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[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s masterpiece contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
Cancel culture, like most of our contemporary cultural revolution, began in China.
In the aughts, rural Chinese migrated to massive mega-cities whose impossible population densities were matched by the growing interconnection of the internet. While three quarters of China’s population is now on the internet, in 2006 it grew by a quarter to encompass only 10%.
In these cramped quarters, physical and social, there was no room for the individual.
The Chinese internet, unlike its American counterpart, was always centered around social media which is one reason why TikTok is eating Facebook, Twitter and YouTube’s lunches. It was also always mobile. Chinese commuters on public transportation tapped in their grievances against neighbors, friends, family and random strangers. And mobs formed to take sides.
What we call cancel culture, the Chinese called “internet hunting” by “morality mobs” who were enforcing a street-level Confucianism in Maoist fashion by destroying the lives of the offenders.
It took Americans another decade to catch up to China. Cancel culture is more overtly ideological than internet hunting, but they are the common phenomenon of leftist mass societies where people inhabit anonymous collectives, displaced by technology and the collapse of definable communities, they form ad hoc groups to enforce social codes and burn witches.
Communist societies pursue collectivization to eliminate personal spaces. The Soviet Union pushed its peasants into collective farms and its urban residents into communal apartments to root out the very idea of the personal. Early Soviet apartments had no kitchens and the planners initially intended to have everyone eat in public kitchens and use their homes for sleeping.
The social web is much more stifling than any Soviet communal apartment. A family might have been stuck with one bedroom, but at least they had a door that they could close. The internet has taken down all the doors. Making the private public is a core leftist program. The old hackers claimed that “information wants to be free”. Information is less free than it ever was, but people’s lives have become public property. The ‘free’ public services of Google, Facebook and others offer convenience in exchange for information. Family life and political participation leave a trail. Disputes spill out into their ugliness into social media. From the media to social media, everyone is invited to judge the private lives that have become public commodities.
It took Americans longer to collectivize the personal than it did the Chinese. And we did it in a typically individualistic fashion. To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, when collectivism came to America, it did so by flying emojis offering character creators, personalized algorithm suggestions and relevant ads. Americans became the same under the guise of expressing their differences. That sameness refracted through the illusion of collectivist mass cultural expression is not at all coincidentally at the heart of identity politics setups like the LGBTQ movement.
Cancel culture politicized the personal. But for it to work, we had to give up our private lives.
In a collectivist society, everyone is either a model citizen or a problem. Individualism is an offense against the system. That is what the Chinese, whose version of the ‘Ugly Duckling’ has the swan dying because of his differences, innately understood. It was what China’s morality mobs and internet hunters foreshadowed to Americans eagerly signing up for Facebook.
When people make their personal lives public, they hand them over to the Left
Defeating cancel culture requires restoring private lives. Soviet citizens in the grip of Communist terror understood that they could survive, not only physically but morally, by creating spaces where the state and its enforcers could not reach. At the end of the film ‘Brazil’, the protagonist, being tortured by the state, escapes into his imagination. Such is the power of inner lives.
Engaging with cancel culture on its own terms feeds the beast. Like every totalitarian system, cancel culture is nourished by consuming the lives of others. And those lives must be accessible. The more we live our lives in public view, the more of us it consumes and the more we normalize the idea that life is a collectivist enterprise to be pored over by others for their entertainment. What began with reality television has culminated in professional influencers whose existence is a facsimile of reality and whose gravitational pull warps our sense of reality.
Private lives are not just a stylistic choice. The American Revolution was fought over, among other matters, because the colonists refused to be feudal peasants who were expected to open their doors and quarter British soldiers in their homes at the demand of a king. Contemporary Americans assume that they are obligated to let officers of the state, not only the police but a long list of inspectors and authority figures into their homes, and have made their homes and lives into just another node on the internet for everyone to pass through when they please.
Inhabiting public lives has not made us any happier. Statistics show a sharp increase in depression and suicide rates for teens beginning with the popularization of the smartphone. Critics and experts point to the devastating impact of phones on public happiness, yet fail to boil it down succinctly to what adults understand, but teens never had a chance to experience.
Like the child stars and teen musicians of another era, a generation has come of age and another is coming of age without any sense of what living a private life is even like. The personal is naturally public. Life feels only lived if someone else is watching. Without audiences, life appears unreal, and yet with the eternal audience of social media, it is truly unreal. To be public is to give up the self. Teenagers, who have the greatest need for privacy and the least ability to maintain its boundaries, are the greatest victims of the violation of private lives.
Cancel culture is only the most visible manifestation of that, along with elevated depression and suicide rates, and a general anhedonia, an inability to be happy, because happiness on any level other than the animalistic is impossible without a private self. Teenage girls are the most dependent on social networks for their sense of worth and are the most likely to lose their sense of who they are to them. Transgender mutilation is a massive phenomenon among teenage girls for the same reason that body dysmorphic disorders tend to hit them harder. When you lose your mental sense of self, hurting your body becomes a desperate effort to exercise control.
Politics did not cause us to dive so far down a technological rabbit hole that we left western civilization behind and found feudalism waiting on the other side of the singularity, but the destruction of individuality opened the Overton window for totalitarian movements. By trading the private for the public, we erased the lines between the personal and the political. A revived leftist movement under the flag of wokeness made politicizing the personal into its mission statement. Giving up our wealth, our homes and our children to it was nothing. The true sacrifice was to give up our morality, our reasoning and our souls to the madness of the trending topic.
We ceased to think and we became receptacles for mass messaging in a way that no people, not even during the worst days of the twentieth century, had ever become. We no longer thought, we echoed, and we stopped acting and reacted, and let the postmodern dancing sickness that had once infected medieval millenarians take us on a crazy jig down the street.
The best defenses against public madness are private lives, against mass culture, the pursuit of individual creativity, and against mindlessness, thinking for ourselves. We are on the cusp of a world in which culture will be mass produced by AI, tailored by algorithms and primed to persuade us of anything as long as it has enough information about us to form a profile.
In the face of that inconceivable collectivism, we can become ourselves or lose ourselves.
Private lives, and their vital tools, thoughtfulness, modesty, integrity, religiosity, reason, humility and common sense, are the anti-virus software against a virus of a scale we can neither imagine nor survive intact as reasoning civilized beings. They are the barriers, the doors we can close on a system that needs us to give up everything we have in order to rule over us.
This is not monasticism: it’s individualism. We do not need to retreat from fighting or making a difference. But what we must do is fight without losing the selves that we are fighting for.
What, in the final analysis, are we fighting for? More than a single election, we are fighting for a world in which we are the kings and queens of our homes, where our children are safe from the predators who have become emboldened in the age of identity politics, where we do not have to account for choices to the oversight of the state and where we are free to think and believe.
We are fighting not just for a nation, but for the right to our private lives once again.
In a totalitarian state, the private is public because the people are the property of the state whereas in a free society, the public is private because the state belongs to the people.
America was founded as a free society and has become a totalitarian state. Its monolithic institutions, state, corporate, academic, nonprofit, claim the right to control everything about their subjects from birth to death, a thousand forms and agenda items put the personal at the disposition of the public. A new revolution will make the personal, private once again. It is a revolution that can begin with us when we do not answer a question, fill in a form, turn over data or share our lives or scrutinize the lives of others who are not our family or our friends.
The act of living private lives carries with it a moral power that can transform a culture..
Even in the most totalitarian societies, people can draw lines between the public and the private. Acts of quiet defiance serve to restore norms and limit the power of the state. There are many walls worth building. One of them is the wall between the private and the public, the personal and the political, between our homes and the system, and between ourselves and the state.
Thanks, excellent insights and analysis.
Wisdom.
“ Transgender mutilation is a massive phenomenon among teenage girls for the same reason that body dysmorphic disorders tend to hit them harder.”
Transgendered men tend to keep their private parts and become increasingly public. They seem to be the epitome of Daniel’s article.
Reading this article is like listening to Mozart –
Magnificent!
More than that, I imagined myself listening to a presidential inaugural address.
These words connect us to our souls.
Beautiful.
Thank you!
Reading this article is like reading Ayn Rand, particularly “The Fountainhead”. Maybe, just maybe, Ms. Rand’s ideas are very slowly spreading through the culture. That’s the way she actually envisioned her philosophy eventually becoming the dominant philosophy of America. It took 500 years from the beginning of the Aristotelian Renaissance (the rebirth of Aristotelian reason) to the Founding of Aristotelian America in 1776. America, contrary to the false claims of religious conservatives, was not the most religious country in history, but the most rational.
“Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men….
Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. The things which are sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous sharing. But now we are taught to throw everything within us into public light and common pawing. To seek joy in meeting halls. We haven’t even got a word for the quality I mean–for the self-sufficiency of man’s spirit. It’s difficult to call it selfishness or egotism, the words have been perverted, they’ve come to mean Peter Keating [think Hunter Biden]. Gail, I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I’ve always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I’ve always recognized it at once–and it’s the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.” – Ayn Rand
“Maybe, just maybe, Ms. Rand’s ideas are very slowly spreading through the culture.”
Maybe, just maybe, you are completely off your rocker. Only you could think that there is a revolution brewing based on your religion, from one article that doesn’t mention Rand or Objectivism.
Thank you. What a wonderful compliment.
Now I’m reluctant to reply. to this superbly phrased essay…. being that such an action is ipso facto, quite public.
But fighting Marxism requires fighting…. not just in private..
The Leftists during the Vietnam War never could imagine how the Internet would “up their game” for them… accelerating the “domino theory” they so collectively derided as a delusion of conservative America.
Notice today, how the Marxists call all critics of CRT, DEI, “woke” et. al., conspiracy peddling right-wing racists and intellectual Neanderthals.
Struggle sessions are coming, both publicly and in private.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. The internet is simply a tool, like the printing press, telephone, radio, television,
No more powerful a tool than a gun, guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people.
FDR didn’t have the internet or television, but the country did not rebel against his establishment of his welfare state. By the 1930s the philosophy of American individualism had been eroded enough by public education that the culture was sufficiently primed for an acquiescence to the Rooseveltian, public, welfare state.
Even Thomas Jefferson at a time when only the printing press existed could not, or would not, see where his advocacy of public education would lead, the eventual destruction of the private self.
The philosophy in a man’s mind guides him in the use of his tools.
“America’s inner contradiction was the altruist-collectivist ethics. Altruism is incompatible with freedom, with capitalism and with individual rights. One cannot combine the pursuit of happiness with the moral status of a sacrificial animal.” – Ayn Rand
“The Americans were political revolutionaries but not ethical revolutionaries. Whatever their partial (and largely implicit) acceptance of the principle of ethical egoism [rational selfishness], they remained explicitly within the standard European tradition, avowing their primary allegiance to a moral code stressing philanthropic service and social duty [the sacrifice of privacy]. Such was the American conflict: an impassioned politics presupposing one kind of ethics, within a cultural atmosphere professing the sublimity of an opposite kind of ethics.” – Leonard Peikoff
The country was in no position to rebel against FDR’s welfare state. We were in the midst of a depression. And it there had been a rebellion it would have a full blown Marxist one. FDR’s welfare state was already defacto socialism.
Then came the war and that was the end of FDR’s welfare state. Then came the prosperity of the 50s and the 60s. There would be no Objectivist revolt period. Sorry, tough guy.
Nothing in this article suggests that we shouldn’t fight in public. Obviously I do.
What’s important to remember is that the fight begins in our souls and in our private lives.
Too much of the right has come to think of fighting as an external process, rather than an internal one, and that’s a leftist view.
Focusing only on the external fight destroys individuals. The Left has provided endless examples of that. As a destructive movement that’s not a problem for the Left. It is a problem for us.
The Left doesn’t care that its people are zombies. It thrives on that. We should care for the reasons laid out in the article.
We need both the internal and the external struggle.
Cancel culture is one of the most insidious aspects of our culture
Cancel culture is as old as religious tribalism. The monotheistic tribes call it ex-communication for heresy and blasphemy.
Atheists do it too, but it comes from religion (just because a person claims to be an atheist does not mean all of his thinking is rational). More precisely it comes from unreason which stems from emotionalism.
The emotional belief that words alone divorced from thinking and action have the magical power to destroy. In a way words do have the power to destroy, they have the power to destroy the false words that the other person believes. So they react with anger and fear and want words that destroy their false beliefs suppressed. They want to destroy the message and the messenger.
Incisive. Cogent. Good angle. This is a subject that could lend itself to a host of books as well
Not for the first or last time, Daniel Greenfield mixes profound analysis with a use of language that rises to the poetic. What a gift.
thank you so much
Was going to say “Excellent insights and analysis, Mr. Greenfield,” but “Algorithmic Analyst” stole my thunder.
Old & Busted: Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.”
New Hotness: Western Civ’s “Great Leap Backward.”
I’m reminded daily now with each new dystopian headline of Ayn Rand’s prescient compilation of essays — from more than 50 years ago now — on the then “New Left” entitled: “Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.”
“The social web is much more stifling than any Soviet communal apartment. ” Not the most ignorant thing you’ve written, but up there.
Still enjoying the forced isolation?
Even most honest lefties would agree with that. And similar assessments have come from the Left.
“To be public is to give up the self…. A new revolution will make the personal, private once again.”
Mr. Greenfield, you’re implicitly talking rational selfishness here, you’re implicitly talking Objectivism.
Indeed, what America needs is a MORAL revolution which rejects altruism and champions rational selfishness. Nothing less will save the American way of life which is the personal, individual, and private pursuit of happiness on Earth.
The transgender paraders are also incredibly selfish.
You are using the perverted meaning of selfishness. Objectivism uses the objective definition of selfishness.
How about using the accepted and real version of selfishness, instead of hiding behind your Objectivist flapdoodle like rational selfishness. Objectivism, like leftism, distorts language so you get to shoehorn it into your childish view of the world to justify phrases like radicals for liberty, the Christian Dark Ages, rational selfishness….you know the phrases no one else uses except for those pushing a political narrative, like you.
He always changes the definitions when he gets caught out 🙂
There is this song that came out some years a go PRIVATE EYES ARE WATCHING YOU,WATCHING YOUR EVERY MOVE this makes Big Brothers Watching You(1984)very very real
When they say “You will own nothing” they don’t just mean material possessions. You will completely lose all agency to think, speak, or act on your own volition.
BINGO! Your entire life will service the collective. And you will have purpose and meaning!
Daniel,
Ordinarily I eagerly devour your writings. This essay was confusing to me because I don’t follow the writings of Ayn Rand of which I read a few when much younger and dismissed as callous. Now understand that she was warning us of allowing our religious sentiments of service and charity to be twisted into “understanding” and then rewarding bad behavior, to the detriment of society and our freedoms.
I agree that internet connectivity can enslave young and gullible minds, but I think that this communication vehicle is one that we can use for our benefit while avoiding participation in areas which are harmful. For example, I have written letters to the editor online or have made comments online. I usually do not go back to see how they are responded to. Therefore, I can have my say about issues but I avoid being “shouted down” by the paid trolls or “cancelled” psychologically.
The beauty of our technology is that I am able to read widely and learn from people much more educated and intelligent than I am without going bankrupt buying books, magazines, newspapers while in the comfort of my home. Also, my smart phone can help me when lost while driving; can let me make calls as needed and stay in touch with grandchildren who only text! Stuck in the hospital, I can watch videos instead of the horrible TV offerings.
For some reason, I never had any desire to take part in Facebook (too public) or Twitter (mindless). Being old and religious may have insulated me from such foolishness. I have given my DNA to genealogy sources (probably unwise) and shared family info (not current data on the living) with long-lost relatives found through these vehicles which has been delightful.
To clarify, my article has nothing do with Ayn Rand.
Every technology has pros and cons. The internet has been empowering in some ways and destructive in others. Figuring out where to draw the line can be a balancing act.
Cancel culture can ruin peoples lives. All it takes is one false accusation to the authorities. But it can backfire on the accuser, if the authorities figure out the accusation was false.