From the Journal of Joshua Fryfogle
Liberty, Liberally Volume I - Issue VI
July, 2021
“So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.” - Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions The phrase ‘cancel culture’ has entered the lexicon, and with it the burden of defining it. The little alliteration makes it catchy, easy to remember. So many of our common phrases have a similar symmetry of sound. Cancel Culture is a negation of principle. The principle of free speech the primary principle of Liberal philosophy - is being punished publicly by private parties who do what the government cannot. We’re told to shun, to ban, to apply public pressure to prevent and prohibit wrongspeak. And when we point out that this is inherently an infringement of rights, we’re given the social conservative argument that private companies (mostly corporations) can do as they please. Of course, this is the social conservative argument from way back, that citizens have a fundamental right to refuse service. In fact, the 13th Amendment prohibits forced servitude. They aren’t wrong, either. These folks who are mostly left-leaning, they can make the social conservative argument that private entities should be able to discriminate according to their own conscience, but in so doing, these Left leaners have left liberalism behind. Encouragement.
“Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson To encourage someone is more than giving them a compliment. To en - courage someone is to assure them that their efforts are worthwhile, and good, and should be continued. It is a beautiful, non-coercive means of building a better world. Rather than discouraging through disrespect and distancing, which supposedly cancels any cultural phenomenon that you don’t like, encouraging those things you do like is a more effective means of cultural co-creation. To cancel someone for wrongspeak is more than discouraging to that someone, it is discouraging to other someones, and stifling to that cultural connection. It’s coercive, telling that second someone that they’ll get what the first got if the forget to forget it. It’s a threat of force, a public display of intimidation, this developing phenomenon of ‘cancel culture’ that’s becoming normalized. Instead, we should abandon this totalitarian trope, we should seek a counter-instinctive response to those things we don’t like, and a cultivated response to those that we do. Courage Culture is about encouragement.
Liberty, Liberally
“Correction does much, but encouragement does more.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I’ll call it Courage Culture, that we would abandon our animal instinct to attack those things that might be a threat, and adopt a co-operative culture of encouragement of those who are shaping our communities in ways that are positive. We tend to take for granted what is good, to the point that we react with anger to anything outside of that. This is the root of cancel culture, that is the natural, animal response, which can be prodded and provoked by those with power and position. Cancel culture is easily exploited by those who are in control.
There is a mythos that’s arisen around the evening news. People have been taught to feed at the trough of truth. We’ve been trained to consume information along with a beer and dinner. We’ve been conditioned to receive information, and not to reciprocate. Look no further than social media to see that the majority of interactions are emotional, and often lacking in basic grammar, spelling and punctuation. This is indicative of the fact that our own ability to contribute to the public discourse is defunct.
Encouragement culture is the antidote to that contrived chaos of controversy.
Without the assistance of some corporate appendage that hands us our helping of nightly news, we should know how to seek out information, and contribute to the flow of information with practical aptitude. Our own hands have atrophied, our wit has wilted away, our intellectual muscle is emaciated and weak.
When we simply deny our natural negative response, and replace it with our cultivated encouragement, we reestablish our creative role over our own culture. Cancel culture is made moot by our controlled co-creation. Our liberal ideals are restored, and we begin again to champion free expression as a cultural norm.
Consider the Second Amendment, the one about guns. In the second amendment, there is a clear mandate that it is the People who have a right to arm themselves. Most people understand it as such, except for a loud minority of totalitarian types. We understand that the right to keep and bear arms belongs to the individual.
The fact that corporations can cancel people for speaking their minds is indicative of systemic failure for a liberal society, because liberal people (free people) believe first in freedom and love liberty for all.
Now, consider the First Amendment, regarding one’s own conscience. In the First Amendment, there is the same mandate that the collective cannot infringe on the right of the People to assemble, to speak, to publish written documents, all according to their own individual consciences.
This corporate cancel culture cannot be cancelled by more cancellation - that will only add to the problem. This problem can, however, be countered by careful cultivation of courage and encouragement as a cultural norm. Cancel culture is reactive, but Courage Culture is proactive.
“When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent was cradled that explains; it is the training it received while it grew, the nurture it got from reading, study, example, the encouragement it gathered from self-recognition and recognition from the outside at each stage of its development: when we know all these details, then we know why the man was ready when his opportunity came.” - Mark Twain, How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson and Other Tales of Rebellious Girls and Daring Young Women
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Look closer at the First Amendment and you’ll see a series of clauses. The first or primary clause is clear - each individual has a right to religion without regulation. This is the right to decide for yourself what is right and wrong. Then it guarantees free speech - which is and was the voice of the individual. Then, it protects the right to use the printing press. This, too, is for the individual. But we’ve somehow transferred this responsibility to proxies who tell us what to think, and what to think about. They set the narrative that we consume, and then we regurgitate it
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ad nauseam around the workplace the next day. We are part of a mythology that is being constructed in real time, yet we are not creating that myth knowingly. It’s shaping our moral orientation, too. “We Need Real News!”, they say... The phrase ‘fake news’ has permeated our vernacular now. We’re finally aware that the nightly news has gotten us to the gallows, and we’re complaining that the noose isn’t tied tight enough. Instead of realizing that we are the rightful inheritors of our God-given right to freedom of conscience and communication, we continue to believe that the solution is a better corporate controller, so convincing that we don’t notice when they lie. You know, like before we realized the nightly noose was asphyxiating America. This mythos is a false myth, and it’s meant to manipulate and control our behaviors. It’s not some grand conspiracy, but corporate trajectory that is to blame. Our need to relinquish the rights and responsibilities of Liberty is satisfied by these proxies who are more than willing to take power wherever and whenever they can. The problem is simple. Because we’re not active in our freedoms, because we only react rather than act on Liberty, we are sentenced to a fate worse than death. Our minds are occupied, we are a captive audience, and as the floor falls from our feet, we hang on their every word.
“Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.” - Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land “Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.” - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 “I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories. ” - Dave Barry
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From the Journal of Joshua Fryfogle