Orcasional Musings | No!

||| ORCASIONAL MUSINGS BY STEVE HENIGSON |||

Cancel Culture has arrived on Orcas Island!
“Cancel Culture”?
What’s that?
“Cancel Culture” is the state of being so certain that your own way of thinking is the one and only right way of thinking, that you set out to cancel (that is, to censor, and thereby to erase) any other thought, and to chase all of those other thoughts out of your social environment.

In the recent past, we have seen sporadic, but rare, occasions when one or two political-advertising signs have been pulled out of the ground and stolen, and when verbal political debate has become temporarily vociferously acrimonious. But now we are seeing something much worse.

A few days ago, the signs promoting one specific political party’s candidates were defaced, each with a big “NO!” scrawled across it. A few thoughtful Orcasians pointed out, in this particular public forum, that whomever had done that had abrogated some other person’s right of free speech and expression, as guaranteed by the First Amendment of our Constitution.

This sort of one-sided behavior is irrational, in that its most effective product is the prohibition of meaningful discussion and useful compromise. But we need discussion and compromise, because both are the necessary foundations of truly good government. Without those foundations, we will eventually devolve into dictatorship, probably led, at least at first, by some self-righteous fool who just absolutely knows that he, and only he, is right.

However, cancelling the points-of-view and the opinions of other people — for instance with a scrawled “NO!” — is proof of the desperation of a self-righteous fool who is running scared. He knows that his own behavior is unacceptable to most other people, so, in jealous retaliation and by using force, he will try his best to harm those people whose behavior is more acceptable to society than is his. He can’t fight the opinions of those better-behaved people, so, instead, he aims his fight at the persons who hold them.

Doing this requires descending into vandalism, and also into innuendo, ad-hominem attacks, and outright lies. The technique requires taking a page or two from both the Soviet and the National Socialist playbooks. Vandalism, if it’s destructive enough and anonymous enough, is a really fine intimidator. And then, if you tell a big enough lie, and you tell it often enough, some people will eventually come to believe it. And if you lie about an opponent’s aims and beliefs, and you do so loud enough and keep it up long enough, eventually your opponent will give up in disgust and leave the lectern, and maybe the entire floor, to you alone.

The solution to the problem of the self-righteous fool and his destructive behavior is isolation. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, and very soon he will tire of producing his useless demonstrations of thunder and lightning. Finally, he will pull his cloak over his sheepishly-grinning Guy Fawkes mask and quietly creep away home. Replace the defaced signs. Refuse to engage in acrimonious “discussion” on his terms. In short, do as he does: Cancel him! Don’t rise to his bait, for ignoring him is the only appropriate way to defeat him.