In the many op-ed denunciations of cancel culture that get churned out (of which I suppose this is one), a common theme is that we’ve all become too quick to take “offence.” But having spent the last few years interviewing cancel-culture victims, from Steven Galloway to Meghan Murphy to James Damore, I can attest that the real driver of mob-run silencing campaigns isn’t “offence.” It’s a desire to demonstrate power. When a heretic’s agonies (and eventual confessions) play out on a public medium such as Twitter, the spectacle serves to warn other thought criminals. It’s all about offering a show of force “pour encourager les autres” (as Voltaire once put it).
This explains why cancel-culture mobs often channel the tribalistic language and imagery of territorial warfare, with activists seeking to prevent the forces of “hate” penetrating the secular-sacred confines of a campus, library, literary festival, public event or online discussion group. What they truly fear isn’t the substantive content of the heretic’s message (of which many mob members will be ignorant), but the symbolic effect of a heretic speaking freely in a space seen as traditionally controlled by dogmatists. Mob censorship only works when the mob is feared. Let a single heretic go unpunished, and the mob loses its power.
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