Cancel Culture, Personal Growth, & Forgiveness
“Our culture is dying because we have no capacity for forgiveness or discussion.” - Ben Shapiro
While progressives claim to be an ideology of free love, acceptance, and diversity, the reality is their worldview leaves little to no room for personal growth or forgiveness. Two things that are essential to compromise and civility in a free society.
For an ideology so obsessed with the concept of diversity, they seem to entirely miss the irony of dismissing the unique views and feelings of millions of people outright.
Rather than trying to win opponents to their side through reason and debate, they would rather take the easy road of systematically silencing entire points of view through political correctness, cancel culture, and fear tactics that lead to self-censorship.
We have all done and said things we regret. In many circumstances, we have paid for those transgressions, made amends, and moved on with our lives. In other circumstances, we have had to make peace with ourselves and understand that our actions don’t necessarily reflect who we are as a person.
That is at its core what is wrong with cancel culture, it views actions and words as inseparable from the individual.
This is a problematic worldview as it doesn’t allow for personal growth. How are we supposed to be better as individuals, or a society for that matter, if a person cannot learn from their mistakes and become better? We can’t, and therefore our contributions are invalid and we must be banished from society according to this new mindset.
So how did we get here?
Perhaps it was inevitable. When you combine the permanence of the internet, the rapid pace of social media discourse, and ever growing ideological division, it was only a matter of time before a person’s previous statements, actions, or even “likes” became weaponized against them.
For progressives, the people involved are just collateral damage. Pawns that must be eliminated to win their real life game of chess. If you can eliminate enough pawns off the board, you can then begin to take down the real enemy - leaders, structures of power, and even ideas themselves.
Need more proof that this isn’t about the individuals but about the ideas? If this wasn’t the case, why would progressives be so intent on cancelling history?
By condemning the actions and character of the individuals who wrote our founding documents and put in place the structures in which we live under, they are able to by proxy place doubt on the system itself.
Efforts like the New York Times’ “The 1619 Project” seek to reframe American history in a way that focuses on the shortcomings of our nation’s founders, rather than on their successes that have led to the most free and prosperous country on the planet. Ironically, without the very system of government they deplore, it is very likely that they would not even be able to put such ideas into print.
One can only assume the chilling effect cancel culture will have on speech going forward. People will be much more reluctant to speak out or put original thoughts in writing out of fear not only of how they will be judged today, but by the quickly changing standards of tomorrow as well.
One can only hope that a culture of open-mindedness and forgiveness will begin to permeate into our political discourse. Yes, there are people in our society that have committed atrocities and have rightly earned their place as social pariahs. But for the most part, we are all just flawed individuals doing our best on any given day.
We have to begin to cut each other some slack. None of us is perfect, no matter how hard we try to portray ourselves that way to others. While it is easy to utilize personal attacks and point out hypocrisy for a quick political win, long term this strategy will backfire on everyone because humans by our very nature are not as consistent as we like to believe.
