The sadistic rewards of cancel culture

We’re all going on a witch hunt

Photo by Gama. Films on Unsplash

You won’t understand the persecution of heretics, McCarthyism, the Maoist cultural revolution or the cancellations that come from the radical left and right of our day unless you grasp what drives witch-hunters.

They claim to have the noble ambition to deliver us from evil (in its religious and secular guises).

But that explanation cannot be complete when they so clearly love their work and relish their power. There is a sadistic pleasure that wrecking other people’s lives brings, and you can see them thrill to it as they receive the applause of followers who treat them as modern saints.

There are signs that wider society is fighting back and a reckoning with cancel culture’s reckonings may be coming.

In a rebuke to those who consider it a nest of wokists, the BBC is running a series on the destruction of the Orwell Prize winner Kate Clanchy. She was targeted by online enemies in 2021 and abandoned by her own publisher Picador for the flimsiest of heresies against leftish orthodoxy.

(A few weeks ago, Pan MacMillan, Picador’s owners apologised to her via the BBC. But I would say to writers looking for a deal that they should still think hard before signing with a publisher that left an author to swing in the wind.)

Steven Pinker has a book out this week that tries to explain cancel culture as an attempt to prevent dangerous ideas from becoming common knowledge

Meanwhile, Rachel Hewitt has written an essential commentary on the psychopathology of cancellation.

For liberals the argument is of the utmost importance. Nothing has done their cause as much damage in the last decade as the embrace of the politics of personal destruction

Rachel Hewitt knows it all too well. She has the “lived experience” of witch hunts, to use the cumbersome jargon, and the experience of death too.

She and her partner Pete Newbon were cut off by many of their friends after she criticised gender ideology in the 2010s. Activists tried to get her fired by telling her university that “trans students would be unsafe in my classes,”.

Then Newbon was caught up in the arguments about left antisemitism when Jeremy Corbyn led the Labour party. An online campaign against him resulted in 4000 complaints to his employers at Northumbria University.

He committed suicide in 2022.