Cancel Culture Is A Tax On Being Interesting

If you have any interesting thoughts, some of them will be controversial

Consider two hypothetical people, Bob and Jon. Bob has no cancellable opinions, nothing that would offend anyone on either the left or the right. He has sort of bland, milquetoast political views, none of which he’d be frightened to share at either a liberal or conservative dinner gathering.

Jon has lots of controversial views. He has strong views about Israel, abortion, the criminal justice system, and much more. He has many views that he wouldn’t share, that are very controversial. Question: who do you think is going to be more interesting, on average?

The answer is obvious: Jon. If you have no cancellable views, you are probably a conformist. It’s unlikely that you impartially evaluated every issue without being swayed by social pressure and just happened to conclude that the consensus view on every controversial topic happens to be right. And if a person gets their views simply by conforming to social consensus then they probably do not think very interesting things. As Norm MacDonald says “It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?”

Thus, cancel culture doesn’t just have the effect of ruining people’s careers. It is maximally targeted to ruin the careers of those who are interesting, who think anything interesting.

Peter Singer might be wrong, but it can’t be denied that he’s interesting. Yet he has many cancellable views and has just barely survived several cancellation attempts. Singer has expressed his support for infanticide in certain rare cases—where a baby is severely disabled and unlikely to live a good life—and believes all the non-PC things that follow from utilitarianism. Yet if he said that more recently and wasn’t established, he’d face a severe risk of being blacklisted from academia.

Scott Alexander is, according to leading experts, the most interesting person on the internet (with a possible exception that I cannot name, due to the fact that it would be seen as arrogant). But Scott has said various controversial things over the years: that BLM was responsible for the 2020 crime wave, that there are certain pathological strains in modern feminism, and that gender differences in various traits are primarily not caused by offensive attitudes. And Scott is much more chill and cautious in expressing controversial views than is typical: other interesting people have even more cancellable views!

It would be hard to find an interesting writer who doesn’t think any cancellable things, if you dig through their views thoroughly enough. Most interesting Christian philosophers think that being in gay relationships is seriously wrong—that view does seem to be beyond the pale these days. If you ask those who think factory farming is very seriously how it compares to other grave crimes, you’ll probably find that they think some cancellable things (I do!)

Even interesting left-wing people tend to think some cancellable things! Matt Yglesias, the most milquetoast policy wonk, differentiated from the rest of milquetoast policy wonks by beeing super smart and interesting, has some cancellable associations: he’d interact with Hanania on Twitter, for instance. Even those with mostly mainstream uncancellable views will be cancellable by association with lots of people who say offensive things.

Here’s another way to increase your chances of cancellation: write a lot of things. If you don’t have a public persona, then you probably won’t be cancelled. But more interesting people tend to write more things! Those with more to say write more, on average! But it’s bad to disincentivize writing more interesting things that might offend people. That’s a recipe for boring prudes.

Geoff Miller has a related argument against cancellation, namely, that it tends to target neurodivergent people disproportionately. Who is more likely to get fired for making an un-PC remark: a socially aware popular person or an autistic nerd? As Miller says:

Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-travelling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit any “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the ‘Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion’).

Newton also wants to publish Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, to explain the laws of motion governing the universe. But his literary agent explains that he can’t get a decent book deal until Newton builds his ‘author platform’ to include at least 20k Twitter followers – without provoking any backlash for airing his eccentric views on ancient Greek alchemy, Biblical cryptography, fiat currency, Jewish mysticism, or how to predict the exact date of the Apocalypse.

Newton wouldn’t last long as a ‘public intellectual’ in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say ‘offensive’ things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signalabout on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.

This is what’s so pernicious about cancel culture. It targets those who are most intelligent, most interesting, and most profound. It targets those most likely to have profound insights about things, less likely to shut up and conform. The only way one can be spared from cancel culture is to be a mindless drone. Cancel culture doesn’t just ruin lives: it’s specifically targeted to ruin the lives of the interesting. More significant than the first-order effects of cancel culture is the chilling effect and its tendency to make people boring, simplistic, and conformist.