#70 Getting cancelled

On doubt, and learning to trust yourself because no one else will

Last week when I published my newsletter, I sent a text to Emily that said “Do you think everyone feels like they are going to be cancelled every time they post something or is it just me?” to which she said probably not everyone, but maybe people who’ve been cancelled?

To date I don’t believe I’ve written about the experience of being cancelled¹ (a term I am using loosely, there is a wide spectrum of situations and vastly different interpretations of what being 'cancelled' even means) and that’s because when you’ve been through something like that, you just want it to go away and never come back and you’re certain that even speaking of it will somehow charm it back into existence so it can finish you off for good.

But I was cancelled. Twice. The first time when I published an Op-Ed very many people decidedly did not like, and the second within the institution I founded. In many ways those experiences freed me to write about anything and everything without the kind of fear I used to have, because so much of the worst has already been said. At the same time, they left me thinking that every time I post something, I’m going to fucking get it. It’s a huge, wild paradox of not caring at all in a certain sense, and simultaneously caring so much your nervous system actually sparks.

I bring cancellation up today not to delve into my experience of it, but to highlight one of the biggest reasons why these days I can be a little more scared to publish, and why: I’m less precious about my beliefs; I’m aware I operate on a thick ideology I’m emotionally attached to (just like everyone else); I feel allergic to anyone who thinks they have the one right answer and I feel severely allergic to anyone who thinks they possess some kind of moral authority or superiority because of their ideology or beliefs or even experience; and I’m cautious of intellectual privilege and how its weaponized.

Cancellation is also why I’m far more likely to be concerned with how we treat each other and the tolerance we extend to one another—what we do in the actual course of our lives—than I am with sweeping systemic change².

The feeling of being willfully misunderstood, villainized, silenced, ostracized from my community, encouraged to loathe and punish myself, etc. etc., sent me down a cave-hole not many have had to spelunk, which means it also gave me experiences and awarenesses not everyone has access to.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, they talk about becoming “right-sized” and when I asked ChatGPT what that meant it said “Neither inflating one’s ego nor diminishing one’s self-worth…developing humility, recognizing personal limitations…letting go of the need for control or excessive pride…neither superior nor inferior to others, fostering a sense of equality, accountability, and openness to growth.” And I’m telling you, recovery has nothing on being cancelled in terms of how to come to fucking Jesus and actually get so-called Right sized.

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We were traveling abroad the last few weeks which was eye-opening, just like it was in 2016 when I was in Rome and the U.S. election was playing out on cafe TVs with Italian dubbing. At one lunch last week I asked two German women what their feelings were (scared), and on the second-to-last morning an American woman sitting next to me at breakfast told her companion “I obviously don’t like him, but what choice do I have?” It’s a specific kind of experience, being in a different culture and somehow feeling removed but even more pressed up against it.

A few days ago, on the ride home from the airport I read an email alert from The Atlantic, which reported that Scientific American had endorsed Kamala Harris. The Atlantic writer called it a stupid, inflammatory move because now a large swath of American’s will no longer trust a 179-year-old “mainstay of science and technology journalism in the United States”. From the Atlantic article:

In 2021, a researcher asked a group that included both Biden and Trump supporters to look at two versions of the prestigious journal Nature—one with merely an informative page about the magazine, the other carrying an endorsement of Biden. Here is the utterly unsurprising result:

The endorsement message caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters…The endorsement also reduced Trump supporters’ trust in scientists in general.

In other words, The Atlantic is asserting that science just discredited itself as science by aligning with a Democratic candidate.

This feels like an insane-making statement—that people could actually be swayed against actual science because it’s tethered to a political opinion—but it got me thinking a lot about the existence of doubt and how much of it a person would need in order to stop believing empirical evidence.

The author Allen Brandt in his book The Cigarette Century chronicled how one of the ways that the cigarette industry kept people smoking for years beyond the publishing of scientific evidence that clearly showed correlations between smoking and lung cancer was the creation of a PR arm of the tobacco industry that employed scientists who refuted newly published findings on the dangers of smoking. Brandt called this kind of tactic “engineered controversy”, in which the story became not that cigarettes were harmful, but that the jury was still out on the matter. By the tobacco scientists’ insistence there was “not enough evidence” to conclusively show cigarettes were dangerous, the smoking public who desperately wanted to maintain their smoking habit continued to smoke because according to the news they were actually reading, there wasn’t enough evidence, and they couldn’t know for sure that cigarettes were killing them.

In my book I traced that same play to the alcohol industry’s current use of a similar type of tactic, in which they invoke the phrase “Drink Responsibly” in order to situate the blame of excess drinking and its associated casualties back on the public. Similar to the tobacco industry, the alcohol industry has a PR arm that enforces this message (an example: responsibility.org). This tactic (“Drink responsibly”, “To be enjoyed responsibly”, “Friends don’t let friends drink and drive”) leaves the drinking public locked in a different kind of doubt—about what responsible drinking even is, why they can’t seem to achieve it if they can’t, and wondering whether they are alcoholics. It also keeps everyone blaming the people who drink too much for the horrors that befall them, instead of the industry and political interests that financially benefit from those horrors.

The alcohol industry makes most of its money from those that drink excessively; they aren’t interested in consumers drinking within whatever guidelines exist in the culture they drink it in or anyone drinking “responsibly”. They’re interested in selling as much alcohol as they can and they do this by selling the idea that if we all try hard enough, we can drink the way we’re supposed to.

Both of these tactics are doubt tactics (also known as FUD tactics, etc.). They sow fear and confusion, they prey on confirmation bias (that you want to believe what you already believe, that you think you need to in order to survive), and they guarantee the continuation of the status quo by ensuring we don’t dig deeper into our own beliefs, or considering ideas of others we find repugnant or threatening.

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I don’t know what any of these things have to do with each other yet, I started writing this and I’m trying to just write my thoughts without having fully fleshed them out.

But it does have something to do with what that woman said at breakfast back in Rome, about how she obviously didn’t like him, but what “other choice” did she have. What choice did she mean? I’ve wondered about that (earnestly, not sarcastically) ever since and I wished I’d asked. Did she mean her paycheck doesn’t go as far so she has no choice but to elect the candidate she believes will fix the economy? That she’s anti-abortion? That she is terrified of having to use pronouns, or losing some illusion of control or way of life or fractional institutional privilege? I don’t know what leaves her no choice, and maybe it’s vanilla and basic, like how she’s a lifetime Republican the same way I’ve been a lifelong Dem.

It also has something to do with this: The same thing that makes it trust-suicide for the Scientific American to endorse Harris, is the same thing that made people believe smoking was safe even after the evidence piled up in front of them, is the same thing that makes someone think they have to elect a person they might totally fucking abhor: Doubt.

Doubt to which we’re all susceptible, because the opposite of doubt is surety, and who can be sure of anything anymore? Doubt to which we are all vulnerable, because the antithesis of doubt is the examination of what terrifies us most, and who among us is sitting around considering what precious beliefs we hold that we might just be totally fucking wrong about?

“When you can get people to constantly fear outside threats that are going to come in, ruin their lives, take everything they have…when you can even get people to fear each other within a society…that is exactly the point that people will start to gather together under a strong, absolute leader that is promising to keep them safe from all those threats. It’s a time tested strategy from all throughout human history.” —Stephen West, Philosophize This! Ep. 207

To bring this back to where I started.

One of the side-effects of cancellation is at first you think you don’t exist anymore. You as a person are gone and what’s left is what everyone else thinks. You don’t trust yourself, you trust the people that want you disappeared. You have to be what they say you are, because so many of them are saying it and they all seem to have the manual that supports the conclusion that you are terrible; you are scourge; you are worse than anything you ever thought about yourself. You get quiet, you slip between the cushions on the couch to the seabed floor of your life, you wait until some signal arises that you may rejoin, which probably will never come.

I had a choice to stay there in that hole of everyone else’s opinion, to remain flat and unremarkable and chameleon and pixilate into a memory of a person that used to say and do things. Believe me when I say: I really considered staying there because it actually felt cozy and safe.

I did get quiet. But I didn’t stay there.

I started reading and thinking deeply, and not about what everyone else was saying or had said or was going to say, or what the group said, or what My Group said, but about what I actually thought, and whether I agreed with certain ideas I’d wholeheartedly internalized, like whether cancelling people is ethical³ . Eventually I got brave again about having my own ideas, even if they weren’t ones you shared, understood, or liked. Even if, and especially if, it meant you wanted to disappear me for having them.

What I mean to say in all of this is that we are living in a time where literally The Atlantic is freaking out because it thinks we are all so dumb that we can’t think for ourselves anymore, that we need the million catastrophizing headlines a day, or to know what our favorite pop singer thinks, or to not know what our favorite scientific journal thinks, in order to make a fucking decision because we are terrified herd animals who can only run in two directions, or because we are such children we cannot actually bear to hear something we don’t want to hear.

I refuse this narrative about myself and us and you and them, and I refuse it not in some radical burn-it-down kind of way like I might have before, but subtly. By having an unpopular opinion, or maybe an easily misunderstood one. By trying to listen, even when it’s really fucking hard, even when it means I might be wrong. By be willing to be wrong, or change my mind, or not know anything at all. By not counting people out because of what I think I know about them, or what I think they think they know about me, or what it says about me by talking to them in the first place. By resisting the temptation to disparage someone I don’t understand, or do things to others I don’t want done to myself. By not letting myself become hardened to everyone else, especially those I don’t agree with at all on the right, the left, and even the center.

By trying—in the face of so much inhumanity and the endless unstoppable brain-breaking cacophony of horror streamed constantly via my personal tracking device—to maintain my sense of community, compassion, softness, kindness and grace, even if I fail a thousand times doing so, because all of this is so much harder to do in real life than write an essay about.

I went back and forth on comments this week (whether to leave them on related to this post) and I am leaving them on. My ask is that if you are familiar with what I’m talking about, out of respect for my experience and nervous system and anyone else involved and theirs, that you don’t discuss it at length here. xxH

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11 Things Right Now

1. Related: I have a list of resources I hand out to people who are being “cancelled” (or facing ex-communication from communities, whatever)—I’ll share that next week if there’s enough interest

2. Related: This article in The Atlantic about a left-leaning journalist couple that ended up living in a neighborhood with some of the relatives of the January 6th insurrectionists on trial called “The Insurrectionists Next Door”: “When you read books about how we can come back from the brink of civil war, this is what they tell you: Don’t go into a discussion trying to change anyone’s mind. Just listen, and have faith that maybe the ice will start to melt a little. For their part, Micki and Lauren’s debates often end with:

   > **lauren:** “You are too smart for that, actually, Micki!”

   > **micki:** “Please, Lauren, I believe _you’re_ too smart for it too!”

3. Loosely related to today’s topic on sweeping systemic change vs. smaller, tangible actions

4. Me, recording a book at Audible this week that comes out in January. (Patrons/paid subscribers get a chance at a free copy—more details to come in the next months.)

   

5. This article on procrastination, defining it not as the act of putting something off, but the feeling of shittiness that arises from believing you shouldn’t have (!!!) In other words it’s not technically procrastination unless there’s shame or guilt.

6. From this Longreads on “The Collapse of Self Worth in the Digital Age”: “A few years ago, much was made of the fact that the novelist Sally Rooney had no Twitter account—this must explain her prolific output. But the logic is back to front: it’s only top-selling authors who can afford to forgo social media. Call it Deactivation Privilege.” Deactivation privilege!

7. Related: I don’t post regularly to social media, which has caused me to not think about my phone really at all. Last week I made one post to Instagram that led to me using my phone for about 7 extra hours than normal the next day, and also kind of colonized my life immediately. I was checking my phone frequently, refreshing for comments, I had dreams about it, I was far more aware of myself than I usually am, and I felt noticeably unwell mentally in relationship to it.

8. Related: New study finds everything we already knew about social media companies harvesting our data

9. The fifty best Tiny Desk concerts

10. Just buy the minoxodil As a person that has Tried Everything to deal with telogen effluvium (cyclical hair loss), I don’t know what exactly keeps me from the one proven, affordable topical solution (which is apparently minoxidil) aside from the fact that every single time I think of it I see my friend’s dad’s head circa 1992. Currently using this solution which does seem to be working (plus it doesn’t make my hair greasy) along with this supplement, regular scalp massages, leaving loads of hair oils in my hair, and not being so actively stressed that my blood refuses to travel to my scalp and thus starves me bald.

11. 💊📱🍺 how to be sober in wine country and still more on sober travel, Scotland raises the minimum price for booze, NY extends its pandemic-era drinks to-go policy for five years, please don’t give your dog psychedelics, we still don’t know a lot about the health benefits of pot, nutrition labels on wine still not a thing.

1. Honestly can’t remember if I have but couldn’t find it in a word search?

2. Of which to be clear, I’m still largely concerned with.

3. I personally believe it’s not ethical and that it’s in conflict with abolition work, as noted by adrienne maree brown in We Will Not Cancel Us, “Canceling is punishment, and punishment doesn’t stop the cycle of harm, not long term. Cancellation may even be counter-abolitionist.”