"friend-enemy distinction" has become a thought-terminating cliche. Yes, politics is a struggle, and it often involves hypocrisy. Don't be surprised if your opponent breaks the nominal rules of the game. But politics also depends on some shared norms, otherwise it would just be civil war. Establishing those cultural norms is important in the long term, even if there is a temptation to transgress them in the short term.
Section 3.4 is partially meant to be a response to Cosmic Skeptic's thoughts on cancel culture. I don't agree with his objections to cancel culture, nor do I think he addressed the main problems with cancel culture abuse. I plan to post this on Twitter and tag his handle.
I think cancel culture is generally harmful. That doesn't mean we can just opt out of it entirely, given where we are. And the left's sudden interest in freedom of speech is laughable hypocrisy, after years of demanding that the right be censored.
Freedom of speech isn't a simple issue. There are two levels: government restrictions and social consequences. Cancel culture is at the second level. It is a free speech issue when social consequences are used systematically to censor certain beliefs or positions. But being socially punished for legal speech isn't always a free speech issue.
For example, if a teacher says online that she hates her students, or a nurse jokes about killing patients, that is not illegal speech, but it is a sufficient reason for an employer to fire that person, because it creates a credible public concern. That does not infringe freedom of speech.
However, there is a gray zone. What if a teacher is fired for supporting Donald Trump? Or for being an atheist? To some people, those are credible public concerns.
In the case of Jimmy Kimmel, there was no free speech issue. He is paid to speak in a certain way, within certain limits. In that context, his speech is not free, because he is being paid to do it. His employer would presumably terminate his contract if he started using his show to preach Christianity or sing nursery rhymes, instead of telling dumb jokes about Drumpf or whatever he does. They didn't hire him to say whatever he wants to say.
If an employee is in a public-facing role, then the employer can make employment conditional on maintaining a certain public image. For example, an employer could require public-facing employees to abstain from commenting on political issues in public. That is not a free speech issue.
By contrast, if ordinary people are being debanked or kicked off major communication platforms for having certain opinions, that is a free speech issue. Corporations colluding to silence certain opinions is a major free speech issue.
It is not a free speech issue if many people get mad at someone online for having a certain opinion. People who express controversial opinions have to face mass disapproval, criticism, etc. E.g. if people online tell Nick Fuentes that he sucks, that's not a free speech issue. If someone goes to Nick's house and throws rocks, that's vandalism, which is a crime regardless of the motive.
It is a free speech issue when organized mobs (e.g. antifa) use violence to censor people, such as shutting down public speaking events. In that case, they should be arrested and punished for their crimes. Local authorities have allowed this kind of violent mob censorship for a long time, and it has become normalized in certain places.
It becomes blurry when a mob demands that a corporation punish someone for an opinion. E.g. Brendan Eich was forced out of his CEO position because he supported a ban on gay marriage (privately, with a small donation). The woke mob was trying to punish him for his beliefs, which were completely unrelated to his job. The point was simply to make an example of him, to make people afraid of transgressing woke moral boundaries. That kind of thing is a problem, but there's not much that we can do about it.
Unfortunately, we went down this road of corporations taking a side in the culture war (the woke side, mostly), so that's where we are now. The struggle has spread into economic aspects of life (boycotting products, getting people fired, etc.). It would be nice if corporations just tried to sell us products. But we are where we are. If a corporation acts as a propaganda machine, it is perfectly reasonable to fight against it economically.
Regarding your proposed norms, the problem is that they presuppose prior knowledge of what is true and what is good for society. But the point of free speech is to discuss and explore questions of truth and value.
E.g. much of what was censored as "misinformation" in 2020 is now considered to be true. Wokists will say that non-woke values are socially destructive. They might say that someone quoting FBI crime statistics is lying by not including "the right context" (woke beliefs about racial oppression, poverty, etc.).
Thank you for responding. I don't think my norms presuppose truth and value. They would if we're only considering the norms listed in section 3.2, but I think section 3.3 resolves that problem. For example, I wrote "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." I'll edit the page to make this more clear.
I agree with everything you wrote in your comment. While I think that there are legitimate uses for cancel culture, I think canceling tends to be abused just as often (or more often?) than not in practice.
I think there are some partial remedies for when cancel culture is abused (which I will elaborate on eventually), but I don't think it's possible to get rid of it. Cancel culture is a consequence of freedom of association. So, society cannot get rid of cancel culture, unless it restricts (or outlaws) people's freedom of associate and disassociate.
"While superficially compelling, this is not a realistic model of social behaviour. After the spate of recent firings, did you encounter any leftists saying, “Fair enough, we deserved that. We really ought to think twice the next time we engage in cancel culture”? I just saw scores of people poking fun at the right’s hypocrisy and running victory laps for having insisted the right never cared about free speech."
I think it is well to consider that modern western societies are beyond this point, because it reveals an underlying intend at cooperation and compromise.
All that is gone, and hence hypocrisy is simply a tool to win a zero sum game. It *may* have been seeded during Gingrich's term as Speaker, and metastasized gradually from there. Concurrently, each succeeding generation seems to have devalued ethical consistency in favor of gratifying one's own social whims--many of which are fickle and transient--consequences to social stability be damned.
I'm approaching 80. All this is becoming very, very evident to me by way of comparison over this time frame. Regrettably, it will require a period of protracted existential trauma on a massive scale to force a re-set back to mutual cooperation between opposing parties just simply to survive. Right now, each political/ideological party truly believes that yep, it *can* have it all.
Your generation literally handed the keys of western civilization to non Whites. The friend-enemy distinction was naturally built in, and you rejected it for... Ethical consistency?
...and not to dramatize, I think it will require a bit of Hell to press the re-set button.
Honestly, I don't see anything like a de-escalation as working. The window for that was Biden's election, and all that happened was a doubling down of inane woke positions.
Obama made Trump 1 possible, Biden made Trump 2 inevitable.
This is a well-written essay with some persuasive arguments, but I am ultimately unconvinced.
People who celebrate violence can and should be canceled. It helps to discourage further violence.
There should be distinction between being canceled for saying the truth vs being canceled for anti-social activities (e.g. celebrating violence and murder).
I think the strongest arguments against cancel culture are that friends and enemies aren't always clearly defined (as you've written) and not everybody agrees on what the truth is. 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.
I think that it's unacceptable to cancel people who speak the truth. It's mostly acceptable to cancel people who deny the truth. And it's unacceptable to cancel people who merely have different values, provided that their values aren't destructive and such. In the end, the truth always wins eventually.
By this criteria, most cancel culture by leftists is unjustified because they cancel people for expressing different values and they can cancel people for speaking the truth.
Your Israel-Palestine example is good, but I think that would fall under different values. While I support Israel over Palestine, I wouldn't be upset at someone for supporting Palestine instead. Either way, the conflict doesn't really affect me.
As for the essay's second argument, I think that it is very much in favor of the Western tradition to cancel people who celebrate violence. I would rather live in a peaceful society where nobody celebrates murder.
In your distinction between cancellation for “saying the truth” versus for “anti-social activities”, who gets to judge what the truth of the matter is, and who gets to judge whether the activity is “anti-social”?
Anyway, truth is subjective, and it tends to be convergent between minds. Everybody gets to judge what the truth is. Intelligent and honest minds tend to be better at judging the truth. I have never proposed that there should only be one judge of "truth". Like I said, that is why people should debate the truth when they disagree. If both sides are acting in good faith, they will eventually arrive at a consensus. If one side is being bad faith, then they lose.
“[…] 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.”
This is precisely why Leftists have been so celebratory. The dogmatic nostrums [hmm, nostra?] of the Left are emotive and egregiously illogical.
Kirk demonstrated the fallacies of the Left in simple, clear declarative statements of self-evident fact. He had to be removed from the debate by any means to further progression to utopia.
“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
You are right, I can't imagine many progressives thinking, 'Fair enough, we deserved that'. Equally, I can't imagine many of them thinking, "Look, conservatives didn't resort to cancellations while they were in power so now that we are back in power perhaps we shouldn't either". After all, these were the same people who turned our non-cancelling culture into a cancel culture in the first place so why should things be any different next time round? It takes someone with moral backbone not to grab an unfair advantage when the opportunity arises and they failed that test first time round.
So imagine this scenario. Conservatives decide to stop cancelling leftists over nasty Charlie Kirk comments and everything else besides. In a year or two wokeism gets a second wind and the cancelling of conservatives begins again. Would you still make the same argument again? After all, if it's a matter of principle then we should always do the right thing, regardless of how many times progressives cancel us. to me that just seems a bit...stupid. Like constantly being punched in the face and never punching back because it's 'wrong' to punch people.
I think there is an element of deterence in giving them a taste of their own medicine. If they are never made to feel the pain of cancellation then I'm not sure they will ever learn the lesson.
Apart from that, I'm sure they could construe almost anything conservatives do as 'cancellation'. Imprisoning Luigi Mangioni? Cancellation of an a virtuous justice warrior. Sacking some completely corrupt or useless judge or mayor? Cancellation. The left can play all kinds of infuriating language games and just when we decided to bite the bullet, foresake cancellations of our enemies and in doing so gaining the moral highground, leftists could easily turn around and call our highground a stinking cesspit. Acting morally is only of any use to us if it's recognised as moral by the people we need to convince. Also while cancellations are easy to spot, not-cancelling is harder to perceive. We can claim that we didn't cancel so-and-so when we could have to which they could respond, 'Damned if a remember it. What was it he was supposede to have done? Was that REALLY a cancellable offence? Oh, I don't think it was'.
One point I think should be stressed: Political hypocrisy is pretty necessary when refraining from doing so permanently tilts the board against your side. If one side is gerrymandering and the other isn't, or if one side is shrewdly using the courts to pass their agenda but the other isn't, then the side that abstains is playing a fool's game.
Other than that though, political hypocrisy is just generally a Bad Thing.
"During the period from roughly 2010 to 2024, which has become known as the Great Awokening, radical progressives attempted to co-opt every major institution in society for the purpose of advancing their ideological agenda."
Well kinda. As I have contended in the past, it is not 'radical progressives' acting alone, but acting at the direction of the power elite (Deep State). The purpose of this is to sow societal disruption to affect descent, thus destabilizing the populace and making control easier.
"A map of more and less corrupt countries is shown above. As you can clearly see, Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand are among the only places where citizens do not perceive a high level of corruption in the public sector."
WTF! This is a perfect case of perception not born of reality. This is almost laughable, particularly in the case of the United States, undoubtedly the most corrupt country on the planet. There are three possibilities here: either those controlling the United States are especially adept at deceiving the public, the populace is stupid on a stick, or both.
Most corruption is "petty" corruption. That is what drags a country down. We all know elite levels are nepotistic and corrupt. But what makes you the third world is having to bribe someone to get a passport or a shot at college. That is not the case in Western countries and especially the Anglosphere.
In Nigeria the police won't show up unless you can bribe them, for example. We are nothing like this. That is the reality in most of the world. They cannot conceive of the levels of trust we have in Western nations. And now we are throwing it away.
I'm not sure that is the case. I vacillate myself.
One argument is we are upholding standards others are using to undermine us. The left can more or less guarantee the right won't riot or lynch them, so that gives them confidence of course.
The alternative view is we degenerate into a blood feud if we abandon our principles.
For me the middle ground is a three strikes approach.
1. Assume decency will be forthcoming
2. If not, one warning is given; play fair, or we respond
3. If ignored again, do to them the thing they have done to you; if they are ill mannered, you do the same; if they start a riot, you level their whole street
I think that is workable; you give the sensible ones a chance to back off. Maybe they made a mistake. Repeated offences get severe punishment.
The "realist" thinks the USA is (undoubtably!) the most corrupt country in the world. This si objectively false. Ask anyone who has traveled to the Turd World.
Friend-enemy politics is inevitable when two factions are locked in existential opposition and have nothing in common as is increasingly the case in broken Liberal Democracies like UK and USA.
Thanks for the comment. What do you make of the examples I gave in the article? Are people who oppose Trump's tariffs (including many conservatives) the "enemies" of people who support them? Should they try to get them cancelled, if they can?
Only if you flatten everything political into one dimension.
“[…] Politics is far more complicated than that. At the very least, what’s being played is an n-person prisoner’s dilemma (i.e., the public goods game) […]”
Thinkers like Schmitt seem to be growing in popularity (among the right recently) when it seems, at least to me, that all he does is declare that there exist metaphysical reasons for feeling okay in wanting to obliterate people you view as your enemy. Raymond Geuss and even Bernard Williams are much more serious figures of philosophical political realism that people ought to hold up as examples of serious, realistic political thought that doesn’t spend the bulk of its time genuflecting to superstitious or metaphysical constructs they themselves devised. That said, people seem to lose perspective, and I think social media has made the problem worse, about the need to institute norms, and your essay is excellent in pointing that out. It’s like when people ask the question of who started or who is to blame for something like the Israel-Palestine conflict. It’s a long lasting issue and a forensic analysis of who is to blame does nothing to help us solve the problem we are in now, and throwing away principles doesn’t get you out of the spiral it just keeps you spinning.
What a lot of thinkers actually wrote is often rather different from the simplified “vulgar” version that gets applied in popular consciousness.
What Schmitt wrote is that the subject matter of politics is the question of who counts as an enemy; i.e., someone who must be defeated by any means necessary, including violence. He definitely didn’t write that any political opponent is an enemy in this sense. Yet when people say “friend-enemy distinction”, they usually mean something just like that - that any political opponent is an enemy.
As far as Schmitt goes, he never wrote or even implied that the friend-enemy distinction was the only one that mattered. Using his own logic, to do so would be to replace all other distinctions with a sole distinction - the political one. Indeed, Schmitt's critical observation is that there is a difference between the "enemy" (hostis), who has to be fought, and the "opponent" (inimicus) who can be reasoned and compromised with. The decision of which enemies are truly "enemies" in the first sense is exactly what he considers politics to be about.
"A recent poll found that only 24% of Republicans aged 18–24 sympathise more with the Israelis, with another finding that half of those under 50 have a negative view of Israel."
I would chalk a lot of this up to historical ignorance about, not only the role that violent Eurpean antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust, played, but also the role played by British, French, and later American and other Western statesmen in the issuance of the Balfour Declaration and its incorporation into the treaty of Versailles—and then later by UN resolutions post WWII— in creating this conflict in the first place. In other words, if these young people only knew, they would be condemning their own countries, not Israel or the Palestinians, for the suffering caused by this conflict.
“Rather than restoring deterrence, right-wing cancel culture seems far more likely to bolster the left’s own predilection for censorship. How? It sends the message that, yes, it’s appropriate to censor “offensive” speech.”
It is frightening how such a simple observation seems to have been ignored by those tempted with short-term power for vengeance.
I’d say the two-party system highly encourages thinking in terms of this binary friend-enemy distinction. And at this late date, its spread to Europe such that their parliamentary system is reduced to Basically European GOP or Basically European Dem.
But then Schmitt himself obviously pre-dates the America-centric elephant vs. donkey, so…
I agree. We should resist the urge to cancel people. The exception would be the standard one, calls to harm others. But gloating about getting someone fired set off alarm bells for me when I saw conservatives doing it.
Without principles it is just a race to the bottom.
It is good to see this compared to the third world. I think we need to do a much better job of reminding people how unusual the West and especially the Anglosphere is. Most of the people imported in the last few decades will not preserve it. And once it is gone we will look like the rest of the world, including the chaos and lack of mutual respect.
It seems to be an inevitable trajectory. Many in the West have become spoiled and take the rule of law and the absence of petty corruption in particular for granted. But once they lose them the quality of their lives will plummet.
I think embracing principle retards that decline even when the other side is in power.
The vast majority of foreigners are actively tearing down our society. War is upon us and most people are concerned with policy rather than organizing.
While I partially agree with your premise, there has been a huge 'ratcheting effect' of Federal power over the past few generations.
My grandparents grew up in a 'leave me the F*#k alone' relationship with the Government.
LBJ's Great Society caused the tendrils to invade everything we do.
I have nothing personally against most Federal employees. I just wish them to not be paid for by my taxes. The government exists to defend the borders and insure domestic tranquility. Every thing on top of that is superfluous.
The add-on agencies i.e. Education, Environmental, Homeland Security can be disbanded with no ill-effect. The Dept of Veterans Affairs should be folded into the DOD. Hopefully the DNI can be brutally downsized.
I would love to have a country where 5-7 cabinet positions ran things and the states were left alone to manage our local issues.
So, is there a 'payback' behavior happening now? Probably. Will it end when a certain limit is reached? Dunno. There is a massive amount of ill will in the population. The trannies rating to kindergartners has left a lot of us hoping for tumbrils and Madame Guillotine.
A National Divorce has been discussed. I am more and more in favor of the discussion. It appears that a non-military petitioning would allow 2 or more formed countries to peacefully co-exist.
"friend-enemy distinction" has become a thought-terminating cliche. Yes, politics is a struggle, and it often involves hypocrisy. Don't be surprised if your opponent breaks the nominal rules of the game. But politics also depends on some shared norms, otherwise it would just be civil war. Establishing those cultural norms is important in the long term, even if there is a temptation to transgress them in the short term.
You can't with millions of foreigners
What do you think of these norms that I have proposed for legitimate cancel culture? https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/activism#cancel-culture-norms
Section 3.4 is partially meant to be a response to Cosmic Skeptic's thoughts on cancel culture. I don't agree with his objections to cancel culture, nor do I think he addressed the main problems with cancel culture abuse. I plan to post this on Twitter and tag his handle.
I think cancel culture is generally harmful. That doesn't mean we can just opt out of it entirely, given where we are. And the left's sudden interest in freedom of speech is laughable hypocrisy, after years of demanding that the right be censored.
Freedom of speech isn't a simple issue. There are two levels: government restrictions and social consequences. Cancel culture is at the second level. It is a free speech issue when social consequences are used systematically to censor certain beliefs or positions. But being socially punished for legal speech isn't always a free speech issue.
For example, if a teacher says online that she hates her students, or a nurse jokes about killing patients, that is not illegal speech, but it is a sufficient reason for an employer to fire that person, because it creates a credible public concern. That does not infringe freedom of speech.
However, there is a gray zone. What if a teacher is fired for supporting Donald Trump? Or for being an atheist? To some people, those are credible public concerns.
In the case of Jimmy Kimmel, there was no free speech issue. He is paid to speak in a certain way, within certain limits. In that context, his speech is not free, because he is being paid to do it. His employer would presumably terminate his contract if he started using his show to preach Christianity or sing nursery rhymes, instead of telling dumb jokes about Drumpf or whatever he does. They didn't hire him to say whatever he wants to say.
If an employee is in a public-facing role, then the employer can make employment conditional on maintaining a certain public image. For example, an employer could require public-facing employees to abstain from commenting on political issues in public. That is not a free speech issue.
By contrast, if ordinary people are being debanked or kicked off major communication platforms for having certain opinions, that is a free speech issue. Corporations colluding to silence certain opinions is a major free speech issue.
It is not a free speech issue if many people get mad at someone online for having a certain opinion. People who express controversial opinions have to face mass disapproval, criticism, etc. E.g. if people online tell Nick Fuentes that he sucks, that's not a free speech issue. If someone goes to Nick's house and throws rocks, that's vandalism, which is a crime regardless of the motive.
It is a free speech issue when organized mobs (e.g. antifa) use violence to censor people, such as shutting down public speaking events. In that case, they should be arrested and punished for their crimes. Local authorities have allowed this kind of violent mob censorship for a long time, and it has become normalized in certain places.
It becomes blurry when a mob demands that a corporation punish someone for an opinion. E.g. Brendan Eich was forced out of his CEO position because he supported a ban on gay marriage (privately, with a small donation). The woke mob was trying to punish him for his beliefs, which were completely unrelated to his job. The point was simply to make an example of him, to make people afraid of transgressing woke moral boundaries. That kind of thing is a problem, but there's not much that we can do about it.
Unfortunately, we went down this road of corporations taking a side in the culture war (the woke side, mostly), so that's where we are now. The struggle has spread into economic aspects of life (boycotting products, getting people fired, etc.). It would be nice if corporations just tried to sell us products. But we are where we are. If a corporation acts as a propaganda machine, it is perfectly reasonable to fight against it economically.
Regarding your proposed norms, the problem is that they presuppose prior knowledge of what is true and what is good for society. But the point of free speech is to discuss and explore questions of truth and value.
E.g. much of what was censored as "misinformation" in 2020 is now considered to be true. Wokists will say that non-woke values are socially destructive. They might say that someone quoting FBI crime statistics is lying by not including "the right context" (woke beliefs about racial oppression, poverty, etc.).
Thank you for responding. I don't think my norms presuppose truth and value. They would if we're only considering the norms listed in section 3.2, but I think section 3.3 resolves that problem. For example, I wrote "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." I'll edit the page to make this more clear.
I agree with everything you wrote in your comment. While I think that there are legitimate uses for cancel culture, I think canceling tends to be abused just as often (or more often?) than not in practice.
I think there are some partial remedies for when cancel culture is abused (which I will elaborate on eventually), but I don't think it's possible to get rid of it. Cancel culture is a consequence of freedom of association. So, society cannot get rid of cancel culture, unless it restricts (or outlaws) people's freedom of associate and disassociate.
"While superficially compelling, this is not a realistic model of social behaviour. After the spate of recent firings, did you encounter any leftists saying, “Fair enough, we deserved that. We really ought to think twice the next time we engage in cancel culture”? I just saw scores of people poking fun at the right’s hypocrisy and running victory laps for having insisted the right never cared about free speech."
I think it is well to consider that modern western societies are beyond this point, because it reveals an underlying intend at cooperation and compromise.
All that is gone, and hence hypocrisy is simply a tool to win a zero sum game. It *may* have been seeded during Gingrich's term as Speaker, and metastasized gradually from there. Concurrently, each succeeding generation seems to have devalued ethical consistency in favor of gratifying one's own social whims--many of which are fickle and transient--consequences to social stability be damned.
I'm approaching 80. All this is becoming very, very evident to me by way of comparison over this time frame. Regrettably, it will require a period of protracted existential trauma on a massive scale to force a re-set back to mutual cooperation between opposing parties just simply to survive. Right now, each political/ideological party truly believes that yep, it *can* have it all.
Luxury beliefs, indeed.
Your generation literally handed the keys of western civilization to non Whites. The friend-enemy distinction was naturally built in, and you rejected it for... Ethical consistency?
Indeed, the empire is on a crap slide to hell.
...and not to dramatize, I think it will require a bit of Hell to press the re-set button.
Honestly, I don't see anything like a de-escalation as working. The window for that was Biden's election, and all that happened was a doubling down of inane woke positions.
Obama made Trump 1 possible, Biden made Trump 2 inevitable.
And mass immigration made Zimbabwe inevitable
This is a well-written essay with some persuasive arguments, but I am ultimately unconvinced.
People who celebrate violence can and should be canceled. It helps to discourage further violence.
There should be distinction between being canceled for saying the truth vs being canceled for anti-social activities (e.g. celebrating violence and murder).
I think the strongest arguments against cancel culture are that friends and enemies aren't always clearly defined (as you've written) and not everybody agrees on what the truth is. 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.
I think that it's unacceptable to cancel people who speak the truth. It's mostly acceptable to cancel people who deny the truth. And it's unacceptable to cancel people who merely have different values, provided that their values aren't destructive and such. In the end, the truth always wins eventually.
By this criteria, most cancel culture by leftists is unjustified because they cancel people for expressing different values and they can cancel people for speaking the truth.
Your Israel-Palestine example is good, but I think that would fall under different values. While I support Israel over Palestine, I wouldn't be upset at someone for supporting Palestine instead. Either way, the conflict doesn't really affect me.
As for the essay's second argument, I think that it is very much in favor of the Western tradition to cancel people who celebrate violence. I would rather live in a peaceful society where nobody celebrates murder.
Update: I've made a more thorough and better written critique of cancel culture here: https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/activism#cancel-culture
In your distinction between cancellation for “saying the truth” versus for “anti-social activities”, who gets to judge what the truth of the matter is, and who gets to judge whether the activity is “anti-social”?
Hi! It's nice to finally meet you. I have one of your webpages linked on my website's home page. https://zerocontradictions.net/#morality
I like your morality webpage, but I would critique that the mentioning of r/K selection on it is misleading. https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2017/01/rk-selection-theory-is-bogus.html
Anyway, truth is subjective, and it tends to be convergent between minds. Everybody gets to judge what the truth is. Intelligent and honest minds tend to be better at judging the truth. I have never proposed that there should only be one judge of "truth". Like I said, that is why people should debate the truth when they disagree. If both sides are acting in good faith, they will eventually arrive at a consensus. If one side is being bad faith, then they lose.
As for anti-social activities, society is the judge of that. Anti-social activities are intersubjective (https://zerocontradictions.net/pdfs/what-is-subjectivity.pdf).
I also wrote a longer work that elaborates on the appropriate norms for cancel culture in greater depth. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/activism#cancel-culture
Thanks, I’ll have a look at your link on r/K.
Okay. You might find the PDF version easier to follow though. I should've linked it the first time: https://zerocontradictions.net/pdfs/r-k-selection-theory-is-bogus.pdf.
I also have a different webpage about r/K, which is a sequel to my friend's essay. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/r-k-selection-critique
“[…] 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.”
This is precisely why Leftists have been so celebratory. The dogmatic nostrums [hmm, nostra?] of the Left are emotive and egregiously illogical.
Kirk demonstrated the fallacies of the Left in simple, clear declarative statements of self-evident fact. He had to be removed from the debate by any means to further progression to utopia.
“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
You are right, I can't imagine many progressives thinking, 'Fair enough, we deserved that'. Equally, I can't imagine many of them thinking, "Look, conservatives didn't resort to cancellations while they were in power so now that we are back in power perhaps we shouldn't either". After all, these were the same people who turned our non-cancelling culture into a cancel culture in the first place so why should things be any different next time round? It takes someone with moral backbone not to grab an unfair advantage when the opportunity arises and they failed that test first time round.
So imagine this scenario. Conservatives decide to stop cancelling leftists over nasty Charlie Kirk comments and everything else besides. In a year or two wokeism gets a second wind and the cancelling of conservatives begins again. Would you still make the same argument again? After all, if it's a matter of principle then we should always do the right thing, regardless of how many times progressives cancel us. to me that just seems a bit...stupid. Like constantly being punched in the face and never punching back because it's 'wrong' to punch people.
I think there is an element of deterence in giving them a taste of their own medicine. If they are never made to feel the pain of cancellation then I'm not sure they will ever learn the lesson.
Apart from that, I'm sure they could construe almost anything conservatives do as 'cancellation'. Imprisoning Luigi Mangioni? Cancellation of an a virtuous justice warrior. Sacking some completely corrupt or useless judge or mayor? Cancellation. The left can play all kinds of infuriating language games and just when we decided to bite the bullet, foresake cancellations of our enemies and in doing so gaining the moral highground, leftists could easily turn around and call our highground a stinking cesspit. Acting morally is only of any use to us if it's recognised as moral by the people we need to convince. Also while cancellations are easy to spot, not-cancelling is harder to perceive. We can claim that we didn't cancel so-and-so when we could have to which they could respond, 'Damned if a remember it. What was it he was supposede to have done? Was that REALLY a cancellable offence? Oh, I don't think it was'.
This article is pretty close to my thoughts, which I detailed 4 days ago: https://voltairesviceroy.substack.com/p/the-limits-of-political-hypocrisy
One point I think should be stressed: Political hypocrisy is pretty necessary when refraining from doing so permanently tilts the board against your side. If one side is gerrymandering and the other isn't, or if one side is shrewdly using the courts to pass their agenda but the other isn't, then the side that abstains is playing a fool's game.
Other than that though, political hypocrisy is just generally a Bad Thing.
Thanks Noah, great article.
"During the period from roughly 2010 to 2024, which has become known as the Great Awokening, radical progressives attempted to co-opt every major institution in society for the purpose of advancing their ideological agenda."
Well kinda. As I have contended in the past, it is not 'radical progressives' acting alone, but acting at the direction of the power elite (Deep State). The purpose of this is to sow societal disruption to affect descent, thus destabilizing the populace and making control easier.
"A map of more and less corrupt countries is shown above. As you can clearly see, Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand are among the only places where citizens do not perceive a high level of corruption in the public sector."
WTF! This is a perfect case of perception not born of reality. This is almost laughable, particularly in the case of the United States, undoubtedly the most corrupt country on the planet. There are three possibilities here: either those controlling the United States are especially adept at deceiving the public, the populace is stupid on a stick, or both.
Most corruption is "petty" corruption. That is what drags a country down. We all know elite levels are nepotistic and corrupt. But what makes you the third world is having to bribe someone to get a passport or a shot at college. That is not the case in Western countries and especially the Anglosphere.
In Nigeria the police won't show up unless you can bribe them, for example. We are nothing like this. That is the reality in most of the world. They cannot conceive of the levels of trust we have in Western nations. And now we are throwing it away.
Well the author and most commentors seem to care more about ethical concerns than pragmatic concerns concerning race relations
I'm not sure that is the case. I vacillate myself.
One argument is we are upholding standards others are using to undermine us. The left can more or less guarantee the right won't riot or lynch them, so that gives them confidence of course.
The alternative view is we degenerate into a blood feud if we abandon our principles.
For me the middle ground is a three strikes approach.
1. Assume decency will be forthcoming
2. If not, one warning is given; play fair, or we respond
3. If ignored again, do to them the thing they have done to you; if they are ill mannered, you do the same; if they start a riot, you level their whole street
I think that is workable; you give the sensible ones a chance to back off. Maybe they made a mistake. Repeated offences get severe punishment.
The "realist" thinks the USA is (undoubtably!) the most corrupt country in the world. This si objectively false. Ask anyone who has traveled to the Turd World.
Friend-enemy politics is inevitable when two factions are locked in existential opposition and have nothing in common as is increasingly the case in broken Liberal Democracies like UK and USA.
Thanks for the comment. What do you make of the examples I gave in the article? Are people who oppose Trump's tariffs (including many conservatives) the "enemies" of people who support them? Should they try to get them cancelled, if they can?
–NC
People should be cancelled for celebrating or excusing political assassinations.
I don't think people should be cancelled for policy disagreements.
Though I personally don't think the "tent" of the right is wide enough for:
1) Most pro-immigrationists.
2) The transgender crowd.
3) Anyone who opposes school choice (this is my personal hobby horse after covid).
No. Because that isn't an existential issue to either party. That's not a good marker of friend or enemy.
Only if you flatten everything political into one dimension.
“[…] Politics is far more complicated than that. At the very least, what’s being played is an n-person prisoner’s dilemma (i.e., the public goods game) […]”
Politics is not civil in a ‘diverse’ society.
Thinkers like Schmitt seem to be growing in popularity (among the right recently) when it seems, at least to me, that all he does is declare that there exist metaphysical reasons for feeling okay in wanting to obliterate people you view as your enemy. Raymond Geuss and even Bernard Williams are much more serious figures of philosophical political realism that people ought to hold up as examples of serious, realistic political thought that doesn’t spend the bulk of its time genuflecting to superstitious or metaphysical constructs they themselves devised. That said, people seem to lose perspective, and I think social media has made the problem worse, about the need to institute norms, and your essay is excellent in pointing that out. It’s like when people ask the question of who started or who is to blame for something like the Israel-Palestine conflict. It’s a long lasting issue and a forensic analysis of who is to blame does nothing to help us solve the problem we are in now, and throwing away principles doesn’t get you out of the spiral it just keeps you spinning.
What a lot of thinkers actually wrote is often rather different from the simplified “vulgar” version that gets applied in popular consciousness.
What Schmitt wrote is that the subject matter of politics is the question of who counts as an enemy; i.e., someone who must be defeated by any means necessary, including violence. He definitely didn’t write that any political opponent is an enemy in this sense. Yet when people say “friend-enemy distinction”, they usually mean something just like that - that any political opponent is an enemy.
we gonna end up like south korea where every former president ends up in jail. For US each party change most of the former cabinet will be arrested.
As far as Schmitt goes, he never wrote or even implied that the friend-enemy distinction was the only one that mattered. Using his own logic, to do so would be to replace all other distinctions with a sole distinction - the political one. Indeed, Schmitt's critical observation is that there is a difference between the "enemy" (hostis), who has to be fought, and the "opponent" (inimicus) who can be reasoned and compromised with. The decision of which enemies are truly "enemies" in the first sense is exactly what he considers politics to be about.
"A recent poll found that only 24% of Republicans aged 18–24 sympathise more with the Israelis, with another finding that half of those under 50 have a negative view of Israel."
I would chalk a lot of this up to historical ignorance about, not only the role that violent Eurpean antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust, played, but also the role played by British, French, and later American and other Western statesmen in the issuance of the Balfour Declaration and its incorporation into the treaty of Versailles—and then later by UN resolutions post WWII— in creating this conflict in the first place. In other words, if these young people only knew, they would be condemning their own countries, not Israel or the Palestinians, for the suffering caused by this conflict.
I make this argument at length —including a proposed way out —for any who are interested here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CqFXu8tbmAOkZHexFes8OqzGIfzw69vU2ejpPj3lQzE/edit?usp=sharing
“Rather than restoring deterrence, right-wing cancel culture seems far more likely to bolster the left’s own predilection for censorship. How? It sends the message that, yes, it’s appropriate to censor “offensive” speech.”
It is frightening how such a simple observation seems to have been ignored by those tempted with short-term power for vengeance.
They will always do that, regardles of what the right says or does. Why do you think their argument needed any fodder?
I’d say the two-party system highly encourages thinking in terms of this binary friend-enemy distinction. And at this late date, its spread to Europe such that their parliamentary system is reduced to Basically European GOP or Basically European Dem.
But then Schmitt himself obviously pre-dates the America-centric elephant vs. donkey, so…
I agree. We should resist the urge to cancel people. The exception would be the standard one, calls to harm others. But gloating about getting someone fired set off alarm bells for me when I saw conservatives doing it.
Without principles it is just a race to the bottom.
It is good to see this compared to the third world. I think we need to do a much better job of reminding people how unusual the West and especially the Anglosphere is. Most of the people imported in the last few decades will not preserve it. And once it is gone we will look like the rest of the world, including the chaos and lack of mutual respect.
It seems to be an inevitable trajectory. Many in the West have become spoiled and take the rule of law and the absence of petty corruption in particular for granted. But once they lose them the quality of their lives will plummet.
I think embracing principle retards that decline even when the other side is in power.
The vast majority of foreigners are actively tearing down our society. War is upon us and most people are concerned with policy rather than organizing.
See my other comment.
I do see your point though. I am aware we are losing partly due to niceness, if you will.
While I partially agree with your premise, there has been a huge 'ratcheting effect' of Federal power over the past few generations.
My grandparents grew up in a 'leave me the F*#k alone' relationship with the Government.
LBJ's Great Society caused the tendrils to invade everything we do.
I have nothing personally against most Federal employees. I just wish them to not be paid for by my taxes. The government exists to defend the borders and insure domestic tranquility. Every thing on top of that is superfluous.
The add-on agencies i.e. Education, Environmental, Homeland Security can be disbanded with no ill-effect. The Dept of Veterans Affairs should be folded into the DOD. Hopefully the DNI can be brutally downsized.
I would love to have a country where 5-7 cabinet positions ran things and the states were left alone to manage our local issues.
So, is there a 'payback' behavior happening now? Probably. Will it end when a certain limit is reached? Dunno. There is a massive amount of ill will in the population. The trannies rating to kindergartners has left a lot of us hoping for tumbrils and Madame Guillotine.
A National Divorce has been discussed. I am more and more in favor of the discussion. It appears that a non-military petitioning would allow 2 or more formed countries to peacefully co-exist.
Thanks for the comment. Steve Sailer made a strong case that a national divorce is neither practical nor desirable: https://www.takimag.com/article/lets-not-break-up-the-usa/
—NC
Steve Sailer Is Fucking Jewish.
Trumps policy of gutting federal agencies and sending the money to the states is probably a good and practical form of "national divorce."
Yes, the empire will fall on its own.
The death throes of an empire are never pretty.