When Facebook Becomes Blogging

That letter about cancel culture was a good idea, not a bad one. The point of it is not that it's a pity that celebrities who misbehave have it difficult for five or ten years. They're generally getting what they deserve so who cares? But what is served when people no longer have permission to share their thoughts out loud? The only other option is that the really insidious thoughts go back underground, and we no longer know who's secretly harboring thoughts we don't like. It's one thing when people reveal themselves to be white supremacists or any other true form of bigot, they absolutely should be shunned, and the more inviolable freedom of speech can be maintained, the easier it will be to find out who they are. But thought is a process of trial, and trial usually means many errors along the way. Shout and shame as much as you like for people whom you disagree with, make their lives miserable, but if you get rid of their power and increase your own, someone else will eventually do the same to you.

It's easy for someone like me to think out loud, I'm obviously a verbal diarrheist who has very little to lose, but when people who have real influence become too circumspect about expressing unpopular thoughts for fear of losing their jobs, then the only people who will be promoted in all those institutions are people who hew the orthodox line, and when that happens, those institutions decay because they can never develop new ideas and they can't evolve with the times - and that's true whether it's the Democratic party or the Democratic Socialists of America, and the institutions which replace them in the discourse may very well be right wing institutions rather than left-wing ones. You may not think political correctness exists, but Donald Trump would never have been so much as a candidate let alone a President without it. The more we clamp down on heterodox thought, the more the right wing can exploit it for much much more demagogical presidential candidates. We now see the momentum for Tucker Carlson to be the next generation of anti-PC candidate. He's everything Trump is, but smart. Everything Trump wanted to do, Tucker Carlson can do.

So you may think this is what you want, but believe me, its not. Every attempt to create impossible standards of order that humans can't live up to can only create more chaos. The proof is Trump, just as the proof was once a hundred other governments that got more and more right wing as their countries' left wings became more and more impossible in the standards of their demands.