Healthy Cultures Don't Cancel
(draft) Let's stop salting the earth where people stood.
Healthy communities do their best to bring bad actors back into community.
They sometimes take extraordinary steps to do so. Ostracism (and its modern, digital equivalent of cancel culture) should be a penultimate recourse.
The ultimate recourse is execution: death.
Our setting: the present
It's possible to argue, but cancel culture, alongside wokeism, DEI, and other efforts to help people reconcile with the past are the reasons that Trump is president again.
Here I'm going to focus on cancel culture by itself. I don't know enough about its history, but I've observed its effects on our culture and society over the last couple decades. I qualify as a woke white male, perfectly happy to say that white males are the cause of a lot of our woes and might be able to help wright the ship.
Examples from various cultures around the globe.
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.