Horse 2728 - The Internal Paradox Of Trying To Cancel Cancel Culture By Trying To Cancel Cancel Culture

In this post I am going to attempt by self-contradiction to explain why two terms that keep on cropping up in the media irritate me. I am also self-aware that by waggling my pointing finger of annoyance at expressions in English, I am equally guilty of falling into cliche and trope myself. Political speech especially employs a deliberate lack of precision; which is designed to prevent actual thought and in this case, these two terms are more likely to be used as weapons rather than descriptors.

Almost without exception, when someone complains about things being too 'politically correct' what they are actually complaining about is that someone pulled them up for saying something knavery. I can not think of an example where someone has requested for someone else to be more politically correct. No, the person who asks someone to stop saying knavish things, does so because their life becomes more unpleasant as the result of the person saying knavish things.
The people who want the racism, sexism, discrimination, violence, denigration, degradation etc to stop, almost always demand it directly. They want others to listen, to stop acting like a knave and to stop engaging in those things which actively puts people in danger and harm. The voice of someone who is on the receiving end of someonen else's lack of love and decency, never resorts to such weasely terms as 'politically correct'.

If I was to hazard a guess, it would be that the term 'politically correct' came from that part of the right, who chose to use language to sanitise and dehumanise the things that if they actually looked at in the face, would scare them. 'Politically Correct' sounds like it came off of the same euphemism factory conveyor belt which turned 'shell shock' into 'battle fatigue' and then 'post traumatic stress disorder' so that the right could blame that on mental health, instead of their actions literally sending hundreds of millions of human bodies to be chopped up by machine gun fire in wars. The term 'politically correct' sounds like it was devised by the same kinds of people who at this current moment in time are asking people to volunteer to die from COVID-19 rather than the economy suffering and if it wasn't, then it certainly has been employed by those kinds of people.

The common argument against political correctness, is that people have a right to free speech. Of itself, an argument for the right to free speech seems reasonable but I personally find arguments that rights are absolute to be at best misguided and more often than not, an argument put forward which actually acts as a defence for the right to commit abuse of people. Granted, there are legitimate arguments where something ought to be said where people in power need to be held to account but where you have people and organisations in positions of actual political and societal power, those people arguing they they have a right to free speech, even after they have been convicted by the courts for running foul of defamation and discrimination laws, is nothing more than an expressed wish to continue being cruel knaves and not having to pay for it.

One of the real failures of political philosophy over the past 250 years has been the decoupling of people's rights and any responsibility that people have to each other as part of a society. There is an argument to be made that the idea of a social contract is invalid because nobody voluntarily signs up for it but by the same token, nobody voluntarily signs up to be born in the first place. I think that it is deeply dishonest for an individual to assert that they have rights and then act as if they have no responsibility to act decently to anyone else.

Particularly over the last two decades, after some groups of people have established the right to be considered human in some cases, people who have been previously powerless have begun to fight back using what little power they do have, in a continuing quest for others to act decently.
Again we come back to the concept of the previously power asking the powerful to stop saying knavish things because their life becomes more unpleasant as the result of the person saying knavish things. If you really want someone to stop saying knavish things, then the mechanisms that work the best, are the existing laws and regulations and the power of the pocket book. Here we run into the weasely terms of 'deplatforming' and 'cancel culture'. If you cut off the economic incentive for knaves to stop saying knavish things, the hope is that they will stop saying knavish things.
Unfortunately, this ends up meaning that you get elements of all the political left and right and the political north and south joining forces; which ends up just further enabling the authoritarian right to continue on its merry way.

This week there has been an open letter calling for an end to 'cancel culture' signed by JK Rowling, Margaret Atwood which has gained 150 signatures and will be published in Harper’s Magazine. To be fair, I don't give two hoots about Harper's Magazine but as it is published in New York City, it does have a reach into the board rooms of the rich and powerful. Weirdly the signatures include Noam Chomsky, New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss, author Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis. Already, some signatories have realised they they have been co-opted and duped and have asked for their names to be removed.
This is something of a paradox because while the authoritarian north wants to use free speech as a defence for abuse the libertarian south mostly wants to use it to stop existing power dynamics from punching downwards. The paradox exists because this open letter which is calling for an end to cancel culture, is itself cancel culture; and the one thing that cancel culture can not cancel, is itself.

I'm wondering if there is no new culture war going on at all but rather, just new set of terms of describing disagreements between people who hate racism & discrimination & people who love to perpetuate it. While all of this has been going on, the term 'woke' has just replaced 'politically correct' as the most pretentious way of saying 'not a massive bigot'. All of this would go away if the knaves who want to say knavish things stopped saying knavish things because those people on the receiving end of the abuse, wouldn't be receiving that particular kind of abuse any more.