“The puritanical, quasi-religious nature of cancel culture has been pointed out many times. But it still amazes me every time.”
Indeed, the potency of the phenomenon is quite amazing. It helps me to try to make sense of these seemingly crazy cultural phenomena from an evolutionary psychology perspective.
“The puritanical, quasi-religious nature of cancel culture has been pointed out many times. But it still amazes me every time.”
Indeed, the potency of the phenomenon is quite amazing. It helps me to try to make sense of these seemingly crazy cultural phenomena from an evolutionary psychology perspective.
The psychological basis of cancel mobbing is the evolved human trait of coalition building. Designating certain behaviors as morally repugnant recruits strong emotion-level group cohesion. And when everyone in the group is morally offended, a clear sign of commitment to the group is to be more outraged than most. And then any voice of moderation becomes a signal of disloyalty to the group. Then the mandatory shared moral indignation becomes more important than the merits of the accusation of offense. The supposed moral offense can veer into the domain of group level mind-reading.
So this familiar dynamic occurs repeatedly throughout history--- whether the offense is being a witch, a heretic, a conspirator, a cultural appropriator, a micro-aggressor, a racist-by-not-being-antiracist, etc....
"And then any voice of moderation becomes a signal of disloyalty to the group."
God, this is getting weird now! I was having this exact thought this morning. Then I read this piece on Bari Weiss' Substack (https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/friendship-politics?s=r) which describes the same phenomenon, now here you are saying the same thing!😁
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I've noticed that increasingly, people don't find comfort in their groups anymore. Instead, they fear saying the wrong thing and having the group turn on them. Safety can only be found in parroting the ideology of the group as loudly as possible.
“The puritanical, quasi-religious nature of cancel culture has been pointed out many times. But it still amazes me every time.”
Indeed, the potency of the phenomenon is quite amazing. It helps me to try to make sense of these seemingly crazy cultural phenomena from an evolutionary psychology perspective.
The psychological basis of cancel mobbing is the evolved human trait of coalition building. Designating certain behaviors as morally repugnant recruits strong emotion-level group cohesion. And when everyone in the group is morally offended, a clear sign of commitment to the group is to be more outraged than most. And then any voice of moderation becomes a signal of disloyalty to the group. Then the mandatory shared moral indignation becomes more important than the merits of the accusation of offense. The supposed moral offense can veer into the domain of group level mind-reading.
So this familiar dynamic occurs repeatedly throughout history--- whether the offense is being a witch, a heretic, a conspirator, a cultural appropriator, a micro-aggressor, a racist-by-not-being-antiracist, etc....
"And then any voice of moderation becomes a signal of disloyalty to the group."
God, this is getting weird now! I was having this exact thought this morning. Then I read this piece on Bari Weiss' Substack (https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/friendship-politics?s=r) which describes the same phenomenon, now here you are saying the same thing!😁
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I've noticed that increasingly, people don't find comfort in their groups anymore. Instead, they fear saying the wrong thing and having the group turn on them. Safety can only be found in parroting the ideology of the group as loudly as possible.