break a law.

That conceptual misunderstanding applies to every objection to cancel culture, I’m not going to restate it in every subsection. While it sufficiently refutes all the objections, each objection still has fallacies that I think are worth addressing on a case-by-case basis.

Cancel culture is sometimes abused to avoid engaging in rational arguments. However, this is not always the case, nor is cancel culture always bad. For example, many people were rightfully canceled for supporting the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It had nothing to do with truth or rational arguments. It was about canceling people for committing crimes. There are practical, legitimate uses for cancel culture.

Not everybody agrees on what the truth is. It’s naive to unilaterally condemning cancel culture.

Cancel culture is also unavoidable. It’s impractical to strip everyone of their freedom to associate. The best solution is to promote cultural norms on how and when to use cancel culture.

Essentially, cancel culture opponents mainly dislike the potential for how so many of a person’s different associations with different people can change so negatively all at once.

It’s not necessary for cancel culture to have clearly defined punishments and consequences. Dealing with the consequences of one’s behavior is just part of life. Cancel culture isn’t new either. Social punishments have existed for literally all of human history. It’s not practical nor possible to eliminate them.

Cancellations can only be judged as disproportional from the victim’s perspective, as well as the perspective(s) of their associates. From the mob’s perspective, the cancellation is perfectly proportional, especially when each cancel-doer evaluates their action in relation to the victim in isolation.

Many individual punishments can cause a series of punishments that collectively seem disproportional to the crime committed. However, punishments have to be harsh enough to disincentivize socially negative behavior. Often times, people don’t get caught for bad behavior. So from a game-theoretical perspective, the punishment must be bad enough so that when weighed against the probability of getting caught, the outcome is bad enough to discourage people from behaving badly.

While punishments may not be proportional from a collective perspective, they at least tend to be scalable.[2] The more severe the wrong doing is, the harsher the punishments tend to be. Punishments may not perfectly correlate, but they do get harsher (preferably a lot) as the crimes get more severe. What matters is when cancel culture is used. The conditions can be defined by appropriate norms.

Criticizing the severity of punishments is a moral luxury for people of modern times. It’s not a serious problem that needs to be solved either. Especially since “resolving” it would negate the intended effects of the punishment and its severity.

Every individual has a right to exercise their freedom of association. For example, if an employer doesn’t want to be associated with an employee who supports political violence or racist statements on social media, then he should be free to fire the employee and disassociate with them. The employer has every right to do what he must to express himself and show that he does not condone the (former) employee’s statements or actions. The effects and consequences on the employee may be financially harsh, but they are irrelevant to the employer’s freedom.

If the legal system replaces cancel culture, then how would that even work? The implication is that people should be forced to associate with someone, in order to minimize the effects of culture. Is the state supposed to pass laws to regulate people’s behavior and how they can respond via consequence culture? I don’t see how or why that would be practical or beneficial to enforce.

Additionally, the legal system is often unreliable in practice. It doesn’t always accomplish what it’s supposed to do. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem easy to reform the legal system either. In the absence of effective legal punishment, social punishment is necessary.

If a person is cancel cultured, they can still do things to restore their reputation to some extent. For example, they could issue an apology or condemnation for bad things that they’ve previously said. Depending on the action(s) or statement(s) in question, many people are often willing to forgive wrongdoers who repent. Nobody is perfect, and everybody has their flaws. Punishments that can subside after apologizing are also arguably better than legal punishments, because they’re more flexible. By contrast, legal punishments tend to be fixed lengths that can persist even after a person has apologized, even when this is sometimes the main thing that matters and a primary objective of the cancellations.

This is true, but sometimes, friends and enemies are clearly defined. People are always going to cancel their enemies if they can get away with it.

The Israel-Palestine example that was mentioned by Noah Carl is worth considering. It is a topic where people have different values regarding which side they support, rather than different beliefs. Both sides have committed violence against the other. People should be canceled for supporting violence. However, it’s debatable about who started the violence. I have greater favoritism towards Israel, but I would say that both sides are at fault for committing violence against each other. I don’t think it’s reasonable to cancel people over supporting Israel vs Palestine. But some people will disagree, so this is a gray area.

If the left attacked the right, then there’s nothing wrong with the right attacking back. It’s just freedom of association retaliating against freedom of association.

The right’s goal should not be to stop cancel culture. I already explained why that’s a pointless goal to accomplish. The goal should be to exercise one’s freedom and do things that are aligned with their values.

What is politics? Politics is to reduce the number of enemies and increase the number of friends. Make our side bigger and the enemy’s side smaller.

– Mao Zedong

As for the second argument in Carl’s essay, it is very much in favor of the Western tradition to cancel people who support murder and violence. Canceling people who support murder helps to prevent future murders by showing that murder is socially unacceptable. Violence and support for violence should never win social approval, nor should we let it pass.

That’s true, but it’s not an argument against cancel culture. Under rigid moral purity spiraling, nobody is safe from potentially getting canceled in the future. The problem is that rigid moral standards are naive, not cancel culture and not present actions. Morality is an illusion. It’s also inevitable that the future will change who it associates with.

Chronologically speaking, there are two types of cancel culture:

• Canceling living people who did something that is now considered socially negative.
• Canceling historical figures who did something that is socially objectionable nowadays (e.g. the American politicians who owned slaves, Christopher Columbus arriving in the New World, etc).

Canceling doesn’t change the past. Canceling dead people “erases history”, in the sense that it changes what history people know and re-tell the most. Society’s known history and most redistributed stories will always change, just as it has since the dawn of language.

Today, it’s (rightly) fashionable to remove statues of Confederates, and (sometimes questionably) fashionable to remove statues of people who might have done good and important things for their times but fall short of modern progressive standards. Whenever this happens, the claim is that the statue-removers are “erasing history”. Similarly, sometimes books are removed from curricula because they don’t conform to currently fashionable standards, and sometimes this decision is questionable, as when books critical of racism are removed because of their depiction of racism, or when a book important to the Western literary tradition is removed because it makes people feel bad. There, too, you hear claims like “book-banning”.

Let’s start with the statues, though this analysis also applies to building, street, and city names, postage stamps, and the like. The public square is not a history textbook; it’s a way for the government that controls the space to show who it honors. The public square has limited space – and I don’t mean primarily physical space; people’s brain-space and interest level are limited, so the owner of a public space has limited ability to make an impact on its intended audience. You could easily multiply the number of statues by 10 in many places without significant physical crowding, but if you want to show who you honor, it’s probably more effective, given people’s limited attention, to honor fewer people and in a more prominent way.

Needless to say, replacing statues with other statues, renaming buildings, etc., rarely violates anyone’s rights (outside of the unusual case where there was a contractual commitment to keep a donor’s name on a building, or the like). But is this “erasing history”? Not at all. No books are banned; no speech is restricted; this is the government choosing who to honor. The fallacy is in thinking that the public square is like a history textbook. In fact – assuming that governments should be in the statue business – we should probably be changing our statues more frequently, as some previously notable people are forgotten and popular values change.

How about school curricula? Just like the public square, the curriculum for a given grade has limited space. Someone has to choose what to put there, and there’s no obvious reason that The Odyssey or Huck Finn has to occupy any particular place. There’s a huge number of books appropriate for any grade level, and many of those might be equally good for pedagogical purposes.

As before, one can make many interesting arguments about what should and shouldn’t be on the curriculum. One can argue that the curriculum should be primarily about cultural literacy, which means the Great Works should be taught because we need kids to know the history of literature, even if it has offensive components. (I generally agree with this perspective, especially for the higher grades and for college courses, though that’s not the only consideration.) One can argue that the curriculum should be about books that are engaging and make kids want to read. One can argue that, when a book contains elements that are offensive to modern sensibilities, discussion of that element will dominate class time and improperly overshadow the literary values of the work, so why not choose a book that’s relatively inoffensive but is still good for teaching writing skills and reading comprehension?

This is a fascinating discussion, which involves listening to teachers’ experiences with actually teaching particular books and subjects to kids of the relevant age and grade level, as well as ideological issues like who to honor, whether to stress women and minorities, whether to seek out or avoid particular topics, what view of U.S. and world history to convey, etc. But here’s the thing: none of this is remotely like banning books or erasing history. It’s a managerial issue of how to allocate limited curricular space.

– Sasha Volokh, “Cancel Culture and Freedom”

I agree with Volokh’s analysis here, hence why I quoted it. However, he overlooks cases where historical figures are unreasonably canceled due to purity spiraling (e.g. Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson). While people can disassociate from dead people who don’t share their values, this is often counter-productive to rationality. Past actions were caused by different conceptions of morality, which were caused by having different technologies available. It does not make sense to cancel people when basically everybody would’ve done the same things if they grew up in the same culture with the same technologies and circumstances. Once again, it’s not acceptable to cancel people for having different values.

Volokh also overlooks dead people who are canceled for speaking the truth (e.g. Ronald Fisher, James Watson, etc were canceled for claiming that different races have different genetic potentials for intelligence). Volokh failed to recognize this as a problem, so he didn’t propose any solutions for preventing it either.

People who are (deeply) concerned about being canceled for their beliefs and values should obviously hide their beliefs and values (especially if it’s not safe for them to express them openly) or express themselves anonymously. Anonymity and freedom of speech all lower the potential for being canceled. The Internet can help people express themselves anonymously, but it also enables astroturfing and can make it easier for people all over the world to dog pile onto people who are getting canceled.

People with heretical beliefs (namely, biological realism) are often slandered and defamed for their beliefs. Sometimes, the public revelation of a heretical belief(s) is all it takes to ruin people’s perception of the believer. If the believer(s) wants to avoid getting canceled or attracting negative attention to their other memes and causes, then it’s arguably better for them to hide their heresy in order for them to live their lives in peace, and focus on their other causes (if any).

In practice, that only works for targets who can afford to lose social relationships. Some people simply cannot afford to take that risk.

• If heresy is never expressed, then other people may never learn nor understand the truth. In order for heresy to spread, it is necessary for heretics to persuade non-heretics by using rational arguments.
• Hiding heresy may suggest that the heretics are ashamed of their beliefs.
• Hiding heresy can look cowardly, especially if the heresy becomes mainstream in the future.
• Hiding heresy may suggest that the heretics don’t truly believe in their beliefs.
• Censoring or hiding other people’s heresy suggests a desire to censor the truth.
• Some heretics can afford to be canceled and rejected by most people.
• Expressing heresy encourages other heretics to speak up and engage in preference falsification.
• If people judge heretics negatively for heresy, then perhaps the problem lies within the judgmental people, rather than the heretics themselves.
• If more people knew that lots of (intelligent, successful, confident, etc) people are more likely to believe in heresy, then more people would re-evaluate their opposition to the heresy.

Some people (e.g. Steven Pinker) believe that heresy should be hidden or censored when such heresy is likely to have negative consequences. This is a terrible reason to hide heresy, as I’ve argued.

Either way, most people don’t have the intelligence to understand complex, counter-intuitive ideas, so most people probably aren’t persuadable anyway.

It seems that most heretics usually prefer to hide their heresy, since expressing heresy usually has negative social consequences that most people understandably want to avoid.

When heretics are doxxed, exposed, have their communications leaked, etc, they can either choose to:

• Own what they said.
• Downplay what they said.
• Deny that they said what they said.
• Apologize and repent for what they said.

What an exposed heretic chooses to do obviously depends on what they said, what they did, their dedication to the heresy, who they are, their culture, and the social consequences. It is ultimately up to heretics to decide what to do for themselves.

From what I’ve seen, it’s usually ineffective to deny what one has said, unless there’s reasonable and plausible deniability that they ever said what is rumored. When there is no plausible deniability, a heretic who denies what they’ve said appears to be both a liar and a coward.

A heretic can apologize for what they’ve said. Sometimes, this will earn them respect among the forgiving. However, apologies can be assumed to be insincere. Some people will not accept apologies, even if they are genuine. Sometimes, apologies cannot reduce negative social consequences when the damage is already done. Apologies are most likely to be accepted when they are sincere and the heresy is forgivable.

A heretic can also own or downplay what they said. Both cases require accepting that there was at least some truth to what they said. As expected, this will usually yield negative social consequences for the heretic. But the consequences may not matter much if the heretic can afford to be canceled. When the Access Hollywood Tape was released, Donald Trump downplayed it as “locker room banter”. When January 6th happened, Donald Trump gave mixed messaging, ranging from promising a peaceful transition to power and giving a presidential sounding speech that was written by a speechwriter, to praising his supporters, downplaying the attack, and alleging undercover red flag agents at the attack.

Other heretics have faced social consequences for owning their heresy, including but not limited to: Socrates, Galileo Galilei, James Watson, Noah Carl, Nathan Cofnas, etc. I have great respect for these people, and I believe that they will be exonerated in the future, if that hasn’t already happened.

The main problem with cancel culture these days is that it’s abused to silence politically incorrect truths, to dismiss important historical figures, and/or harm the reputations of innocent living people by spreading outright lies (e.g. Nick Sandman, Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny, etc). Despite all the criticism that cancel culture gets, I’ve never seen anybody propose any viable solutions, laws, or norms against it. Cosmic Skeptic has said that the legal system should punish people instead, but he hasn’t described how that would work, nor has he proposed how freedom of association (which he apparently opposes) should be regulated or prevented.

The best that can be done to prevent cancel culture from being abused is to define cultural norms for legitimate uses of cancel culture. The best analogy is the rules for legitimate warfare, which were established by the Geneva Conventions. The rules on legitimate warfare are broken all the time. It’s basically up to the honor system, the independent volition of people who choose to be rule-followers, and the power of anyone who can catch the lawbreakers. In practice, rules don’t stop rule-breakers from breaking the rules. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) doesn’t always win, especially in a multi-polar geopolitical world.

Defining acceptable norms for cancel culture is exactly like defining acceptable rules for war. People should ideally try to follow them, and most people insists that everybody should follow them. It’s ultimately inevitable that someone will break the rules, and there’s not much that can be done about it. The main benefit to defining the following norms is that it sets precedents. We need to define good social behavior, before we can strive for it.

I believe these are reasonable criteria for defining acceptable and unacceptable cancel culture:

• It is unacceptable to cancel people for speaking the truth.
  Examples: James Watson, James Damore, race realists, etc.
• It is unacceptable to cancel people who merely have different values, which aren’t anti-social.
• It is acceptable to cancel people who spread lies and slander. Examples: Alex Jones spreading the Sandy Hook false flag shooting conspiracy theory, spreading lies about Charlie Kirk’s assassin, quacks who promote unhealthy fad diet, setc.
• People who support violence can and should be canceled. Examples: People who celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the murder of Brian Thompson, etc. This discourages further violence.
• Cancel culture should not be done merely for virtue signaling or social status. Cancel culture should be motivated by a desire to improve society, not a desire for personal gain.
• Cancel culture should not inhibit freedom of speech.
• Canceling should be done politely.
• It is appropriate to cancel people who wrongfully cancel others. This is second-order cancel culture.

IMPORTANT: These norms make some presuppositions which are clarified in the next section.

See: Wikipedia: Fact-Value Distinction.

These criteria require distinguishing truth from value. In most discourse, people fail to accomplish this, so truth and value are mangled together, even when they shouldn’t be.

In cases where not everybody agrees on what the truth is, the appropriate action should be to debate the truth. If one side refuses to debate, then they are wrong. If the truth is on their side, then they shouldn’t have any problem debating and defending it.

When people are spreading false information, it’s usually better to refute them and explain why they’re wrong. If they still don’t stop spreading lies, even after being decisively proven wrong, then it can be socially beneficial to cancel them. Of course, this depends on the severity of the lies. If the lies aren’t too severe, then canceling must be done with discretion. Often times, people will promote false ideas on one topic(s), while promoting true ideas on other topics. This creates gray areas regarding when it’s appropriate to cancel people, as far as truth is concerned.

As with all actions involving value, the effects and benefits of cancel culture actions are difficult to measure. In spite of this, I see no reason to believe that cancel culture is ineffective or harmful when it’s used appropriately. False information harms society. When liars are punished, the truth prevails and fewer people believe in false ideas. When people who support violence are punished, violence is discouraged. The benefits of cancel culture are less clear for gray areas, so we shall consider them.

By all this criteria, most cancel culture by leftists is unjustified because:

• They cancel people for expressing different (benign) values.
• They cancel people for speaking the truth, just because it hurts their feelings.
• They cancel people as a means to avoid rational discussions.
• They aren’t willing to debate and defend their conception of the truth when people disagree with them.
• They often justify canceling people for “hate speech”. For example, promoting ideas like race realism supposedly promotes violence, according to their views. However, there is no logical implication between these two. Promoting truth claims does not promote violence.

Cancel culture is freedom of association, and chains of association are absolutely possible. Canceling may cause second-order retaliatory cancellations, which may be followed by even more cancellations. Someone may want to cancel people for canceling or refusing to cancel their enemies. However, the first and second order cancellations within a chain are usually the most powerful in most given timelines. Social circles already tend to have well-defined in-groups and out-groups. Cancellations have more social meaning when they redefine these groups.

Second-order cancel culture should be used to punish people who abuse cancel culture. Good values are the best remedy to bad values. Good speech is the best remedy to bad speech. Good values and good speech are the best remedy to bad values and bad speech.

For anybody who violates the norms that I have proposed, people should change their associations to harm the abuser. For example, if someone cancels a truth-sayer for telling the truth, then the anti-truther should be canceled in retaliation.

The truth will probably win eventually. The truth is aligned with reality, and people face consequences when they ignore reality. Revealing the truth might cause people who acted on their cancellations to reevaluate what they did and maybe offer repentance. So revealing the truth will help to resolve cancel culture of that kind in those situations. There are many benefits when people express heresy, who can afford to do so.