Cancel Culture — Action Or Consequence
The most fearful situation for a child is being shunned by playmates. It is not a natural even. It is a deliberate action and the child knows it. When ostracized the child begins to believe that she is being punished. A fear is generated and boils down to guilt. Some of us learn to deal with this guilt better. Some try to reject it. Some try to brave it. And some learn to use it. All of us feel exactly the same when called-out. The one who dumps knows exactly how it feels to be dumped. The other side of this cancelling thrives in the shadow of negligence.
Cancel culture is one of the plates of the weighing scale with an ever-biased fulcrum. The other plate is the obsessive fan following. What do we use as weights on this scale? People. Now, this is a simple fact hence difficult to grasp. The fan-following turns into cancel culture as the tide of adrenaline-rush that the minds ride changes direction. This change follows the course of the polarity between like and dislike. This change itself is an indicator that the tide is being controlled.
Liking/enjoying a talent is one thing. Extolling it to the extremes of a cult is another. I know it sounds harsh but the patterns in the likes, shares and comments evince that following has mutated into something way far from enjoying, liking or even revering. Going to the extent to call the people we like kings and queens is a serious issue, no matter how frivolous it sounds. Following turns in to a virtual servitude. What flourishes in this servitude — consumerism. The self-set trends cleverly panned out by hired PR seemed to be a hard-earned achievement.
The cancelling hurts the most to the one with top fan following. To be cancelled you need to be popular first. Apart from PR network and bots, there is a general tendency in people to follow trends. FOMO drives that following. The fear of the child to be kicked out of a group is FOMO. The intensity of this fear is multiplied as it is collective. It can be powerful. So powerful that it can make a person become a millionaire or go bankrupt. Practically it can never do so. Because the followers are shrewdly portrayed as holding all the power, when the real power always lies in the shadows.
Cancel culture is nothing but a counterpart of the frenzied following. Some justify it, some call it radical but it is simply a consequence. If we don’t have a problem with crazy fan following, we must not have a problem with cancel culture either. But it can be disastrous. The problem with cancel culture has two reference points depending on who are we concerned for — the popularity that is being cancelled or the followers. My reference point covers both objectively. Many who view from this vantage point tend to ignore this problem as it doesn’t concern them directly. It doesn’t concern me directly either. But I think it is time that we start sharing views about a problem from every vantage point so that there can be a fair solution.
As I have mentioned before this problem is binary with a dysfunctional fulcrum. By looking at the problem, both subjectively and objectively from different reference points impartially, we fix the fulcrum. Then the corrections must be made in both the sides. Saying stop following people is as unfeasible as saying don’t be followed by people. It is the extremities of both the parts that generates the error.
Follow what you like but don’t turn it into your identity. Work/show/become to be liked but don’t covet it. It’s easy to say that the system is corrupt. It is easy to say people will never change. But we are the system and we are the people. We all share equal parts. Equilibrium can be attained only when all the parts, no matter how significant or insignificant, weigh equal. We can begin by making our part weigh and the system will adjust.
