I won’t compete with Abraham Lincoln’s eligibility for being canceled — but my freckles…are off limits, as they will make the case to emancipate our culture from the Jean Paul Marat’s of woketocracy.
In essence, elites are chopping heads by putting careers and social status to death. The Great Terror is alive and well and the shadow court of commoners is the new social guillotine or the wokeguillotine, if you will, and it is sharpening its iron maiden. Shortly after the reign of terror, they were amassing 800 heads a month. We need to catch up. To the French Revolution’s credit its cancellations by the blade were offered in court prior and victims were able to defend themselves before tribunals. In 2021, we should be so lucky. The mirror of our French cousins, nonetheless, is fixed on us and the observation of Alexis de Tocqueville needs no historic timeline: “The Government itself had been busily instilling into the minds of the populace at large what were later to be known as revolutionary ideas; ideas, that is to say, which, taking no account of individuals or private rights, encouraged acts of violence.” (The Old Regime and the French Revolution)
And so, no one has a defense. The offended is the arbiter of your future or ‘guilty until proven innocent’ and innocence is a privilege and we know what happens to the privileged. We have in short resurrected the Commitée of Général Sécurité that was made famous by Danton and Robespierre, the social spies looking for dissenters in the streets, listening to conversations — what citizens said, held their life in the balance as Marat invoked his social media to seize more heads.
True to nature, the woke alliances of Danton and Robespierre severed (pun intended) and Danton sends Robespierre to the guillotine. The same will happen to cancel culture when they can no longer follow their own rules. Those who drop the blade will find themselves under it. The current demagogic regime will find itself eating its own before it even gets to “eat the rich”.
Public apologies and statements are meaningless and incidentally create the opposite effect of earnest repentance if there is any to be had. When cancellations are abrupt and treated as corporal punishment it produces a paranoid nation and we no longer know who is sincere — the honesty that has characterized Americans vanishes. Are apologies real or driven by carreer survival and the hopes that pandering will save face or a job position?
Back to my freckles: I had forgotten about them on my arm, so ubiquitous and connected to my physiology, my Irish pelt, and they remained anonymous until my daughter had pointed them out. Strange how something that is with you from birth can go unnoticed until one day... those freckles...they reveal themselves a whole new constellation. Some had dissapeared, others increased at will. It was an imperceptable change but a substantial one that only another person could make manifest.
Social change and progress seem to operate that way, like those freckles, when unanimous and not under compunction or involuntary collectivism. It is incremental and often slow “Providence moves slowly, but the devil hurries” (John Randolph) and finds its roots in principles, regulated by universal social contracts. Values, on the other hand, are ever changing because they are easiest to manipulate. Values are subjective, not tied to any well tested human principle. They are the license for social preference and therefore there is no community to which values are held responsible. The progressive value system of the last 150 years is crumbling because it was never immovable such as principle and natural law.
Cancel Culture is erratic because it is dependent on the ever shifting reputation of "values" as opposed to principles leveraged by reason. The absurdity of the cancellation system then, in view of my freckles, an equally absurd analogy is clear: someone will always be offended by something, even the birth marks on your skin and if the analogy of the French Revolution seems contrived and hyperbolic, it drives the point that so is Cancel Culture. It makes what would normally be a local, forgiveable ignorance, a punitive mark only cured by public hanging (imminent social credit system) and public shaming. It seems ironic that a movement driven by “moral” conviction should be unable to endorse forgiveness. I suppose the Salem Witch trials might look pretty woke in light of the new chopping block.
So how do we dismantle this primitive wokeguillotine? Forgive. Teach the Great Books. History. Mythology. Ban nothing that is true. Dream. Create transcendent beauty that reduces wokeness tyranny to the size of a freckle. Then we will forge a new Manifest Destiny: a new Golden Age of ideas, the pursuit of ingenuity the new gold rush, the genius of our diversity the least important — then we will be the Americans again.
******************CODA*****************
References:
de Tocqueville, Alexis. (1988)
L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution
(Philosophie) Editions Flammarion.
de Tocqueville, Alexis. (1981) 1835.
De la démocratie en Amérique.
Editions Flammarion.
Mill, John Stuart. (1859) On Liberty.