Welcome to The MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my 119th episode. In this episode I want to discuss cancel culture and whether or not it is truly progressive. Cancel culture is a societal trend that has emerged from ideologies found primarily in left-wing politics. Many people who espouse these ideologies refer to themselves as progressive. I’m not willing to concede them that descriptor because I don’t agree that their worldview is even remotely advanced or sophisticated. In fact, I’ll make a brutally clear case that left-wing ideology is a direct path of regress to primitive tribal violence. But first I want to steel-man their ideas and make the best case I can in support of their beliefs. So what is cancel culture and what do its woke acolytes believe in?
Cancel culture is primarily an effort to stamp out systemic prejudice that causes minority groups to be marginalized and oppressed. Its followers view history as a narrative detailing the patriarchy of straight white males creating social structures that benefit themselves while holding down minority people groups. Cancel culture suggests that major domains of experience including economics, gender, sexuality, and law enforcement are patriarchal inventions designed to favor those in power while exploiting everyone else. Many proponents of woke teaching even believe that science, religion, and freedom of speech are nothing more than tools used to preserve the established orders of power. Leaders of cancel culture consider moral virtue directly connected to the number of victim groups you identify with. Cancel culture gets its name from the phenomenon of online mobs (primarily on Twitter) attacking institutions and individuals who offend any of the protected victim groups. You might say they consider these victim groups to be sacred – more groups are added to the canon with each passing month.
The danger of cancel culture is that it has created an unintended tyranny. We already have federal, state, and local laws designed to protect human rights enumerated in the Constitution. But cancel culture has given rise to a new set of laws that are capable of destroying an individual’s life without due process. The government doesn’t prosecute you for violating the laws of cancel culture but the mob does. This is why you are just as afraid of saying the wrong thing in public as you are of stealing a TV. You know that your peers – brainwashed by the culture of political correctness – can and will destroy your life. Ideally freedom of speech would allow the population to marginalize bad actors. So if I opened a coffee shop and I refused to serve non-white customers, the government protects my right to be a racist so that the population can boycott my shop until I ran out of money and shut down. That’s how it is supposed to work. But what happens when the country is split and each half can no longer agree on what constitutes a bad actor? What happens when power-hungry individuals use deceptive propaganda to shift the parameters of right and wrong thereby directing the population to smear and eliminate their political opponents? When human decency is hijacked and abused to make advances on power neighbors are divided against each other. When love and compassion are used as a justification to attack your neighbor, the unintended tyranny emerges.
So here’s the million dollar question: How could a set of ideas so obviously insane be captivating so many followers? The first answer is that I don’t think very many people adhere to it. I think it’s a very loud minority of the population who have successfully created the illusion of prominence. Institutions and individuals submit to the whims of these mobs because they’re afraid of being labeled a racist or a bigot. But another reason woke culture is so attractive is that it claims to address problems which are very real. Systemic racism is real. Probably the best example is called redlining which is where institutions like banks and insurance companies deny services to areas of certain racial composition citing elevated risk. You can make an argument that this discrimination is based on crime rates rather than skin color – but the effect is still the same in that if you live in a redlined neighborhood you have to overcome extra challenges. Evil groups who promote hate crimes against people who practice homosexuality are also real. It’s not uncommon for kids and young adults to turn to suicide or drug abuse as a consequence of daily bullying on the basis of their sexuality.
It’s possible that the loudspeakers of cancel culture exaggerate the degree of these problems but the problems are indisputably real. The reality of these problems makes the leaders of cancel culture all the more culpable because they are leveraging the suffering of the marginalized in order to garner power for themselves. Telling individuals of minority groups that their unique personality, competence, and character mean nothing because of their racial or sexual identity is the worst (and possibly the most bigoted) thing you can do. And that’s exactly what the woke leaders of cancel culture do. This is a culture that does not see you as a unique individual made in the image of God. To them you are merely an empty face that is part of a group. They are completely unwilling to acknowledge the many layers of your personhood or the depth of your character. They don’t care at all about your relationships, your ability to love, or your history. To them you are just your skin color. You are just your gender. You are just your sexuality. Cancel culture’s main principle is the fight against bigotry, and yet it is the most bigoted force in the West. Just think about this. Woke leaders fuel their prestige on the cheap virtue signaling of shouting down perceived oppressors. If tomorrow all of these perceived oppressors were gone – the woke leaders’ prestige and their position in the hierarchy would also be gone. Cancel culture has a vested interest in nourishing the continuation of the oppressor versus oppressed narrative. They want to keep you down so they can continue being the hero who lifts you up.
Where does this sort of thinking originate? Undoubtedly it is ancient and you can find reflections of it in the Cain and Abel story – which I’ll talk about later. But as far as postmodernism in the West is concerned, we owe much of it to the French intellectuals Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Postmodernism argues that there is no such thing as objective truth independent of social construction. This is why so many on the far left have tried divorcing gender from biological sex. They need to separate gender from biological sex because biological sex is an independently verifiable objective fact which puts an arrow through the idea that men and women are mere social constructions.
Derrida’s theory of phallogocentrism suggests that the individual doesn’t even exist. So you might think you are a unique person with your own thoughts and ideas – but the deconstructionists claim you are merely a nexus of social and economic construction. That’s why they don’t believe in free speech or scientific debate. That’s why they automatically consider members of minority groups virtuous while trying to silence members of majority groups. Every time you speak you are simply acting as a mouthpiece for your group identity. So a phallogocentrist would listen to this podcast and suggest my only motive is to say whatever I need to say in order to advance the power position of heterosexual white males. It cannot be that I’m interested in getting closer to the truth by way of communicating ideas – that would require objective truth to actually exist and the postmodernists do not believe in objective truth.
So why do they insist on the objective reality of power? Remember their claim is that my motive must be power and not truth. But if everything is relative then why do they allow power to be objectively real? This is a good question. I think it’s because their hearts are dominated by it. They assume power is what everyone else must be after because power is what they are after. Power constitutes the fundamental substance of their reality – for them it is the only substance that is actually real. Left-wing ideologues hate the idea of hierarchies because they think all hierarchies are based purely on power. So Jeff Bezos isn’t at the top of his hierarchy because of his competence and ability to develop successful businesses. He’s at the top of his hierarchy because he abused the oppressed in order to garner power and he used that power to accrue even more power. Of course, this idea is utterly wrong because hierarchies cannot operate when they are predicated on power.
Hierarchies based purely on power aren’t even stable among chimpanzees. If a dominant chimpanzee exerts tyrannical power over his subordinates then what will happen is two chimpanzees two-thirds his strength will ambush him and tear him to pieces. Dictatorships are unstable like this as well. That’s why they have to silence their population, exert tremendous governmental control over the people, and assassinate anyone who represents a logical next man up to the throne. The true basis for hierarchies is reciprocity. The best leader is not the person who wins one game at all costs. The best leader is the one who gets invited back to play in the most amount of games. The best leader is not the one whose followers fear him. The best leader is the one whose followers love him. Many of the hierarchies in the Western world operate on reciprocity. Jeff Bezos gets to be the second richest person in the world, and you get to order basically anything on Amazon from the comfort of your home and have it delivered to your doorstep in two days. Online shopping has changed your life because the people at the top of the hierarchy had the ingenuity and the competence to make it happen. It’s not like Amazon invented itself while Bezos was clubbing you over the head in the alleyway to steal your wallet.
That’s where Cain and Abel comes in. Abel sacrificed his best offering to God and God accepted his offering. Cain made an offering to God and God rejected it. God told Cain that if he did the right thing his offering would be accepted. But if he did wrong thing then sin was crouching at the door eager to control him. Instead of looking inward to correct himself, Cain turned against Abel and murdered him. When Cain murdered Abel he murdered his own ideal. He murdered the thing that he wished he could be. I think he did it because every ideal is also a judge. This is why God is simultaneously that which we should aspire to imitate and also the Judge of when we sin or miss the mark. Cain could not tolerate the fact that Abel’s sacrifice was accepted because Abel did the right thing.
This is the same attitude that drives those who want to level out the hierarchies. They mask their hatred of competence with a feigned sympathy for the oppressed. This is why you see communist activists calling for the redistribution of Bill Gates’ wealth while being fully ignorant to the fact that Bill Gates is in the process of ridding the world of five major diseases. And you can make a clear case that Gates has done even more for the world through the invention of Windows than he’ll ever be able to do through his philanthropic work. If the activists actually cared about the oppressed then they would support the cause of those who are oppressed by these diseases. If they really wanted the common person to do better then they would celebrate the fact that computational power is now available to people of every social class. They wouldn’t try to burn down the system that allowed it all to happen. Burning down the establishment is motivated by a heart far darker than sympathy for the oppressed.
But what about the fact that hierarchies of competence tend to dispossess people? This is actually one of the areas where the left makes a valid point. It’s true that when you construct a hierarchy most people will stack up at the bottom. The critical mistake the left makes is that they blame this dispossession on capitalism. But the real problem is far worse and far deeper than capitalism. It’s called the Pareto distribution and sometimes it’s called Price’s law. It was most recently discovered by Italian economist and civil engineer Vilfredo Pareto – but it’s been with us since time immemorial. The Pareto distribution was so clearly articulated by Jesus in Matthew chapter 25 that it’s sometimes known as the Matthew effect.
The Pareto distribution shows that in any domain 80% of the creative resource tends to collect with the top 20% of creators. Here’s a good example. People all over the world create music but only a small fraction of those artists produce nearly all of the music you hear on the radio. Many people love to play basketball but only a small fraction of those people are capable of playing in the NBA. The scary thing about the Pareto distribution is that it can be observed all over the universe – even in places where human beings have never been. The tallest trees in the Amazon jungle capture the most sunlight and grow even taller. The stars with the most mass produce the strongest gravitational pull and gain even more mass. So when left-wing activists protest the billionaire class they are in fact protesting the structure of the universe itself. It doesn’t matter if we burn down the establishment and flatten out the hierarchies – we’ll just create new hierarchies and the Pareto principle will recycle itself.
How do we combat this sort of thing? I think this is one of the proper roles of the church. Christians with the gift of generosity who sit at the top of their respective hierarchies willingly give to support the dispossessed. This type of giving is totally different from taxation because taxation is forced. God desires for His people to give with a joyous heart. Support for the dispossessed has to be done out of love – not compulsion. Otherwise you erode the incentive to work hard and to be competent. Lack of work ethic and widespread incompetence results in diminished production all across the entire country and everyone descends into poverty. The erosion of this incentive was accurately captured in the Russian political satire that said we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. When you force compliance with excessive taxation or redistribution of wealth you diminish the capacity for love and increase the capacity for resentment.
But why do we have to create hierarchies at all? The answer is because we have problems to solve. Imagine you wake up tomorrow with an irregular heartbeat. You’re going to want a cardiologist to examine your heart so you can solve the problem. Are you going to select your cardiologist based on the color of his or her skin or based on the person’s gender? Or are you going to select the cardiologist who is most able to solve your problem? The hierarchy of cardiologists is predicated on competence and not on power. If it were predicated on power then you would see gangs of cardiologists demanding that you use their services or face punishment. We can’t avoid creating hierarchies of competence unless we want to leave our problems unsolved and allow our civilization to collapse. If we allow hierarchies of competence to emerge then the Pareto principle is going to mandate that most individuals stack up at the bottom. There’s no getting out of that. When the communists imprisoned or killed the competent members of their society by way of labeling them as oppressors, their cities burned to the ground and nearly everyone starved to death.
But how could something like that happen? It’s a natural consequence of what is called intersectionality. The doctrine of intersectionality declares that your social status is predicated on how many different victim groups you belong to. For example, if you’re a homosexual white male then you are more virtuous and your opinion matters more than a heterosexual white male. But if you’re a homosexual, non-white female then you have even more prestige than a homosexual white male. If you are a homosexual, non-white, transgender, Muslim female then you have even more prestige than a standard homosexual, non-white female. And you can add so many categories by which to divide people that you end up back down to the individual. The very word individual means you can no longer be divided. Intersectionality and victim-prestige is why woke leaders label people as brave and beautiful while knowing absolutely nothing about the person’s character. This is why presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren said she plans to let a 9-year-old transgender child choose her Secretary of Education. To the leaders of cancel culture competence doesn’t matter, the number of victim groups you fit into is the only thing that matters.
This intersectionality problem has an even more pernicious element to it. The dark side of intersectionality is what led to the rape and murder of competent people during the Russian Revolution – causing the rest of the non-productive population to starve. We already laid out how there’s a huge number of dimensions along which you can be considered a victim and the effect this has on your prestige within cancel culture. It’s like the Oppression Olympics. The problem is there’s also a huge number of dimensions along which you can be considered an oppressor. You might be a heterosexual non-white person who’s awarded some victim prestige because of the fact you’re non-white. But as soon as the woke leaders discover that your grandparents were land owners then all of a sudden you become part of the upper-class oppressors. It’s your turn to be canceled. This actually happened when Stalin and his Russian intellectuals convinced a segment of the population that the reason they were impoverished was because successful Kulak farmers cheated them out of their wealth. So they formed a mob, murdered the Kulaks and raped their wives. They discovered too late that murdering the Kulak farmers also destroyed the only available food production. The mob didn’t know how to produce food so they just starved to death. This idiocy is approximately equivalent to young activists calling for the dissolution of Apple by posting rants to Twitter using their iPhones.
If it’s so stupid then why is it happening? I think it’s because the entire culture is trying to satisfy deep transcendent human needs. We need meaning. Activists derive a sense of meaning by casting themselves as heroic martyrs fighting for the oppressed. We need a sense of belonging. Activists derive a sense of belonging by forming communities based on some characteristic of their identity. We need God. Activists formulate their own god by deifying their group identity, casting the establishment as Satan, and viewing climate change through an apocalyptic lens. In other words people gather into mobs, they protest, and they cancel each other because it feels like they are satisfying some super ordinate principle by doing so. It feels like they are satisfying some god. This brings them a profound sense of meaning and purpose. That’s why so many of the communists were unwilling to let go of the system even as they rotted away in the gulags produced by that very system. The only thing that’s worse than imprisonment and death is meaninglessness. Too many people in the West have given in to the temptation of telling themselves a story of ushering in the utopia. A story in which they view themselves as the protagonist. They view themselves as the savior because they do not know the true Savior.
So how do we solve the problem of cancel culture? The first thing we need to do is avoid overreacting to it. There’s a real danger of the political schism snapping into far-right extremism as a response to far-left extremism. That would be very bad. It’s true that both the left and the right should be fighting for equality of opportunity. You should have the opportunity to participate in the meritocracy no matter what your skin color, gender, or sexuality. I would argue that these aspects of yourself do not even compose very much of who you are. Your skin color tells me nothing about your character. Your sexuality tells me nothing about whether I can trust you. Your gender tells me nothing about your favorite books or TV shows. You are a unique human being made in the image of God. There’s infinitely more to you than these base level characteristics that the propagandists of cancel culture want you to hold in such high esteem.
If we don’t overreact to cancel culture then maybe we can become sober-minded enough to examine the data. Scientists have conducted research in the Scandinavian countries to determine the differences between males and females. They chose Scandinavia because these countries have done the best job of instituting egalitarian social policy. Egalitarian societies try to even the playing field between men and women. The researchers expected to conclude that the differences between men and women are socially constructed. So they thought that men and women are only different because society tells them to be. But what they actually discovered was the opposite. The more egalitarian the society, the more differences men and women displayed. One example is how men tend to be more interested in things while women tend to be more interested in people. This accounts for the fact that the STEM fields are occupied by a majority of men. Science, technology, engineering, and math. It also explains why the majority of medical physicians and nurses are women. The fact that men and women choose different career paths when given equality of opportunity explains the gender pay gap as well. For example, it’s more common for women to choose prioritizing child-rearing over career advancement. These differences are not enforced on men and women by some patriarchal establishment – they are endemic to our biological nature.
The problem with the leftist radicals is that they are not satisfied with equality of opportunity. What they’re really after is equality of outcome. So that means you’d have to take women and deny them the right to raise a family while forcing them to advance their careers in order to ensure that the balance of business remains 50% men and 50% women. No one wants to live in a world where the government plots out the path of your life and robs you of free will. But that is the only course of action if you wish to see equality of outcome. Not to mention the fact that equality of outcome requires you to ostracize the best players in order to make room for the mediocre ones. If I decided I wanted to play golf and I insisted on an equal scorecard at the end of the day, they’d have to kick the real golfers off the course because I’m terrible at golf. It sounds ridiculous but that’s exactly what participation trophies are. They force the acknowledgement of mediocre players by sacrificing the acknowledgement of the player who earned it.
Let’s conclude this episode by summarizing what we’ve discussed. What is cancel culture and how do we survive the toxicity of it? It’s something like opposition to God. It’s something like totalitarian atrocity where freedom of thought is held captive and human beings are subjected to mass death. Just think for a minute about the structures that have emerged from those who claim sovereignty over the truth. Woke leaders create false hierarchies of virtue where piety is rewarded with prestige. Jesus condemned the religious elite for doing this exact thing. Woke leaders try to cancel anyone who sins against their superordinate principle by sacrificing the transgressor. Jesus forgives sinners by sacrificing Himself. Woke leaders inevitably find themselves in circular firing squads where devouring your neighbor is not only acceptable but heroic. Jesus teaches us to be merciful, to judge not, and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. The teachings of Jesus are the opposite of what our hearts desire when we reject God. Cancel culture is like a huge Tower of Babel that is the result of a wholesale departure from God and submersion in our own human arrogance.
You can say that some self-titled Christians have been guilty of tyrannical religious dogmatism – and you’d be right. But this kind of totalitarianism, as advertised by the adherents of cancel culture, is a human universal and is not endemic to any particular religion (although some religious people feed on it). If you want to end woke culture, you must teach individuals to be resilient enough to turn their own cheek at offense, to carry their own cross of suffering, and to sacrifice themselves for the good of their neighbor. You don’t make the world safer by making the world safer, you make the world safer by developing individuals who are competent enough to successfully navigate a dangerous world. This is a difficult process full of suffering and maturation – but the traumatic, prolonged misery that is the alternative is absolutely worse. We live in a fallen world and the adventures of our lives demand that we have the faith to be brave. But we are not alone. God is with us. God is with you. And you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you.
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