The Ontology of Cancel Culture: Racists, Fascists, and Nazis, Oh My!

Antiquity reserved two forms of punishment for the most extreme crimes: death and exile. At times when civilization's jurisdictions were more limited in geographic scope, punishment by exile, sending someone into the wild and socially isolating him, was possible in a manner that is less easy to do in modern times.

Criminals are punished by death or isolation to protect people from the possibility one convicted of an extreme crime might commit a future crime, but also to deter future criminals from engaging in that crime. While both forms of punishment ended a convicted criminal's participation in society, exile was a form of social death for the criminal that spared the people from the messy business of execution. If a criminal did something truly awful but did not pose a direct future threat to where ending his life would be necessary for the protection of others, exile was a sensible option.

A heretic, for example, might face exile in lieu of execution. The heretic is punished for his belief. Because belief itself does not make the heretic dangerous, exile is, perhaps, more appropriate.

What does exile look like in modern times? Modern people invest a substantial portion of their lives into something we call a "career," which entails a social circle and prospects for work within a particular profession. While we can't throw heretics out into the wild like in olden days, we can effectively cut them off from participation in areas they've centered their lives around. We call this "cancel culture." It is the punishment of belief with social exile. I assume I needn't bore readers with examples, which are replete in most rightists' news-feeds, as the push to ban from the public square any right-leaning thinkers or those who opine outside the acceptable parameters of our corporate media overlords is all too obvious. I wrote extensively on it 2017 [*1], and a few books would be necessary to fully cover developments since then.

Why do we see a social trend toward an increasingly-histrionic degree of cancel culture? This essay endeavors to find an answer along with some advice on how we can navigate this trend and bend it to our advantage.

Ontology as a Method of Judgment
What defines a man? Is it his beliefs or his actions? How can we know his beliefs? If we can, does that define him? If a man consistently acts contrary to his beliefs, do his actions override his beliefs in how we define him?

Lyrics from the late Paul O'Neill: "If our kindness this day is just pretending, if we pretend long enough, never giving up, it just might be who we are [*2]." Do we know a kind person by his continuous engagement in kind acts or by his kind beliefs independent of his acts, since his acts could pretend an outward kindness but have a hidden motive? We can't know one's true beliefs, since the technology to decipher such information doesn't exist. Another's underlying beliefs are invisible to us. We can only observe actions.

Think of an invisible object that we know exists solely through observation of its shadow. Through observation of the shadow, we come to know the object, despite its invisibility. This is an Aristotelian perspective.

Ontology, inquiry into the nature of being, directs our attention to things and people in and of themselves as opposed to their effects. The effects are a shadow cast by the individual, and some seek to know the individual beyond his shadow, since shadows can change in ways the object casting it can't. This is a Platonic perspective.



A 1962 U.S. Supreme Court case, Robinson v. California, 370 U.S. 660, illustrates this debate [*3]. A man was convicted of being "addicted to the use of narcotics." California law criminalized both acts involving narcotics and, separately, the status of addiction to them. A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled that criminalizing a status of addiction violated U.S. constitutional law as "cruel and unusual punishment." Four justices gave different opinions. The rulings are far more interesting when we set aside the academic pretense of navel-gazing that is "constitutional law" [*4] and distill the opinions to their raw reasoning.

Why is it wrong to criminalize a status? The Court 's majority reasoned:

It is unlikely that any State at this moment in history would attempt to make it a criminal offense for a person to be mentally ill, or a leper, or to be afflicted with a venereal disease. ... [I]n the light of contemporary human knowledge, a law which made a criminal offense of such a disease would doubtless be universally thought to be an infliction of cruel and unusual punishment ... We cannot but consider the statute before us as of the same category. In this Court counsel for the State recognized that narcotic addiction is an illness. Indeed, it is apparently an illness which may be contracted innocently or involuntarily. We hold that a state law which imprisons a person thus afflicted as a criminal, even though he has never touched any narcotic drug within the State or been guilty of any irregular behavior there, inflicts a cruel and unusual punishment...

Dissenting Justice Clark responded:

[A] State can punish persons who purchase, possess or use narcotics. Although none of these acts are harmful to society in themselves, the State constitutionally may attempt to deter and prevent them through punishment because of the grave threat of future harmful conduct which they pose. Narcotics addiction - including the incipient, volitional addiction to which this provision speaks - is no different. California courts have taken judicial notice that "the inordinate use of a narcotic drug tends to create an irresistible craving and forms a habit for its continued use until one becomes an addict, and he respects no convention or obligation and will lie, steal, or use any other base means to gratify his passion for the drug, being lost to all considerations of duty or social position." Can this Court deny the legislative and judicial judgment of California that incipient, volitional narcotic addiction poses a threat of serious crime similar to the threat inherent in the purchase or possession of narcotics? And if such a threat is inherent in addiction, can this Court say that California is powerless to deter it by punishment?

Moreover, "status" offenses have long been known and recognized in the criminal law. 4 Blackstone, Commentaries (Jones ed. 1916), 170. A ready example is drunkenness, which plainly is as involuntary after addiction to alcohol as is the taking of drugs.

Justice Clark had a solid point. The law aims to minimize drug use, because drug use produces drug addicts. It's drug addicts that we wish to minimize, not drugs themselves. It's not the drug sitting on a table that causes harm, nor is it the act of taking the drug or selling it. It's, instead, the production of the "drug addict" we object to. Putting aside the possibility that one is injected by drugs against his will by another, making oneself addicted is what causes the social misery that justifies drug laws as a remedy.

The Court's majority opinion conflated sympathetic states of being like mental illness with the volitional state of being that is drug addiction in an attempt to cast criminalizing status as immoral. Is one who takes an illegal substance to the point of addiction as sympathetic as someone born with a mental disorder? Was the majority's instinctive revulsion toward punishing one's being misguided?

There's a natural unease we have with punishing one's being. Behavior is easier to define than one's being. If being was easy to define, perhaps we could use law to prevent all future harm by criminalizing evil people. We don't punish people for being evil; we punish them for their evil behavior.

Punishing the essence of a human being seems to be God's work more than that of mortals. A Christian civilization has a natural prejudice against such judgment. To those guilty of heinous capital crimes, we say, "May God have mercy on your soul," but then punish the criminal anyway. We recognize that justice demands our harshest punishment for those that volitionally engage in evil acts. So why not have mercy ourselves and forego such punishment if we suspect God might have mercy?

We use civilization to organize our lives to flourish (be it spiritually or materially), by which law is a tool. But man's law is not meant to usurp a divine role. Thus, humanity's role in law is to punish actions in order have a more orderly civilization where we can flourish instead of living in constant fear of disruption or harm. Ultimate judgment of our character is the job of our creator, not us.

But putting aside Christian ethics, how tempting would it be to simply criminalize evil? If we can identify and punish evil people before they commit evil acts, perhaps we can avoid those evil acts. And even if law is too blunt an instrument to identify and punish evil people merely for evil belief, we organize our lives around the reputation of others. A poor reputation begets social punishment. Is that so different?

Reputation as a Tool
In a functional civilization, the more Platonic perspective on being is a perfectly reasonable means to navigate life. Reputation is a substitute for intimate knowledge. If a scientist tell us, for example, climate change is dangerous, or a pandemic will kill two-million people, and suggests we tax emissions of carbon dioxide to reduce climate change or perpetually wear double or quadruple masks to reduce transmission of a virus, the knowledge-base of that scientist is beyond our scope. We generally don't have access to his data-set he uses in his mathematical models for his suggestions or the knowledge-base to critically examine his models. The shadow he casts is too complex. We look to the scientist himself, or the opinion of the media selecting words to describe the scientist, in deciding whether his effects are to be followed. 

If the scientist is presented as a good upstanding moral person, has the correct credentials, and enough fellow scientists and bureaucrats hold him in high regard, we then trust the scientist himself. Our trust in his effects follow as a proxy for the trust we place in his being.

For a more simple example, if someone lies to you, do you trust him again? Even if he asks for your trust in a completely different area under completely different circumstances than the time he lied to you, you may rightfully reject his requests of you in an entirely unrelated matter. It's not the fact that he lied about something unrelated that causes your rejection. It's, instead, his being as a liar that does.

Our knowledge of an individual can't be fully known. We take glimpses of his actions to judge whether we want to associate with him going forward, because we don't have the hours in the day to fully know an individual and often have other more-urgent matters occupying our time.

To know someone's being is sometimes more useful than to know his actions. He can fool you with his actions, or he can act in a reliable way and then revert to unreliable ways later on. And since we don't have the time to all independently specialize in the various areas of knowledge forming our increasingly-complex civilization, we make decisions on whether to participate in certain actions or accept certain ideas, like using a recycle bin or taking a vaccine, based on the status of proponents and opponents' reputations in lieu of foundational knowledge.

Of course, this methodology makes character assassination a tempting tactic to derail certain ideas from being accepted by the public. Remember the "Alt Right" in 2016-17? Nobody can tell us what it means to be "Alt Right," as there are numerous definitions, mostly by its opponents using the pejorative "racist." Perhaps the general public assumes Alt Right means someone is a "racist," but nobody really knows what racist means anymore either. Your Google-fu will take you down a wild ride of confusing and conflicting definitions, as articles by leftists play the persuasive redefinition game [*5], relaxing the definition of an emotionally-charged term so it can be widely applied while still carrying the same charge of the original more-acute definition (to the extent we can remember what it was). Whatever "racist" means, we only know it is someone who is bad, not to be trusted, and who should be universally rejected by polite society.

A racist could mean someone who believes a certain race or races is/are inferior to others. Or, we could define it on a continuum. Someone who notices differences in races might infer from those differences a degree of inferiority, even if he doesn't explicitly state such a belief. Kindle readers are linked to the New Oxford American Dictionary, Third Edition (2010).

But a piece by the Atlantic takes "racist" a step further [*6].

Today, racist means not only burning a cross on someone’s lawn or even telling someone to go home, but also what feels unpleasant to someone of a race—as in what I as a person of that race don’t like. It has gone from being mean to someone to, also, what feels mean to me.

The two may seem the same, but it gets tricky. A white woman admires a black woman’s locks and asks her how she washes them; the black woman gets tired of answering such questions and feels they are intrusive, harmful. Many would instinctively extend the term racist to this interaction, despite the fact that the white woman sincerely admired the black woman’s hair and feels odd being called a racist.

Racist, according to the left, is a feeling, a state of being independent of one's actions that is defined by the person using the label against the person he applies it to. They make the term broad to the point it no longer has objective meaning, but meaning doesn't matter so much as the emotional punch, as people fear the effects of racists and seek to punish the racist as a preventative measure against his future effects.

A racist could harm society in similar manners Justice Clark stated a drug addict could. The drug addict might cheat and steal as a result of his habit, and the alleged "racist" might cheat and steal from another race as a result of his racism. Thus, leftists broadly define "racist" to ensure the dangers of harm or protentional harm caused to minority races are kept in check. We assume future bad behavior by a drug addict, and one might assume future bad behavior by the "racist" as well.

We can play this game with political ideologies as well. A communist could mean someone who believes in establishing a global socialist government ("Workers of the world unite."). A Nazi, or "fascist" to be more precise, could mean someone who believes in establishing a national socialist government. We could define these beliefs on a continuum as well. Beliefs in policies that integrate the nations of people to one government (globalism) with policies enhancing government control of wealth (socialism) might lead to communism, even if a person doesn't explicitly state he is a communist. Beliefs in policies maximizing the sovereignty of nations of people (nationalism) with policies enhancing a government's control of wealth (socialism) might lead to fascism. Thus, we broadly define a "communist" (pinko or commie) or "fascist" (Nazi or crypto-fascist)  to ensure the dangers of communism or fascism are kept in check, perhaps by making it socially acceptable to "punch" a Nazi or bar a commie from public service.

Except, with racism, we needn't even infer beliefs, as we can, as the Atlantic suggests, base the term in the feelings of the person applying it. Feminists argue this with sexual harassment claims. One standard would be for a jury to decide if a reasonable person would feel the act was harassment of a sexual nature before labeling it as such. Another, asserted by feminists, is that as the long as the jury believes the woman believes she was harassed in a sexual nature, regardless of whether the jury believes that belief is reasonable, then it is sexual harassment.

The more broadly we define a term and the more ontological we are with it, the more power it has to control our enemies. Thus, techniques like this are incredibly useful for political change.

While it's currently not in vogue to shame communists, fascists and racists certainly fall within this purview in the current social climate of exiling wrong-thinkers. If a person can be argued as even 1% "fascist" or "racist," then he can be effectively barred from polite society, to the extent you buy into the continuum view and can keep track of the nebulous ever-changing definitions of racist and fascist.

The Wicked Ethos
Of the three means of argumentation studied by the ancient Greeks, logos (appealing to logic), pathos (appealing to passions), and ethos (appealing to character), ethos appeals to ontological thinkers. Belief is based in one's reputation as opposed to ideas themselves.

An idea can be intrinsically terrible or wonderful. We use logic to demonstrate how it is terrible or wonderful. An idea can evoke negative or positive emotions. We appeal to passions to dissuade or encourage acceptance of the idea. An idea can be presented by a terrible or wonderful person. We appeal to character to dissuade or encourage acceptance of an idea.

In an increasingly-complex world where all specialize in different areas and don't have time for independent examination of each other's specialties, ethos is the easier tool to make decisions with. But, as I've discussed before, such a tool is subject to the wicked [*7], which involves entwining a degree of truth with a degree of lie in order to make people believe in something or engage in behavior that they otherwise would not.

The du jour being to hate is the racist. Thus, the easiest way to destroy a character is to tar him with that label. But the emotional punch behind the term racist can only last for so strong, as the media calls any policy loosely associated with a right-of-center worldview "racist." Even in books by otherwise-erudite leftists, like Douglas Valentine, on the topic of critiquing the intelligence community's crimes, the term is liberally applied throughout his 417 pages as self-evident [*8]:

The hatred is visceral and ubiquitous. Trump symbolizes the imbedded racism within America. Make America Great Again means make America white again. The racists are proud of it. In order for an individual to lead America, he or she must represent this supremacist “might is right” ethic. … National Security in the United States is equated with white supremacy. It always will be [p. 389]. …

The Republican Party is openly racist, militant, and business-oriented. Trump’s populist appeal seemed like a departure from Reagan elitism, but that was a result of shifting demographics, not establishment policies. The Republican base voted for Trump because of his outspoken racism. Trump didn’t use code words like the Party leadership [p. 405].

To organize the media and tarnish a reputation is to suppress the ideas behind the individuals with the reputation. The logic is this: Trump supports reducing immigration. Reducing immigration is prejudice toward other races. Therefore, anybody that wants to reduce or limit immigration must be racist. Ergo, half of America is racist. Once we identify the "racists," we must ostracize via their social removal from polite society.

By now, it should be clear that labels trying to define a being like "racist" are rhetorical weapons to disrupt political speech of political enemies. Who knows what one means when they launch the pejorative du jour? The point is to provoke an emotional reaction. X is bad. If someone is being called an X by enough people and suffering consequences, then we should all stay away from him, lest we suffer the same consequences as well. The more we argue over how we're really not X, the more time we waste and the more validation we give to arguments like the prior-mentioned absurdity published by the Atlantic. We direct our attention away from logos and forever remain in defensive ethos, never gaining any political ground. You can't reason with them. So don't. And don't let their pejorative du jour have power over you, or, more importantly, your allies.

In the 1950s, the du jour being to hate was the communist. Considering the Soviet Union was a communist empire pursuing a goal of global domination under its jurisdiction (i.e. the very definition of communism), a revulsion to communists was natural, as it meant the usurpation of American sovereignty. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the stigma of "communist" all but went away. Now, it is socially acceptable to be a communist, but not a fascist, because fascists are "racist."

How long until a similar fate occurs for the term "racist?" Demagogues will always pick a term du jour that exercises the most power in its application and liberally use it to assert their will as a political weapon. What the next term to use as a tar-and-feathering of one's being will be isn't particularly relevant for our discussion. What matters is understanding why terms are selected.

Ontology in the Post-Democratic Era
Democracy infers debate between voters as to which ideas should become law. Expression of what laws should exist is political speech. Generally, political speech is protected in most democracies, since debate between voters as to what laws should exist is the foundation of democracy.

A post-democratic era is one in which the controllers of law are no longer subject to the opinions of voters. Thus, the justification to forbid laws governing political speech exits with the end of democracy. If the rulers of a jurisdiction know best what laws to subject their citizens and aliens to, the aforementioned distinction between status and effect is no longer relevant. Punishing subjects based on their actions becomes less effective, as rulers must wait until harm occurs before punishing; whereas punishing wrong-thinkers for being wrong-thinkers prevents illegal actions to begin with.

As I've discussed in immense detail before [*9], the United States is effectively no longer a democracy, as the same fate spreads around the world (e.g., the vote on "Brexit" in the United Kingdom). Thus, we can anticipate an increasing trend for punishments and controls for beings themselves as opposed to solely for their behavior. During the Soviet Union, behaviors were outlawed, but the aim of law was to isolate and/or punish people with beliefs contrary to the regime. The same is true in China.

When half of a jurisdiction's people hold beliefs that become effectively illegal, whether by statute, regulatory rule promulgation, and/or by corporate policy of monopolies [*10], and states of being can be punished, peaceful resolution becomes unlikely.

They hate you for you. They seek to destroy you for you. You can't debate with them. You can't change them. Your only hope is to apply the same ontological attacks they engage in against you against them.

The commonly-known term for a leftist activist who seeks to harm political opponents through social exile is SJW. The SJW hates the term applied to himself, because he knows he is not a warrior, as "warrior" infers an ability to handle one-on-one combat. The SJW is terrified of conflict, which is why he needs his swarm to accomplish his goal.

The swarm of social approval the SJW gets from fellow SJWs when he successfully summons his pack to cancel someone fills the void of purpose in his life. He seeks to harm you with social exile, because he has suffered from social exile himself and wishes to inflict his pain on another, but in the name of a cause he actively believes. Politics fills the void of purpose for a Godless, often childless, lonely leftist, as the novelty of material pleasures wears off over the years. The SJW tends not to create the good, beautiful, or true with a small business or successful art, as few of us have the ability, talent, and drive to produce. It is easier to swarm and destroy others than to build something beautiful. Through the swarm, purpose is filled. This is what motivates the SJW.

So, what can we do? Build and punch back.

(1) We need to do more than resist cancel culture. We need to build our own communities and isolate SJWs from them. Many corporations are dying husks that will eventually perish from the corporate cancer of SJW infiltration [*11]. With what we build in our various areas of specialty, we need to be prepared to fill the market and spiritual voids once that corporate cancer becomes terminal.

(2) It's not enough to ignore and/or "take the high road." The cancel-culture proponents need to face humiliation and social isolation from our own communities every time one of them engages with us. Fight back. If one defames you, seek counsel and sue him. If he files bankruptcy after you get a judgment for defamation, file an adversary to block the court's stay on collecting his debt to you, as volitional acts can be deemed non-dischargeable. Word will spread, and they will think twice about continuing attacks. If you see an ally standing up for himself, join him in support.

What behaviors will you change today to help fight cancel culture?

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FOOTNOTES
[*1] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-ire-and-corruption-of-social.html
[*2] http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/transsiberianorchestra/christmaseveandotherstories.html
[*3] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/370/660.html
[*4] Constitutional law is a long game of telephone. A judge says a constitution means X. This becomes "precedent." The old precedent is later deemed by another judge to really mean Y. This now becomes the new precedent. Rather than being honest by admitting the judge is reasoning what he/she thinks the law should be, we pretend a document is commanding it, even if the text of that document makes no reference to the ever-evolving precedent.
[*5] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2020/05/persuasive-redefinition-what-does.html
[*6] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/racism-concept-change/594526/
[*7] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/02/what-is-wicked.html
[*8] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-cia-as-organized-crime-douglas-valentine/1126003040 Valentine, Douglas. The CIA as Organized Crime (p. 389 & 405). Clarity Press.
[*9] When exactly this became the case is a matter of debate, but nobody honestly believes Joe Biden: (1) won 10.5 million votes more (13% more, with 80 million "votes") than the previous record-holder, Barrack Obama in 2008 (about 69.5 million), while (2) winning 45% less counties (Obama 875, Biden 477), with (3) most excess votes coming from four cities that shut down counting operations at night, and (4) suddenly found statistically-absurd Biden-only ballot dumps



u

under (5) the circumstances of a thousand affidavits witnessing boxes of early-morning Biden-only ballots being run through machines multiple times



while (6) observers were purposefully being distracted and conveniently kicked out (like in Michigan),





including after (7) a pipe "burst" in Atlanta (later changed to a "leak") where ballots in a case under a cloth-covered table were dragged out and counted after the observers were told to leave, and



(8) forensic tests of the Dominion Voting machines used in these same states, in Michigan's Antrim county, sent data overseas with 2/3rds of the votes decided in private-party adjudication by an unknown party with a deleted audit trail for the voting decisions, as subpoenas to test machines in other states like Georgia and Arizona were usurped or ignored.




https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/02/rebellion-in-post-profit-era.html
https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/01/planning-for-post-democratic-divided.html
Also:
https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2020/11/a-measure-of-cowardice-and-sociopathy.html
https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2020/12/election-fraud-law-violations-should.html
[*10] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/02/rebellion-in-post-profit-era.html