- Position‹3 of 4›
- Cancel culture must be cancelled
Cancel culture isn't really about justice. Instead, it's a vicious competition of who can make themselves look better by putting someone else down.
The argument
Cancel culture is presented by its proponents as a form of protest or a social justice. But the method and character they use contradict this claim. The language of cancel culture seeks to tear down one person while building another up. It is not about empowering the weak; it is about ganging up on one person to make yourself look good. Cancel culture is being weaponized under the guise of "liberal" values. It has become a competitive sport in which people effectively dehumanize their opponents to prove their own "wokeness". It promotes a toxic culture of self-elevation for the influencer generation, in which power is handed to those who most convincingly undermine their opponents. It makes a show out of attacking, demoralizing, and destroying someone else. Cancel culture’s vicious nature threatens human interaction at every level. It teaches people to prioritize their own image at the expense of others. This way of thinking doesn’t promote justice; it’s just a vanity project on a broad scale. And in attacking certain values, it teaches its own brand of values that are ultimately harmful for society.
Premises
Counter-arguments
This is a disingenuous misrepresentation of what cancel culture is. Yes, there will always be some people who twist a good thing and take it too far. But for the most part, cancel culture is comprised of people fighting a powerful individual spreading hateful ideas. And they fight them not with hateful words, but with silence and withholding their money. It’s not about self-empowerment. In fact, cancel culture comes from the acknowledgement that most people simply don’t have the same power as celebrities. The only way for those that do have power to be held accountable is if the people band together online and denounce them.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The premise sets a motive test nothing could pass: participants in any collective protest gain standing within their group, so if that disqualifies a protest it disqualifies every social movement, including those the argument would endorse. [Rejecting P2] Motive is inferred rather than shown, and the same conduct — public criticism, withdrawal of custom, refusal to platform — is called boycott or accountability when the target is one the speaker disapproves of, so the characterisation tracks the case rather than the behaviour. [Rejecting C] Even where some participants behave as described, that argues for criticising particular instances rather than abolishing the practice — and the conclusion applies to the phenomenon the very method it condemns.