This is a great thread, one of the best I’ve seen on Twitter:
Do You Mean it?
The firings for tweets, private conversations, and exposure of anonymous accounts reveals a deep (and false) assumption about how thinking works, and thus a false (and deep) assumption about who we are.
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— Patrick Lee Miller (@Plato4Now) March 12, 2021
“Cancel culture” is a poor name for what’s happening here, but it seems to have stuck. Just like even a small bit of surveillance alters behavior en masse, the idea that some off the cuff, misinterpreted tweet or essay or casual conversation from 10 or 20 years ago might get you fired alters behavior now greatly. How could it not?
Of course, this is the liberal moralist goal, and not some accident. But there is a larger group, who say utterly daft things like, “If you had never said anything untoward, I wouldn’t have to report you to HR and get you fired.” Never mind that the standards about what is “untoward” sometimes change literally week to week, and there is nowhere to consult for what these codes of speech might even be, or when they are due to change yet again.
Thinking requires play, irony, experimentation, adopting voices, poetry as well as prose, “a drop of cruelty.” The moralists cannot see this because quite frankly they do not think. They say words, their mental wheels spin, but the goal is propaganda, not truth.
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— Patrick Lee Miller (@Plato4Now) March 12, 2021
This “they do not think” is something I noticed and wrote about in regards to the recent copyright “debate.” No one was doing or had done an ounce of cogitation about any of it. Many of them even admitted they knew almost nothing about copyright, its implications, history or manifestation, and yet still had lots of feelings about it all.
And that’s what we’ve become: propelled by propaganda-driven feelings above all else, without even the possibility of considering anything deeply and doing what’s best for society. In fact, if you even suggest thinking about something, you are then branded a “rationalist” and are automatically pronounced wrong and oppressive because you are “denying someone’s feelings.”
Is there any coming back from this? I have my doubts.