Anyone who’s been canceled (or mobbed and lived to tell) can attest to the defining characteristic of the affliction: a rapid-onset ambush that will not abate until you throw yourself on the mercy of your tormentors, bleating effusive mea culpas for existing. “Trying to defend yourself to the internet is a futile task,” writes Zuri Davis in Reason. “If anything, it will inflame them more.” If indeed you elect to mount a defense—or, heaven help you, launch a counteroffensive—the initial assault morphs into a riotous feeding frenzy in which new waves of attackers allege an escalating litany of sins and demand commensurate atonement. As Lee Jussim puts it in his ultimately not very reassuring piece on surviving the mob, “they take your protestations of innocence as further evidence of just how despicable you are.”
You’d think your refusal to just shut up and take your lumps is more enraging to the mob than the original perceived sin.
And you’d be right, I would argue, for reasons having to do with a decades-old movement that is today’s sociological equivalent of Long COVID. Albeit more widespread and virulent.
While it’s reckless to reduce any broad social phenomenon to a straightforward theory of causation, cancel culture has all the earmarks of being a latent manifestation of America’s most notorious social experiment, the self-esteem movement. All grandiose social initiatives tend in time to devolve into case studies in the law of unintended consequences, but the self-esteem movement wrought paradoxical effects so prolific and severe that they might easily attract the attention of that phalanx of lawyers now pimping litigation over illnesses caused by the water at Camp Lejeune.
Premised on the uplifting (but untested) notion that “empowered” children would live up to their newly burnished self-images, the program held sway in American education for two generations, beginning in the late 1960s. During this period, all educational metrics cratered: from SAT scores to graduation rates to U.S. performance in international scholastic competitions. In the classroom, self-esteem was an unmitigated disaster.
Megadosing with self-esteem was, however, spectacularly successful at one thing: creating hordes of unrepentant narcissists who qualified as forever-children under the famous Piaget/Kohlberg paradigm. All they knew was “I want, I need.” So say psychotherapist-authors Jean Twenge, Sally Satel and a top-level cadre of other credentialed observers I interviewed for SHAM, my 2005 book on the self-help movement’s unchecked (and unfortunate) metastasis through American life.
Though the scholastic program eventually was repudiated by even some of its most vocal early supporters, so-called empowerment culture lived on less formally in the messaging of such self-styled champions of personal motivation as Tony Robbins, Dr. Phil, Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle and even Oprah Winfrey. Their regimens coalesced into any number of ambient cultural mantras. Here are two of note: “Don’t let anyone take away your dreams!” and “live your truth!” Oprah elevated the latter in particular to incantation status.
The effects of all this “selflation,” as some observers dubbed it, have been dramatic. Back in the 1950s, just over one in 10 teenagers had agreed with the statement “I am an important person.” By the late 1980s, that number would soar to a surreal 80 percent. (In my book I wrote of a Southern school district where kids piling off the buses each morning saw their reflections in a full-length mirror bearing the inscription, “You are now looking at the most important person in the world.”) Parenthetically, these kids, whose sense of entitlement left them bereft of coping skills, often ended up as frustrated, implacable young adults. Twenge has written several books on the irony, while others have chronicled the manifold harms wreaked by coddling.
But to rejoin our main narrative, self-esteem’s original lab rats went on to become helicopter parents, hovering protectively over their kids and raising them to be even more certain of both their exceptionalism and their right to have their needs met. Eventually these children landed in college, which is where our saga takes its darkest turn.
Having been fed a steady diet of exhortations about realizing dreams and living truths, they encountered on campus a vision of an aspirational Utopia, constantly reinforced by professors in so-called grievance studies coursework. Social justice became for them a shared dream and a collective truth to live. Their individual dreams might’ve succumbed to the harsh realities of competition—we can’t all win American Idol or be Tom Brady—but they could unite around this one dream and swear a blood oath to defend it. They became an army of the righteous, claiming an absolute franchise to act as moral Emily Posts.
But wait a minute. Let’s say you’re with me so far. How could people committed to Utopian ideals justify the egregious acts of bullying and personal destruction that we now know as cancel culture?
Actually, it all fits a pattern best described in the work of another contrarian social-psychologist, Roy Baumeister. Baumeister was among the first to question the widely promoted link between low self-esteem and antisocial behavior, which struck him as incongruous with historical data compiled during decades of psychological testing. The highest measured levels of self-esteem and pathological narcissism often were found in difficult if not authentically dangerous people, from playground bullies to rapists to serial killers. Such individuals felt superior, not inferior, and moreover, they fully expected their glossy self-images to be recognized and validated out in the real world. They might lash out when their personal sense of manifest destiny was threatened.
Long before the phrase “the mob” began referring to harassers rather than hit men, Baumeister and his proteges hypothesized the dangers of “systematically and repeatedly” validating the egos of “an entire generation of young people.” They saw this as a surefire formula for unloosing legions of “entitled, egomaniacal narcissists” on an unsuspecting society.
Thus it should surprise no one that today’s forever-children would become bullies on the larger playground of American life. Worse yet, these narcissists rationalize their coercive or retributive excesses as not only acceptable, but obligatory in furtherance of the presumed greater good.
They’re on the side of the angels, after all—which is the mob’s justification for acting decidedly less than angelic when they harass you, defame you, dox you or get you fired from your job.
Those who find themselves in the cross-hairs of the cancelistas would do well to consider that only nominally is mobbing about social justice. At its core, the mob’s rage is rooted in your having the effrontery to argue at all! One does not take issue with a demographic whose truth is the only truth, and who inhabit a common dream that no one can be permitted to take away.
Great essay! That's an interesting connection you explore, between the Self-Esteem/Human-Potential Movement and the phenomenon of self-important, wannabe Messianic, cultlike wokeists, who claim to be about social justice (or "climate justice") but don't have amy clue what "justice" even is, nor do they care to develop any kind of realistic or philosophically defensible concept of justice.
You may enjoy John Carter's essay on this theme, in which he dubs these woke cancel-culture mobsters "Marxcissists," which is a perfect term for them: https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-marxcissists