Socrates was sentenced to death by a ruling class who feared the power of his ideas. When I went to university for philosophy, my colleagues playfully decried that they’d never be killed for ideas because their safety was guaranteed in a an apathetic culture.
The times are changing. Punishment for wrong speech is on the rise in the West. We’re nowhere near executions for blasphemy, but contradicting the moral order is noticeably more dangerous than just a few years ago.
A variety of theories account for this hyper reactivity: Academia fossilizing into monocultures of left leaning thought, historically oppressed demographics gaining fair power and a resulting wave of comeuppance, a generation of helicopter parented children inventing ideologies to avoid the pressures of reality, and online algorithms driving us all mad. Partial truths can be found in all of these explanations, but I’ve been entertaining a simpler, more unifying explanation.
Headlines referencing god-like artificial intelligence, lab leaks, stolen elections, impeached presidents, nuclear war, white supremacy, record heat waves, inflation, state sponsored misinformation campaigns, the collapse of Afghanistan, and war in Eastern Europe all surface and vanish within the lifespan of a disposable mask.
The world is shaking and the pavement is beginning to crack. The stable consciousness which grew out of Western traditionalism is now slapped by virality on a regular basis, adding topspin to dizzying information cycles. A strange, schizophrenic dynamic has crept into normal conversation as people sponge their unique digital ecosystems. An influential tweet can transform the memeosphere in an hour. The once stable mass of the West sways, driving polarization as people seek firm footing. The cohesion of the collective feels like it’s coming apart. The fabric weaving together our democratic norms is beginning to fray. The masses wear hollow expressions, and the streets warn of unusual nerves. Civilization feels wobbly.
I hope this diagnosis is incorrect. But if the West is beginning to unravel, how would we expect the “collective” to react? Surely, societies in decay would mount some sort of response, productive or not. One strategy in times of disintegration that may have been useful for our ancestors would be to create a bottleneck around acceptable ideas. This impasse would torch radicals, as well as charismatic leaders. This bottleneck ensures that any emergent leaders in times of trouble have passed a rigorous filter, and resonate with the collective — Otherwise, it’s too easy for cowboys to gain control of a discombobulated flock.
What’s interesting about this model is that all societies are somewhere on a coherence spectrum. Obviously, some societies are more coherent than others, meaning more interconnected and socially stable. As of this writing in summer of 2023, Russia, for example, is not a very coherent nation. Which makes one wonder, are there any decoherence thresholds that trigger collective responses and patterns? If so, then those responses would be bellwethers of social decay — and in the west’s case, the proverbial Karen’s in the coalmine.
My instinct is that we’re living through times of destabilizing upheaval, and cancel culture is a reaction thereof. Cancel culture is commonly portrayed as a cynical strategy to win power and destroy adversaries. But if we strip away the moral finger waving, we can see that fierce enforcement of social norms would be adaptive for primates seeking to bind their societies together in times of trouble.
Consider Jordan Peterson. He isn’t attacked because of #metoo allegations or outrageously hateful ideas, but because he’s a cowboy. Thought leaders are once again extremely dangerous. Not too long ago, intellectuals lived in dusty corners of universities and paid us no worries. But today, anonymous shitposters like “Q” can nearly topple governments. From behind the eyes of the cultural superorganism, both Peterson and Qanon look like onramps to memetic novelty. During turbulent times, this is unacceptable.
* Squash*
Common Sense Breakdown
Supply chains represent a physical manifestation of loss in social order. But human relationships are also decohering as faces are replaced with screens, friends with buddy simulating podcasts, sex with porn, etc. This was well underway before a global pandemic, in which humanity experienced the greatest disruption to social bonds in living memory.
What happens when common sense begins to decohere? “Common sense” is one way to refer to the gravitational center mass of a culture’s knowledge matrix. This once stable center is being increasingly fractured into political camps, ideological bubbles, and digital wormholes. The memosphere feels at risk of falling apart, and everyone can feel the potential. So, like wounded animals fighting for our lives, perhaps we feel that further disintegration is intolerable and grow hypervigilant of enemies. The overarching cultural mood is aggressiveness to foreigners, and devotion towards the ingroup’s sacred memes.
Nuance is dying. Subtle distinctions are falling on increasingly deaf ears. And what is nuance, exactly? Nuance is, by definition, outside of common sense. Fine details and additional context lead one to a unique stance - High-variance memes, in other words.
Perhaps when the superorganism is safe and calm, it has the capacity to hold nuance and explore. But in feverish times, the superorganism is too frantic to tolerate anything outside of the gravitational bullseye. So, in fear of the fabric beginning to fray, edges are singed in order to prevent a great unravelling.
Cowboys are not new. They’re restrained when societies are well cohered too — Their influence arguably even more so. However, when times are safe, edgelords are given the silent treatment rather than the aggressive cancellation treatment. When everyone shares the same beliefs and has a clear sense of who they are, the influence of intellectual cowboys is restrained with little exertion of energy. We pay them no mind. Our innate social programming may therefore operate as follows: In stable times, ostracize calmly. In transformative times, banish frantically.
Pining for Yesteryear
“When a culture gets into trouble, instinctively what it does is it goes back through it’s own past, until it finds a moment where things seemed to make sense. And then it brings that moment forward into the present.” - Terrence Mckenna
Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan makes Mckenna’s archaic appeal explicitly. But it’s not just outsiders like Trump pining for yesteryear. Biden and Brexit were also calls for returns to historic norms.
Trump is targeted by the cancel culture mob because of his authoritarian nature, but for his ingroup, Trump represents a return to normalcy. He is the prototypical unabashedly straight white male common at every American neighborhood barbeque until maybe the 1980’s. For boomers (who grew into adulthood in the 80's), he is the last recognizable figure standing. Cancel culture is often viewed as a politically left phenomenon, but from within the cult of Trump progressives are dehumanized. Anyone who trespasses memes of heteronormativity, economic growth, and American exceptionalism are treated as mentally inferior libtards.
There is no going back this time.
Despite our instincts to retreat to familiar grounds, technological momentum denies any shifting into reverse. Being forced forward is somewhat unprecedented in Sapien history, as all previous generations could defer to the ways of their grandparents when shit hit the fan.
Conservative fallbacks were used for millions of years, until about 100 years ago. The world is changing with such speed and dimensionality that some of the contexts in which prior wisdom made sense have evaporated. My grandfather, for example, was born in 1917 when most homes in America weren’t yet electrified (50% of homes weren’t electrified until 1925). My grandparents lived in a completely different world. Today, children can ask Google to play the livestream of robots exploring outer space. We cannot simply go back — An entirely new social system must be invented on the fly in concert with accelerating tech.
No doubt, some ancient wisdom will need to be retrieved in order to uplift our spirits through whatever this era’s transition becomes. One of the most productive actions a human being can take in times of decoherence is to bolster relationships. Calling our mothers and grabbing drinks with old friends may be profoundly more important than mere social hygiene. Music festivals, dinner parties, beach gatherings, and other social rituals could be medicines of civilizational importance.
Little about these complex topics is obvious to me other than we are in the middle of some kind of socio-technological revolution still finding its feet. The American Dream with the white picket fence for everyone is dead. So, what do Sapiens require in order to live fulfilled lives? And, how does modern tech enable us to achieve such lifestyles at a global scale in harmony with the biosphere? That’s the discombobulating reality we have to deal with.
God knows what the next era will be: Climate tumult, an A.I. revolution, the blockchain overthrow, the Solarpunk protopia, or something totally mysterious. But sooner or later, we’ll look back on this modern upheaval and give it a historically appropriate name, and I bet it won’t be cancel culture.
“Karen’s in the coal mind” Ha! Nuance lost to the “singed edges”. Yes. Cowboys. Yes. So well said. Gonna go call my mother…