Lower the stakes of changing our minds
What cancel culture is, why people partake, and how we can compassionately oppose its detrimental effects.
More often than I would like to admit, I look back at some of my published writings and cringe. Did I really think that? I might ask myself. Or, I might say I can’t ‘believe I put it in that way; people are going to think I think x, and I don’t!
So, I have been publishing works for about 8 years now, meaning that it would be weird if I agreed with everything still because a lot of personal growth can happen in 8 years; particularly when they start in your teens. I am sure I am not the only one, and there are even articles I have written maybe a little over a year ago that I would have a some quips with today. I change my mind a lot, or at least try to fine-tune and challenge the views I take for granted.
Yet, articles people write are immortal. They’re associated with your name forever. They don’t have a disclaimer on them that say “this person wrote this one as an edgy 19 year old, and might not believe it now, so don’t ‘this you?’ them with this on Twitter.”
I wanted to interrogate why I feel so uneasy about having writing that I did, and that I now personally disagree with, still out there. I have asked myself “why should this be a problem in the first place? Isn’t it common knowledge that people change their mind?” And that’s the thing: it is common knowledge. We are all human and know that other humans change their mind. So what is the big deal?
Let’s interrogate it together!
The cost of being wrong
The big deal is the stakes. The way that our culture operates is that the stakes of stating an opinion publicly are too high. Every day, we are confronted with stories of people losing their jobs, university offers, and more for opinions or things that they have said in the past. In my mind, this is for two reasons.
Politics as personal identity
The first is that one’s political views are becoming more and more a part of one’s personal identity. As religion declines, politics replaces it. We often identify others and decide whether to like and associate with them based on their partisan affiliations. Some of this has been very disturbing to me, and has included people cutting ties with or antagonizing their family members over political disagreement. Your political view can’t just be an opinion or interpretation that’s subject to change with productive exchange with others. Instead, it’s your lifelong, committed faith. If you stray or disagree with elements of it, your community will shun you. People on a different partisan team can make inferences about your view on everything based on what faith marker you identify with (e.g., conservatives think liberals must always be tolerant of everything, liberals think all conservatives must be racist or climate deniers or what have you).
This is also why the people who do not fit the most neatly into a faith box are the most enraging to the public. People like Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi have been the targets of rage and criticism for holding traditionally left policy views while still critiquing left orthodoxies (Greenwald, whose husband is a socialist politician, has recently released a book about challenging the far right government of Brazil, and the majority of Taibbi’s podcast guests are progressives). Things like this do not compute, because your politics have to be your faith. Do not deviate from the catechism of leftism.
I’m not saying Greenwald or Taibbi changed their minds or were previously wrong about something, but rather use this as an example. Their positions as targets of rage from those strongly aligned with leftist orthodoxy are indicative of how we treat political belief today. This widespread attitude is a recipe for discouraging people from saying “I was wrong about x” or “I used to believe x, but I have changed my mind upon further thought/reception of new information.” Why? Because it makes you fit less comfortably within the neatly packaged box you were in before. If you’re already within the faith, you can’t change your mind without committing a heresy.
A scramble for resources
The second reason is largely a product of our economic conditions. In a society where ordinary people are scrambling for resources and jobs — that is, in a society where there is little to no guarantee of the necessities we need to survive — “cancelling” someone can be seen as taking them out of the competitive pool.
I’ll give a bit of an example. This year, at my school, there was a spreadsheet going around that tracked what students were doing during COVID-19 lockdowns. This allegedly would list students seen to be violating lockdown rules on social media, and had the intention of disrupting job recruiting, or taking people out of the competitive pool. Sure, one may argue that it was to dissuade pandemic violations, but in law school there is competition and a finite number of job offers, so I doubt that the real reason was truly a moral one.
But morality provides a perfect cover up. It’s hard to say “I want to deny people jobs to make my prospects of getting one more likely”, but it’s far easier to say “people who do bad things don’t deserve work”. This does not only involve people with explicit intentions to narrow the competitive pool, but cleverly conscripts a good deal of well meaning people by making it seem like a righteous moral cause.
This can also operate within the workplace, i.e. if someone can get fired for their views, there is less competition for things like promotions, which one may need to reach financial stability.
In an economy where work was guaranteed, or where, for instance, housing wasn’t a costly and artificially limited commodity but a right, this would be less of an issue. Instead, what’s happening is that to survive — to feed yourself or your family — you are dependent on the will of employers that are, in turn, subject to the whims of the market. In many cases, you are also dependent on property owners to be able to rent an apartment or house, which involves extensive screening processes; particularly in Vancouver, where I currently am. Canadians have some guarantees (e.g., medicine), but for the most part, whether Canadians are fed and housed depends on the will of a small number of people, who can be persuaded to withhold these resources from you if they so wish.
In labour law, there have been some efforts to insulate workers from this problem by making it more difficult to fire workers for their speech outside the workplace. But, this is something that progressives have been conscripted into opposing, and are often (though not always) the ones cheering on this behaviour. What is tragic is that, like I said, I do not believe there is an explicit drive to limit the competitive pool. There are lots of people who are not consciously doing this. Rather, our cultural moment of cancelling coincides with our economic condition of austerity and market chaos.
Something that is especially dismaying about this is that it limits the voices within the public square, and often does so on a class basis. Owners, managers, bosses, and what have you — people that are less reliant on someone more powerful for job security or housing — do not have to worry about self-censoring to the same degree as those with less security. As such, we have a class stratification of “free speech”. The more economically secure you are, the more freedom of speech you have.
This seriously warps our perception of public opinion, because the views we are typically most exposed to are the views of those who have more job and housing security. But should we not want to hear more from those that do not, if we are interested in tackling issues like the housing crisis in Vancouver? Should we not want to have an accurate understanding of public opinion?
Lower the stakes
A healthier and more open minded culture — a culture that fosters understanding and intellectual curiosity, and not cancelling — would be interested in lowering the stakes of both being wrong and/or changing one’s mind. It’s good to keep articles up and read your old work, because it’s good to understand how you once thought about something or how your reasoning once operated.
But I think it’s important to try and change the way we view how people relate to their own political beliefs. It is important not to infer what someone’s intention is, or how good of a person they are, from what politics they have before even talking to them about it, or before giving them a chance to explain what they mean.
It is good to start with the presumption that people simply want what is best for themselves and for their families, and that people will have different interpretations of what political goals will help bring them closer to that. It’s also good to start with the presumption that people might simply disagree with you without having ill-will towards you.
But of course, it’s very hard to try to change peoples’ attitudes overnight, and I cannot simply wag my finger at everyone and ask them to stop cancelling people or beg everyone to hear each other out.
So another important thing, that I do believe will help heal our culture, is making sure people have as much personal stability as possible, and that we minimize reliance on the whims of bosses and owners (who are, in turn, at the whims of the market, that includes people yelling at them to fire people). I don’t know exactly how that would look like, but I do think that employment protections should include protection of political belief or statements made outside the workplace. This, I think, would be the most conducive to promoting a culture of free speech, as would making one’s prospects of obtaining basic resources like housing less uncertain.
Many of these solutions will involve lawmakers or those with influence over the law, and I assume very few of my readers (if any) would be in that category. But I do think we should also be the change we wish to see. Instead of reacting to peoples’ views with an impulse to ruin their life or security, we should learn to co-exist with them, and be open to learning about them.
We should also welcome people who change their mind, and not make them have to live with a view they now denounce. This is especially important, because I think it will make people more cooperative, less antagonistic, and less likely to try and double down on an opinion that might be… not great. When we make people have to hold on to and own a view they no longer agree with, we incentivize them not to change their mind to perhaps a better view, but to try and twist facts and bend themselves out of shape to try and justify that view. This is particularly problematic for political movements who want to change hearts and minds. For instance, if you want people to believe something, why give them flack (and thereby dis-incentivize them) for changing their minds toward that belief?
Finally, we must stop treating politics as a stand-in for religion, and stop treating it as an all-encompassing identity or heuristic informing us, prima facie, how to treat someone. Yes, there are people who have genuinely disturbing views, and you are not obliged to associate with anyone you find hurtful or threatening. But a good deal of people associated with views you might find disturbing are probably just trying to figure things out, and maybe have an explanation that might be interesting or elucidating.
I want a society where people are encouraged to work out their views in public, to publish their thoughts without fear, and to not have to feel committed to what they say forever. We all have lots to learn from each other, and we all have much to interrogate within ourselves about how we see the world. It’s time to accept disagreement as a fact of life, to attempt to try and understand why others see things differently than you see them rather than jumping to conclusions about their entire being. I think we would all be better for it.