Cancel Culture: Older than Socrates and Newer than the Internet

Saying cancel culture is ancient is both true and trite — it’s like responding to a mention of the electric car by saying wheeled vehicles have been around for five and a half thousand years. Cancel culture is the 21st century version of the ancient desire to destroy heretics and infidels. It began in the US and has parallels to an older US phenomenon, McCarthyism, but if McCarthyism is Witch-Hunting 2.0, cancel culture is the New McCarthyism or Witch-Hunting 3.0. It began at the schools for the rich, Harvard and Yale, then spread to other expensive schools, then trickled down. It required the development of social media, politics based on social identity instead of class, and neoliberalism, the successor to Keynesian liberalism.

Cancel culture is mob justice. The cruelest cancelers issue death threats, but few of them want to physically harm anyone. They want to socially and economically destroy violators of the cancelers’ unwritten code of conduct. When told their punishment is greater than their target’s crime — the consequences of mobbing include mental breakdowns and suicide — cancelers shrug and say, “freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.” It is the the philosophy of bullies who insist their victims made them do what they did. They reject the idea that the consequences of speech should be speech.