Self-Acceptance vs Cancel Culture
Republicans keep winning elections in rural Wisconsin. In a recent essay (“Cancel Culture and White People”) I proposed that one reason they win is because they have been using the politics of blame and division to their advantage. They have been doing this for a long time, but recently their tactics have been given a new name: “cancel culture.” They accuse Democrats of cancel culture, while at the same time using cancel culture tactics to win over what they see as their base. When Liberals take the bait and try to cancel Conservatives, it seems to play into the hands of the Right, who thrive on division. The answer to name calling is not more name calling. I want a functional government that responds to the needs of the people.
I want to take a deeper look at cancel culture. Why is it such a trigger for people, including myself? Are there better ways to hold people accountable and improve our communities?
Disclaimer: my essays attempt to critically examine what it means to be a white, rural, raised Christian, het male. I am trying to use my own journey of self discovery to illuminate these issues. As a white male I hold a place of historical privilege in society, and it is from a growing awareness of that place that I am criticizing cancel culture and trying to offer alternatives. I know I have blind spots and I miss perspectives from other groups. I invite criticism. I think we build a shared truth through the exchange of our perspectives and our individual truths.
I choose to challenge cancel culture within myself and in my relationships by making these commitments:
(1) See myself in the other. I recognize what I have in common with people who are being canceled in the media and other places, and I use that commonality to treat them as humans worthy of both being held accountable and loved.
(2) Celebrate mistakes. I accept that mistakes are part of the learning process and cut myself some slack when I mess up, and by extension I cut others slack when they make mistakes. I think of cancel culture as something to be used as a last resort.
(3) Work on myself. I do my own internal work to become aware of how I am projecting unexpressed parts of myself out onto others, and then own those parts on a path towards wholeness.
(4) Trust people. I assume the best of everyone and honor and support their intrinsic motivations.
(5) Set boundaries. I set clear boundaries and honor the boundaries set by other people.
(6) Build community. I work to build healthy communities based on relationships of trust and mutual support, so name-calling and canceling are used only as a last resort.
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(1) See myself in the other. I recognize what I have in common with people who are being canceled in the media and other places, and I use that commonality to treat them as humans worthy of both being held accountable and also loved.
Folks on the Right love to complain about cancel culture. They claim that they are being unfairly singled out and that Democrats are trying to cancel them as a way to silence them. A recent example is when Gina Carano was fired from the Disney+ show The Mandalorian. She claims she was fired for being conservative, and the questionable tweets were just a pretext to remove her. It is easy for me to see the humanity in Carano. She is cheerful and she plays one of my favorite characters. Carano’s firing seems to be the type of “canceling” that the Right wants people to see and criticize. It is ambiguous, and Carano is likable. There are other times when it has not been so ambiguous.
When I heard about the Unite the Right demonstration in Charlottesville in 2017, I was disgusted. They were there protesting what they perceived as being “canceled” — having symbols of their heritage removed. They were chanting things like: “You will not replace us!” It was shocking to me, because, to me, the Confederate statues are clearly there as symbols of white supremacy, and they need to come down. But these demonstrators didn’t see it that way — they took it as a personal attack on them.
Where did these chants come from? Without apologizing on their behalf, I can still recognize something I think I share with them: existential angst. Mine is fueled by fears of climate change and unchecked oligarchy; I think theirs may be a manifestation of a fear among white supremacists: that if they lose power, Black, Brown, and Indigenous people will do to white people what white people did to them. They/we are not under a real threat. But that story feels real to them, and it gives them someone to blame for the half century of economic stagnation for working people in America. Bringing down the statues was intended to create a more inclusive environment, but it impacted the white protesters as if it were excluding them.
I have no sympathy for white supremacy, and I think it is well past time to remove Confederate statues, but what they felt is probably at the core of what I feel when I am around any type of cancel culture — I feel an existential threat. It puts me in a fight or flight frame of mind. Cancel culture touches a nerve in me and I want to explore why. I think it has something to do with my own deep desire to not feel excluded. There must be a different way to move this country forward than cancel culture.
(2) Celebrate mistakes. I accept that mistakes are part of the learning process and cut myself some slack when I mess up, and by extension I cut others slack when they make mistakes. I think of cancel culture as something to be used as a last resort.
I think cancel culture is a new term for something that has very old roots. I was trained as a biologist, and during my schooling I developed a fascination for evolution. I love to imagine what the early evolutionary environment was that formed humans into humans. The best research I have seen says that humans spent millions of years living in social groups of semi-nomadic hunter gatherers. The size of these groups could range up to 150 individuals, and being a member of such a group was important to survival in early humans. We are social apes. Groups of humans were and still are creative and resilient.
I imagine that when adolescents came of age in these hunter gatherer groups, they were welcomed into the world of adults, with all the rights and responsibilities that group membership entailed. It was very important to their survival that adolescents internalize all of the group norms, so humans evolved to be hypersensitive to social information during that period in our lives (I work with modern day teens, and I can confirm that this hypersensitivity to social life is still alive and well). In the early groups of humans, people who violated group norms were a risk to the group and young people learned to comply through experience, rituals, and initiations. When someone did violate the social norms, there were consequences, but there was a strong motivation from both sides to continue the relationship.
I am imagining an evolutionary environment where educational experiences were hands-on and learning happened with young people learning social norms by making mistakes and then trying again over and over, like the way toddlers learn to walk. Responsive communities helped young people see when they were outside of community norms and brought them back in a sort of feedback loop. Humor, accepted mistakes, and shared struggle are all ways that people are brought back into community. I imagine that for a small group of hunter gatherers, the threat of banishment or death was only used as a last resort.
Banishment from the hunter gatherer band was on the extreme end of a continuum of ways that people were held accountable to the group. This continuum of accountability functions well in small groups, where people have face-to-face interactions and there are webs of interdependence. This may be why cancel culture is such a trigger: it reminds us of banishment. The threat of banishment kept people engaged in the work of being in the community. But like any good thing, it can be exaggerated and distorted to become harmful, like in the case of today’s cancel culture. Another place where this exaggeration and distortion can be harmful is within our own psyches.
(3) Work on myself. I do my own internal work to become aware of how I am projecting unexpressed parts of myself out onto others, and then own those parts on a path towards wholeness.
In my dreams I sometimes find myself being chased by something sinister. I try to run but I am frozen in place. Or I try to hide and I am still exposed. I am terrified by what will happen when it catches me. Dreams like this are vivid and compelling. A half a lifetime ago I happened upon a book by Fritz Perls called Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. Perls was saying that every person we meet in our dream world represents a part of ourselves. The protagonist represents the situation as it is for the ego in daily life, and other dream elements represent unacknowledged or unaccepted parts of oneself. By interrogating these non-ego dream elements, a person could welcome them and reincorporate them into the self.
When parts of oneself are not acknowledged or accepted, they don’t just show up chasing you in dreams. It is hard for one’s ego to accept any parts of the self that society views as bad or ugly or dangerous. Instead, we tend to see these traits in other people. This is called “projection” in the psychology lingo. If you are fearful and timid, you tend to project anger and action out onto other people. If you are weak, you tend to project strength out onto other people. When you project something out, it grows and becomes distorted. In dreams this manifests as the scary monster who is chasing you. One of the maxims I remember from dream analysis is that if you could ask the monster what it wants, it would turn into a benign teacher.
I was once in a state of conflict with a boss of mine. Everything he did seemed to trigger a reaction in me. A friend told me to consider that the people who trigger us like that are those who are the most like us in ways that we do not want to see. They are manifestations of the rejected parts of ourselves that we still have but are blind to. I got really defensive. But eventually I could see how my dislike for this man might have something to do with what I was projecting onto him. It gets complicated. Because usually someone has traits of their own which make them perfect recipients for our projections, so we are interacting with partly their true self and partly our projections onto them.
An example of how projection fits into self-hatred might be seen in many people’s relationship with body fat. Larger children are mocked and excluded in school. Our celebrity culture celebrates thin bodies and associates body fat with gluttony, sloth, and lack of willpower. So our egos project out body fat onto people who are safely in the “other” category. In my head, if I was asked to think of a stereotypical larger person, they would probably be poor, white, and shopping in Walmart. I call up a stereotype (to my shame). We have been trained to hate body fat, and we find someone who is not us to represent what we hate, and then we can despise them and ridicule them. Projecting something out doesn’t eliminate it from ourselves, it just makes that part of ourselves into “other.” So when we notice any hint of body fat in ourselves, we also hate it. We try diets and exercise, all in the effort to eliminate this foreign substance from ourselves. What we need in order to love and accept other people is to love and accept ourselves.
(4) Trust people. I assume the best of everyone and honor and support their intrinsic motivations.
My friend Dotty B. regularly counsels me to have “radical unreasonable trust.” When my fear and mistrust rises, it is likely a projection of my own unacknowledged power and agency out onto the world. Dotty gives people the invitation to ask “joy, bliss, and ease” to come into their lives. This is to say that the world is abundant with generosity and love. To invite abundance is an act of radical self love, and it goes against centuries of scarcity mindsets held by people in our collective white-dominated culture.
In the scarcity mindset which is held by many white people like me, there are a limited amount of resources available, and people need to make hard decisions in order to maximize their chance of success. Modern economics styles itself as the study of scarcity. When we white people combine the scarcity mindset with the projection of all of our deplorable qualities out into the world, we can easily begin to assume the worst of intentions in other people. We can start to wish for and celebrate the failure of others, especially others who embody our projections.
This is a lens to make sense of cancel culture: we take pleasure in the elimination of others, partly because it frees up resources for us, and partly because their literal elimination is a metaphor for the elimination of a despised part of ourselves. In America, the more we white people don’t want to look at our own actions, the more we project that onto people and groups and assume they are out to do harm to us. In self-defense, we attempt to eliminate them. For centuries, the United States had an official policy of genocide (and later, assimilation) of Indigenous people. We white people wanted the “Indian problem” to go away and did our best to make it happen. Witch trials are another example of historical cancel culture that turned deadly. We can also point to the Red Scare of the 1950’s or the anti-immigrant sentiment happening today. Attempting to eliminate those who don’t look, act, or think like us, for white people, is as American as apple pie.
What are the alternatives to the scarcity mindset and distrust in other people? We can honor their intrinsic motivation. Our American idea of eliminating the undesirable elements has invaded our public systems. Author Alfie Kohn writes critically in the book Punished by Rewards about the dangers of our collective focus on rewards and punishments in trying to mold behavior. One constant in his work is his critique of authority figures who assume that people are extrinsically motivated. Whether it is by reward or punishment, figures in authority have been trying for a long time to eliminate the bad parts of persons or groups and encourage the good parts. Kohn calls on us to look to intrinsic motivation to help support healthy people and communities in parenting, education, and justice systems. His call is a radical unreasonable trust in humanity.
How do we promote trust in ourselves, other people, and intrinsic motivation?
(5) Set boundaries. I set clear boundaries and honor the boundaries set by other people.
In the podcast cited below, adrienne maree brown speaks about the power and potential of “transformative justice” to replace the punitive systems that we have today. At one point, she speaks about the need for a “boundary school” for activists and others. Setting and respecting boundaries is a key social skill, and if we want to transform education, parenting, and justice systems, we are going to need to deliberately build social skills in ourselves and in our communities. A good place to start is with adolescents.
Unfortunately, cancel culture is not a thing in itself. Instead I see it as a manifestation of something that begins in childhood and grows exponentially in adolescence, which is a loss of access to the whole self due to self-hatred and a lack of connection to others who can affirm the whole self. That self-hatred, when it is turned on the self can manifest as low self-esteem, addiction, eating disorder, self-harm, and suicide. When it is projected out, it can show up in exclusive cliques, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, cancel culture, and school shootings. The solution is radical self-acceptance and self-love and radical acceptance by peers and adults.
I work for a Montessori school at the junior high level. There are conflicts almost every day. The primary underlying issue is when young people don’t feel included. Research shows that the pain for teens when they feel excluded can be so similar to physical pain that it can be treated with ibuprofen. The struggle is real. My job as a teacher often involves having young people sit down and listen to each other. There can be a sense of relief that comes over a young adult when they discover that their friend doesn’t hate them forever. These types of conflicts, when resolved, bring the community together and reinforce connection. Social skills are built in a responsive community where best intentions are assumed and mistakes are welcomed.
In our school we are trying to address “call out culture” by asking our students to practice “call in culture.” If someone is violating our community norms, we ask the students to find ways to hold the person accountable, while not excluding them or calling them out. It is easy to call people out. It is harder to call people in. We ask our students not to “pile on” if someone is outside of community norms. We coach young people to give their peers a “boundary sandwich.” In a boundary sandwich, the speaker sets a clear boundary, but begins and ends it with words of connection, while using the word “and” to link the sections, instead of the word “but.” For example, “I was really glad you went on a hike with me yesterday, and I want to ask you to show up on time for future hikes, and I want to know if you want to try for another hike tomorrow.” It might sound odd at first, but little things like this can go a long way to keeping people feeling included.
In the Montessori classroom, we have a focus on the prepared environment and an honoring of intrinsic motivation. There are no “bad” children. Everyone deserves to be respected and valued, and we try to create experiences where the young people can see their own self worth through the results of their actions in community. Montessori education sees the cultivation of social intelligence and self-acceptance during the teen years as key to creating a world of peace and justice for adults. We need adults who can work together respectfully to creatively solve the problems of our times, and that starts in the teen years.
(6) Build community. I work to build healthy communities based on relationships of trust and mutual support, so name-calling and canceling are used only as a last resort.
Another analogy I find comes from the area of my work for the school. I am the school’s farm manager. We work with children and families to cultivate about four acres of organic vegetables. We occasionally have creatures that come to damage our crops. I could think of those garden pests like I might think about a person who has violated a community norm. If I were in the scarcity mindset, I might try to cancel the pest by spraying a pesticide. Spraying a pesticide often works in the short term, but over time, the farmer needs to increase the rates or change pesticides as the pest develops immunity. Instead, organic farmers try to create a healthy environment for their plants to thrive.
Organic farmers do things like feed the soil with compost in order to foster healthy plants that can resist pests and diseases. We often plant flowers next to vegetables in order to provide sources of pollen and nectar for predatory insects that eat the pests. We tolerate some levels of infestation, and if those levels are exceeded, we have bacteria that we spray to introduce a biological control. Our goal is to support a healthy self-correcting ecosystem, where one element is not allowed to dominate. Occasionally, when we cannot tolerate the pest at all, and we use barriers like fences or fabric to separate the crop from the harm.
Using the analogies of Montessori classrooms and organic farms, I imagine new ways for people facing someone who violates the community norms within a healthy community. Small violations are watched without intervention. When there are larger violations, there are natural consequences that “call in” the violator back into the community and stop short of total elimination. If the violation is dangerous to the community, then there is a way to separate the offender from the community, but this is a last resort.
I am aware that the alternatives to cancel culture that I have offered assume that the abuser wants to be part of a healthy community. There are some people who simply need to be held accountable (cough…Trump). I would like to reiterate that to me there is a difference between stopping cancel culture and holding people accountable for their actions. We must interrupt abuse and hold abusers accountable and do it publicly. I offer community and personal solutions because I believe we need to build the future we want.
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I wish this were enough. What I have outlined are steps I can take in my personal life and in the communities I belong to. It is a noble goal. But it will fall short if policies stay in place that foster the culture of division and distraction instead of a government that can respond to the needs of the people. Without policy change, it will be like me driving my Prius and thinking that will be enough to stop climate change. Individual change is a start, but it must go with policy change.
To wrap up I’d like to bring it back to self love. In cancel culture people are hating and blaming “the other.” We are projecting our unacknowledged parts onto “the other” and then attacking them. This is a sort of self-hatred that is like a sickness for ourselves and our communities. We need to love and accept our whole selves and find ways to call in people who violate our community norms. We need to come from a place of radical unreasonable trust in ourselves and trust that other people want the best for our communities. We need to use an abundance mindset and assume the best of ourselves and others. If all of that fails, we need to set clear boundaries and protect ourselves and our communities from harm, while still honoring the humanity of the abuser.
Reference: Adrienne Maree Brown, author or We Will Not Cancel Us speaks about alternatives to cancel culture and mass incarceration. She speaks to the power of transformative justice and abolition. She imagines a world where people who experience abuse are held in a healing space, and abusers are simultaneously held accountable and also helped to heal. Her vision is hopeful.
