The Cancel Culture of Wokism Compared to the Medieval Practice of Torture
Lloyd Hawkeye Robertson
President of The New Enlightenment Project
Lloyd is a registered doctoral psychologist with competencies in counselling psychology, educational psychology (including ability assessments) and human resource development. He also has also published on residential school syndrome, the structure of the aboriginal self, the application of memes to self-understanding, the evolution of spirituality and religion, prior learning assessment and recognition, the treatment of suicide ideation and attention deficit disorder.
As a psychologist, I am intrigued by attempts to get into the minds of those with a totalitarian worldview. This essay gets at the similarities between the psychology of torture and the psychology of cancel culture. Remember, never apologize for imagined wrongs.
https://quillette.com/2021/09/09/the-good-death-cancel-culture-and-the-logic-of-torture/
This is the most powerful recent statement about evil and resistance to evil in our time or any other time. Nothing like the phenomenology of a ritual to illuminate human behavior, I always say. Van Eecke’s analogy is to the ritual of torture. Another possibility, albeit not as familiar, would be the ritual of a scapegoat. Throughout the essay, he says things that remind me of passages in the nazi-holocaust novels of Elie Wiesel, who relied on psychological (and theological) insight more than on the body counts. I’m thinking of one passage, for example, in The Town Beyond the Wall (or maybe The Gates of the Forest). One morning, the SS are corralling Jewish prisoners at the Umschlagplatz, which happens to be in or near the town square. One prisoner looks at a nearby house and sees someone looking out—someone who quickly closes the curtain and returns to breakfast. The idea is that indifference to others, not necessarily personal hostility, is what makes evil succeed.