Let’s See How They Like It! (Or not)

Why cancel culture shouldn’t be used for revenge

Dear Coddling Movie Community,

Since this Substack began, it’s been interesting to see this community take shape.

We do attract plenty of people who are connected to education in some way—students, parents, educators, and so on. But, as you know, the coddling themes stretch well beyond the classroom. Note for example, the background of today’s contributor.

Seth A.K.A The Fooder is a comic book artist and musician. He performed in an indie-rock band called Marvelkind and also spent time in the Illinois Air National Guard. Check out his Substack here.

And Seth does also have a connection to education. He used to teach computer science to K-8 students and to adults through a nonprofit in Chicago. 

“I have never lived or desired a normal life and I think it's given me a deep and abiding sense of self,” says Seth. “I try to stay compassionate even while age tries to grind it out of me.”

As you’ll see, his eclectic background shines through in his essay—in his style, his references, and in the controversies he mentions.

No matter how different we humans may appear, we share so much in common—including the thirst for revenge.

Today Seth digs into that theme in interesting ways.

I’m grateful to my friend and collaborator

Pazit Cahlon

for connecting me with Seth, and am very happy to share his lively essay with you. 

All the best,

Ted

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We’re coming off of years of normies being swatted about by very loud, very online maniacs for various infractions of leftist groupthink. We call it “cancel-culture” and a lot of digital ink was spilled frantically gibbering and pointing at it. It’s an ugly and depressingly common aspect of human culture—the need to burn witches.

Some on the right are eager for their turn to light the pyre, but it’s a bad idea to go “all in” on cancel culture as a form of revenge. 

I am going to suggest a new idea: the Anti-Principle of Retribution. 

Within the scope of retribution there’s no limiting factor, no victory condition and nothing but the feeling of justice. It cannot be applied evenly or judiciously. It is a fire that consumes all.

It doesn’t defeat your enemies, it creates more of them.

There’s no line that everyone intrinsically understands as “that which ye shall not cross.” There’s no ceiling to the amount of damage one could cause and no way to control the fire once it’s been unleashed. In our world of asymmetric digital warfare, there are no consequences for bad behavior—the law can’t help you. TwiXter is digital Verdun. The weapons are too dangerous for human (or troll!) hands.

There is no victory condition: you get nothing and go nowhere.

The only thing one can reliably expect is more retribution as righteousness oscillates between the aggrieved. Some say it’s tit-for-tat, but it isn’t. The fundamental presupposition of t-4-t is relative power symmetry—one cat being much like another—and that is not the world we occupy. 

We live in a world of power imbalance, a horror show wherein one group of idiots gets their hand on a lever of power, commits atrocities, has the lever yanked from their grasp by a new set of idiots, who get terribly spanked and then whine about it until they get close enough to grab the lever again—back and forth forever. What we should be focused on is stabilizing the pendulum, not agitating it.

As for your feels…I get it. 

I’m not above understanding how good cancelling feels. I stock a top-shelf of perfectly refined contempt for a handful of cancel-pigs I wouldn’t mind seeing permanently kicked out of the bar. Some have decades of selecting victims in their whisper networks, calling and emailing anyone who knows the unlucky sucker, and, in some cases, driving them to their deaths. If you want more info on that, google up Ed Piskor and Alec Holowka.

It would feel so good to see those bullies get their comeuppance, but that’s all it will ever be…a nice feeling. Eddie P is never coming back, no more comics will be drawn or analyzed; hope is still lost from the world. Erasing she-who-will-not-be-named from the Book of Life does nothing. 

It doesn’t even prevent the next hate campaign.

What we need are gut-level rejections of cancel-pig culture. When they come to you about a “person of concern,” tell them to pound sand. Journalists must be held to the highest standards and spiked the second they swap their opinions for facts.

Businesses need to hang up immediately when someone calls asking if they know what employee X has been up to and strictly limit the power of their HR departments. Any gossip needs to be challenged and scrutinized with extreme skepticism. We need to shut it down at the input stage and resume the presumption of innocence. The solution is smarter people and better media literacy—not a field of digital corpses.

Victimhood is Not a Virtue

This is a big one for me and a line I’ve been tossing around for a decade now. It is the core fallacy behind all of the grievance ideologies: being a victim does not make you a good or worthy person. You may seek recompense for damages, but you don’t simply get rewards because you feel aggrieved. 

It’s so simple and obvious and yet I’ve never heard anyone come out and say it. Expecting reparations for every injustice is childish Hopium, yet it’s just assumed to be true and correct. It’s an ideological garbage chute leading its adherents to deeper and deeper depths of resentment. 

Sorry, but if you get hit by a bus after robbing a bank, you’re still going to jail where you’ll get plenty of time to do your physical therapy. If you got cancelled by a bunch of losers, you may also be a piece of crap. The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being as old Solzhenitsyn used to say.

Because this is true, anyone with any nascent dreams of cancelling someone needs to check where they live and make sure their glass house is shatterproof and reinforced. You are not as good a person as you think, and you don’t have the moral foundation to make the call about who gets punished. 

All Is Vanity and Striving After Wind

And here it is. At the end of the day, this is all about branding. All of the worst online behavior is from people who have convinced themselves they are “good guys” and want to wear the badge of honor and wave the flag of righteousness.

X/Facebook/Instagram has turned this behavior into an economy. Cancelling is about being seen. Friends understand you are the most virtuous and the most stunning and the most brave and they pay you for it with their attention. Retribution is more of the same.

As mortals we’re fixated on legacy. “Being on the right side of history” is an attempt at building a legacy of justice because we’ve branded “SJW’ onto every child’s forehead since the mid-1960’s while simultaneously stroking their egos.

It’s all vanity.

It’s kids trying to show the world they care about the right things and are good people. It’s gray-heads trying to stay relevant to the fight. It’s opportunistic. It’s cynical. It’s identity fodder. All of the cancelling, all of the hand wringing, all of the calls for vengeance—all of it—is vanity. 

It’s the psychic tentacles of Moloch.

The principle of retribution makes you as bad as your enemies. It forces you to accept sin—in this case, knowingly doing something you wouldn’t want done to you. This road always leads to dark places. Empty and without exits. You will hurt someone who did not deserve to be hurt because it was on brand. It will leave a scar upon your soul. You will suffer Troll’s Remorse.

No one builds statues to the people who don’t go to war. Walking from Omelas has consequences: The only people who remember you curse your good name. There’s no special reward for being a good person.

Media Culture is the Problem

The rage, fear, hatred, etc. that drives all of this discourse is the disease, and it’s one that people could cure with the simple act of putting their phones away. It’s continuously amazing to me that people don’t consider how toxic their information ecology is. We live in a single, crap filled tube in a planet sized hamster cage; a media aquarium that’s filter is running in reverse. It makes us sick and angry and it’s completely under our control to terminate—but not without consequences.

You will have to work to maintain relationships and stay informed. You will have to pay for information and then compare it to other information. You will waste time doing research that disproves your big idea. You won’t have much to say when people want to talk about The Daily Show or The Big Bang Theory because you couldn’t stomach the nauseating thought of ever turning your television on. But you may also become less wrong over time.

You will have to accept humility and your smallness (or not!), but you will gain wisdom and caution. Long ago, when I cared about things and educated myself, I knew I was right about all kinds of political positions. But it turns out there was always more to know, always another layer of context, always another question that needed to be asked. We call this epistemic humility—which I just realized would make a great name for a cattle prod.

If you feel like you want to go on the attack, take out the baddies from the other side, go on, I won’t stop you. But I’m skipping those sessions. I will always view cancelling as low-class, childish, opportunistic, and weak. 

The most successful social movements relied on maintaining moral high grounds at all costs (or at least appearing to do so) because you have to convince the median citizen you’re right. This can take multiple lifetimes but the opposite—quick, self-serving tactics of the rash—blow up in their faces every time. If you doubt this, look at the results of <current year> environmentalism.

I can’t promise I will always support the people being attacked, but I will stand against the idea that malice can build a better world. I will go to my anonymous pauper’s grave knowing that I won’t have that sin weighing down Ma’at’s scale. It might be slave morality—but that’s the goal of civilization. 

If we want a less antagonistic Internet and finer discourse, we will be required to subdue our rage. If we want to win the war against life-terminating ideologies—something that has been happening—we must always present the heroic visage.

Excelsior!