Cancel Culture: What I like & dislike

Cancel culture is one of the consequences of social media we didn’t see coming, if a good number of people gang up against you for long enough, they can ruin your entire life. They might decide to boycott a certain company or decide to harm a brand in protest to what a person did, they might pressure your company into firing you, or they could even ruin your business. I think its amazing to really see how people can come together in unison to harm another person’s life, forget about good or evil, just the simple fact that we can all agree that the life of an individual needs to be ruined is really amazing to me.

It feels a lot like mob justice where a group of random persons would just decide to kill a person on the streets without discriminating about whether it was the right thing to do or not, if he stole then he deserves to die, if he killed then he deserves to die, there on that stop we put the person through all the judiciary system and execute him. What always amazed me in mob justice was how random persons who were till then just ordinary persons could all agree to become murderers on the spot, I don’t know for you but even in self-defense I won’t feel comfortable taking the life of another person. Cancel culture is a lot like this, we just all decide collectively that because this person did something wrong, his life deserves to be totally destroyed, since its the worst we can do short of killing him. We’ll take everything from him, his money, his house, his happiness and everything he has ever built in his life.

In an instance, all those persons who had just been anonymous commenters all become this driving force pulling this person down into the abyss with no chance of survival. Every situation is different so I’m not really picking sides here, I don’t know if this is right or wrong but I know this is some very uncontrollable power in the hands of random persons on the internet. Fortunately it only works for things that we can all unanimously agree are bad and not just what a few persons feel is bad.

Things I like about cancel culture

The Power to the People

The good thing about cancel culture is that it gives the power back into the people’s hands, it's no longer up to a long or maybe corrupt justice system to discriminate about what everybody already acknowledges as being wrong, but it hands the judgement power into the people’s hands. Thats really a great thing because sometimes there are all these misunderstandings about what people truly want, one party might have an opposing vision to the other but in the case of cancel culture, we can all agree that it was wrong enough to warrant such a harsh treatment. Thats why cancel culture shouldn’t be appropriated by any group or community, it should be that democratic force which belongs to everybody at the same time, group A shouldn’t be trying to cancel group B, or a group shouldn’t be trying to cancel a person in another group, we should all agree as humans that it was inappropriate.

Unanimous Agreement

Fortunately, cancel culture works only when a great number of persons agree to it. When there is even a substantial number of persons who oppose it, then it's not going to work. That's another great aspect of it, which also shines the light on democracy, when the majority agrees its bad then we know we have to take measures to deal with it, so many people align themselves behind what needs to be done and how it needs to be done. This isn’t just about what you feel is wrong or you thinking you were treated unfairly, it's about us all realizing that what happened didn’t have to happen and us taking action for it not to happen again. You get cancelled because you did something that all the community agreed was wrong, so take the lesson and do better in the future and that will prevent others from doing the same, so we can move better as a nation.

No Prison

Another thing is the fact that it doesn’t always aim to send persons to prison, we are all capable of making mistakes even unwillingly, but I don’t think a slip of the tongue due to profuse emotions should sentence you to a life behind bars. We should all be responsible for our words and make sure to choose them carefully, in case we decide to neglect what we say and how we make others feel then it's incumbent on us to endure the consequences of a life as a social outcast. We live in a world with other persons, as much as we try to be happy, we also mustn’t seek to interfere in the happiness of others.

Unity

There are really very few topics which could bring a whole country together, every social class, every gender and every age group. There are few things we can agree on so quickly, even climate change which is something we all face on a daily basis still has a lot of division but when it comes to cancel culture, we usually come together so fast to push this content and to really bring such persons to justice. The good thing is that it doesn’t even matter who you are, there is no discrimination here, whether you are living in the ghettos or in the Burj Khalifa, if you say or do something very wrong, then you are going to be brought to justice. This is very amazing because we’ve often felt like, if you are rich enough then you are untouchable, but movements such as #metoo have brought down some of the most powerful men on earth. There is literally no one or nothing shielded from this, cancel culture has brought down; companies, franchises, books, book writers, actors, moguls, politicians, regular individuals and so much more.

What I don’t like about cancel culture

It must be on video

Unfortunately, people can only be cancelled if they are caught on video saying or doing something wrong, the word of a witness is not good enough. There are just so many injustices happening without a witness having the time to pull out a camera or for a security camera to be nearby, this makes it very easy for criminals to escape justice and now people are forced to become spies and snitches always waiting for you to slip and catching you red-handed in an error. It also takes for the video to be really outrageous for it to generate enough dislikes and get the person brought to justice, if the person isn’t entertaining enough on the video or if the audio quality isn’t good enough, then the video wouldn’t do any good.

Uncontrollable Power

They always say, with great power comes great responsibilities, but this power has been given out there freely, there doesn’t seem to be a sense of responsibility. There is no one to say “hey, we’ve gone too far”, once the force is unleashed on you then it won’t stop until it has crushed you to a crisp. Are these punishments really befitting of the crime, is using the N-word once really that egregious of a crime that you shouldn’t ever work anymore? Who is there to really regulate the level of harm which should be done to a person when they slip. Some of these persons who have been cancelled aren’t just random people living out their lives in solitary, they are fathers, mothers, husbands, wives etc with whole families who might be counting on them for a daily bread, and you just take everything from them and crush them without no possibility of penitence. I’m not trying to defend anyone here but like Dave Chappelle said

“taking a man’s livelihood is akin to killing him” — Dave Chappelle

without even mentioning all the innocent people caught up in this furry. There was a time when everyone was against the gay community, but now it has become something wrong to do, which means that everything you said back then can be used against you! That's not fair, how would you hold something against me since 10 years back when we were all into it.

Decontextualized

These days it's so easy to manipulate videos and really take things out of context, if we aren’t careful then we risk losing all of our freedoms to cancel culture. That's one of the reason why I don’t understand the controversy around Dave Chappelle and why people are against his jokes, he is a comedian and he makes jokes, you might not like or laugh at the jokes but don’t make them bigger than what they are which are jokes. Its like going to see a scientist and he tells you the earth isn’t flat, then you want to cancel him for it. He is a scientist and that's his job, now It's left for you to agree or not, but not to try to actively ruin his life because you don’t like what he said about something you liked. Its not just about this but also about the videos where persons are caught doing something wrong, I think we want to get rid of persons for whom it's a pattern and not just anybody who said something bad once, we just take a 2-min video of something wrong and make a whole inference about a person’s life and decide to destroy that person all together, maybe there was something which justified his actions. As crazy and unbelievable as it sounds, maybe something justifies perfectly what happened, but you really didn’t give that person the time to explain himself, did you?

People Evolve

Evolution is an inherent part of every human being, when we get new information, we comprehend it, and we evolve to become a more advised person. You aren’t the same person as you were 10 years ago, right now you know additional things which have shaped you into becoming someone different. 10 years ago nobody was into the internet, but now we are all into it, 10 years ago we thought we couldn’t do anything to change the world, now we are all actively shaping it one way or the other, in the same way people do make mistakes and learn from them to become even better persons but when we destroy the lives of people completely, we aren’t giving them that chance to evolve into something better than what they were before, we rather create this villain full of resentment.

Conclusion

I think cancel culture is great, it builds a sense of responbility in every public figure to watch what they say and what they do because they are the role models of the society. It really brings to light what the values we uphold as a society are and where we draw the line, I just wish it was a more controlled power we can pullback on and also a more comprehensive force. For some people its a serious endeavor but for most people its just entertainment and they take pleasure in destroying others. Maybe we do need the cancel culture court system.

Thanks for reading!

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