June 22, 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 19 of the Nihilism Series covers three topics:
My Takeaways:
CANCEL CULTURE
Segment 20 is titled The Breakdown of Higher Education. Most of the excerpts come from a book by the same title written by John Ellis, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He states that his book is not addressed to University professors in the U.S. because they are now the locus of the problem. Alternatively, it was written for people outside the academy.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Segment 19 of the Nihilism Series covers three topics:
- Cancel Culture
- Impact of Tech
- Gaslighting
My Takeaways:
CANCEL CULTURE
- Cancel culture has to do with removing support for public figures in response to their objectionable behaviors or opinions. In other words, to cancel them from the limelight.
- A mere accusation of racism, sexism, homophobia, failure to support Black Lives Matter or the #MeToo movement is enough to get a person cancelled, even though they might be innocent.
- The Cancel culture has no standards or processes for determining whether a cancelling allegation is true or false. The mere accusation often becomes the story itself and becomes part of the person’s historical record.
- This new cancel culture threatens two cherished rights of U.S. citizens liberty: free speech and due process.
- Cancel culture has infected the political arena as well.
- Social justice activism has become the mantra of many major technology companies.
- In keeping with the social justice activism, Silicon Valley “knows what is right” and is attempting to get everyone else to catch up via manipulation, censorship and machine learning bias.
- We are living in a perpetual state of gaslighting, a form of political propaganda and deception. The reality of much of todays media reporting is at odds with what we see with our own eyes. When the issue is raised, the messenger is vilified as racist or bigotry or just plain crazy. This is illustrated in seven attached examples.
Segment 20 is titled The Breakdown of Higher Education. Most of the excerpts come from a book by the same title written by John Ellis, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He states that his book is not addressed to University professors in the U.S. because they are now the locus of the problem. Alternatively, it was written for people outside the academy.
Happy Learning,
Harley
NIHILISM: GOOD OR BAD? – SEGMENT 19
CANCEL CULTURE, THE IMPACT OF TECH, GASLIGHTING – SYNOPSIS EXCERPTS
CANCEL CULTURE: One dictionary recently selected “cancel culture” as “the word of the year” because “it has become, for better or worse, a powerful force.” “Canceling and cancel culture has to do with the removing of support for public figures in response to their objectionable behavior or opinions. To cancel someone (usually a celebrity or other well-known figure) means to stop giving support to that person.” Cancel culture employs the power of public opinion, social media, threats of economic boycotts, and other constitutionally protected forms of private action. This power is magnified by the pervasiveness and speed of the internet and social media, which are the weapons of choice deployed by cancel culture.
A mere accusation of racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Muslim bias, or failure to support Black Lives Matter of the #MeToo movement is enough to get an innocent person cancelled, especially if he is not within the new privileged groups in the “identity politics” of the woke generation. Once accused there is no presumption of innocence. Even worse, there is an irrebuttable presumption of guilt that cannot be rebutted by mere factual evidence, regardless of how convincing and conclusive it may be. In the current cancel culture, the cancellers are often invisible, anonymous, and not accountable. The social media is judge and jury.
The Impact of Cancel Culture on Free Speech and Due Process: Two of the most important hallmarks of liberty and democracy are contained in the American Bill of Rights: “the freedom of speech” and the “due process of law.” These safeguards serve as roadblocks against tyranny. No government in history has achieved liberty for its citizens while denying them the twin rights of free speech and due process.
The new cancel culture in the United States (and other Western democracies) poses a great danger to at least these two most cherished and important rights. Even more significantly, this danger comes not from evil tyrants, but rather from people who consider themselves “woke”, “do-gooders,” and “progressives.” Many are motivated by good values and a desire to make our world better and fairer. But, as Justice Louis Brandeis warned: “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men and women of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
The Pervasive Power of Cancel Culture: Cancel culture does not include standards or processes for determining whether a cancelling allegation is true or false. The accusation itself becomes the story, and thus becomes a part of the historical record, even if demonstrably false. One of the great dangers of cancel culture is that it stifles creativity. Intellectuals are terrified about being cancelled if speculations made years earlier are wrenched out of context and become weaponized in the war against political correctness. Young professors and students trying to survive today’s cancel culture are deterred and disincentivized from saying anything that might come back to haunt or cancel them in years to come. Cancel culture has no statute of limitations. It goes back to the earliest days of a person’s career. Cancel culture has infected politics as well. Viable candidates have been cancelled and precluded from running for higher office because they did not act politically correctly when they were prosecutors or defense attorneys.
Cancel culture combines the worst of self-righteousness and judgementalism. Its advocates and practitioners sit in judgment often of great people. Many of these who sit in judgement over whom to cancel have accomplished little in their own lives. They can’t be cancelled because there’s nothing to cancel.
Cancelling Freedom of Speech for Thee, but Not for Me! Among the major problems with this new effort to justify censorship by cancellation is that it does not even purport to be politically or content neutral. It argues for cancellation and censorship only of right-wing, conservative, anti-left speech, while demanding total freedom of speech for comparable advocacy, even if hateful, directed against conservatives and people of privilege.
Cancelling Due Process and Weaponizing Criminal “Justice”: Cancel culture is a direct attack on the due process of law in that it cancels people – some innocent, some guilty, some in-between – with no semblance of any process for determining the truth. This attack on the rule of law and basic freedoms is part of a broader phenomenon that has weaponize our justice system for ideological and partisan advantage. Our system of investigation and prosecution is unique in the democratic world. Nowhere else are prosecutors (or judges) elected. But in the United States, prosecutors are not only elected, but the job is often a stepping-stone to higher office.
Cancelling Meritocracy: Cancel culture and the broader “woke” or “progressive” movement of which it is a part goes beyond cancelling individuals. It also seeks to dismantle the entire structure of meritocracy – of judging people on the totality of their accomplishments and virtues – and replacing it with a hierarchy based on “identity.” Meritocracy was introduced in this country precisely to replace the European hierarchy based on nobility, bloodlines, class, religion, and other identities. Cancel culture’s effort to replace meritocracy with identity privilege is the woke mirror image of discrediting hierarchies of the past. The American dream, which many generations of Americans were brought up to believe in, is that in our country, as distinguished from the old world, intellect, creativity, moderation, and other commonly accepted virtues. Here, there is no hierarchy. Anyone could make it to the top.
Until recently few, if any, in America have been against the theory of meritocracy: that merit – perhaps differently defined – should be a decisive factor in allocating benefits in society and selecting individuals to perform important services. But from some among today’s so called “woke” generation see the very concept of meritocracy as inherently hierarchical, racist, sexist, and unwoke.
Conclusion: Cancel culture is a cancer on American democracy, meritocracy, due process, and freedom of expression. It is metastasizing through social media. It is chilling creativity, miseducating students, erasing history, empowering extremists, destroying hard-earned legacies – all without accountability or transparency. Cancel culture causes more problems than it solves. It falsely accuses; it applies a double standard of selectivity; it fails to balance or calibrate vices and virtues; it has no statue of limitations; it provides no process to challenge cancellations; it is standardless, unaccountable, not transparent, and often anonymous; it hides personal, ideological, and political agendas; it can be abused for revenge, extortion, and other malign motives; it is un-American to the core. It must be stopped, lest it destroy the heart, soul, and values of our nation. Source: Cancel Culture by Alan Dershowitz (2020)
THE IMPACT OF TECH: We have spent the first years of this century trying to understand a communications revolution so huge that it may yet make the invention of the printing press look like a footnote in history. We have had to try to learn how to live in a world where at any moment we may be speaking to one other person or to millions around the world. The notion of private and public space has eroded. What we say in one place may be posted in anther, not just for the whole world but for all time. And so, we are having to find a way to speak and act online as though we may be speaking and acting in front of everyone – with the knowledge that if we slip up, our error will be accessible everywhere and always. To speak in public is now to have to find a way to address or least keep in mind every possible variety of person, with every imaginable kind of claim – including every imaginable rights claim. At any moment we might be asked why we have forgotten, undermined, offended or denied the existence of a particular person and others like them. To think aloud on the issues which are most controversial has become such a high risk that on a simple risk/reward ratio there is almost no point in asking anyone taking it.
Silicon Valley is not Morally Neutral: As anybody who has spent any time there will know, the political atmosphere in Silicon Valley is several degrees to the left of a liberal arts college. Social justice activism is assumed correctly – to be the default setting for all employees in the major companies and most of them, including Google, put applicants through tests to weed out anyone with the wrong ideological inclinations. Tech companies are rarely capable of practicing what they are so willing to preach. For instance, Google’s workforce is only 4% Hispanic and 2% African American. At 56%, whites are not overrepresented compared to the wider population. But Asians make up 35% of Google staff and have been steadily reducing the number of white employees despite accounting for just 5% of the U.S. population.
On each of the maddening issues of our time – sex, sexuality, race and trans – the Valley knows what is right and is only encouraging everyone else to catch up. It is why Twitter is capable of banning women from its platform for tweeting “men aren’t women” or “What is the difference between a man and a transwoman”? If people are “wrong” on the trans issue in this way, then Silicon Valley can ensure that they do not have a voice on their platforms. So, the moment that a person says that they are trans and announces a change of name, anybody who calls them by their previous name or refers to them by their previous pronoun had their account suspended.
Machine Learning Fairness: In recent years the Valley has not just adopted the ideological presumptions of intersectionalists and social justice warriors. They have embedded them at a level so deep that this provides a whole new layer of madness in any society which imbibes them. It does this by building into the computers a set of attitudes and judgements that have probably never been held by any human being. It is a form of fairness of which no human being would be capable. Yet it is only since users started to notice that something strange was going on with some search engine results that tech companies have felt the need to explain what “Machine Learning Fairness (MLF)” is. Machine learning allows computers to solve problems by “finding patterns in data.” So, it is easy to think there’s no human bias in that. But just because something is based on data doesn’t automatically make it neutral. Even with good intentions it’s impossible to separate ourselves from our own human biases. So, our human biases become part of the technology we create. There seems to be a deliberate effort – on specific occasions – to push things that have been asked for. What appears to be happening is that something is being layered over a certain amount of MLF: it is MLF plus some human agency. And this human agency seems to have decided to “stick it” to people towards whom the programmers or their company feel angry. The one overwhelming problem with this attitude is that it sacrifices truth in the pursuit of a political goal. Indeed, it decides that truth is part of the problem – a hurdle that must be got over. So, where diversity and representation are found to have been inadequate in the past, this can be solved most easily by changing the past.
Source: Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray.
GASLIGHTING: Gaslighting is a tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality. It works much better than you may think. Anyone is susceptible to gaslighting, and it is a common technique of abusers, dictators, narcissists, and cult leaders. It is done slowly, so the victim doesn’t realize how much they have been brainwashed. Typically, gaslighters use the following techniques: They tell blatant lies, they deny they ever said something, even though you have proof, they use what is near and dear to you as ammunition, they wear you down over time, their actions do not match their words, they throw positive reinforcement to confuse you, they know that confusion weakens people, they project, they try to align people against you, they tell you or others that you are crazy, and they tell you everyone else is a liar.
Source: Psychology Today: 11 Warning Signs of Gaslighting by Stephanie A. Sarkis.
Examples: Today, we are living in a perpetual state of gaslighting. The reality that what we are being told by the media is at complete odds with what we are seeing with our own two eyes. And when we question the false reality that we are being presented, or we claim that what we see is actual reality, we a vilified as racist or bigots or just plain crazy. Here are some examples.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
CANCEL CULTURE, THE IMPACT OF TECH, GASLIGHTING – SYNOPSIS EXCERPTS
CANCEL CULTURE: One dictionary recently selected “cancel culture” as “the word of the year” because “it has become, for better or worse, a powerful force.” “Canceling and cancel culture has to do with the removing of support for public figures in response to their objectionable behavior or opinions. To cancel someone (usually a celebrity or other well-known figure) means to stop giving support to that person.” Cancel culture employs the power of public opinion, social media, threats of economic boycotts, and other constitutionally protected forms of private action. This power is magnified by the pervasiveness and speed of the internet and social media, which are the weapons of choice deployed by cancel culture.
A mere accusation of racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Muslim bias, or failure to support Black Lives Matter of the #MeToo movement is enough to get an innocent person cancelled, especially if he is not within the new privileged groups in the “identity politics” of the woke generation. Once accused there is no presumption of innocence. Even worse, there is an irrebuttable presumption of guilt that cannot be rebutted by mere factual evidence, regardless of how convincing and conclusive it may be. In the current cancel culture, the cancellers are often invisible, anonymous, and not accountable. The social media is judge and jury.
The Impact of Cancel Culture on Free Speech and Due Process: Two of the most important hallmarks of liberty and democracy are contained in the American Bill of Rights: “the freedom of speech” and the “due process of law.” These safeguards serve as roadblocks against tyranny. No government in history has achieved liberty for its citizens while denying them the twin rights of free speech and due process.
The new cancel culture in the United States (and other Western democracies) poses a great danger to at least these two most cherished and important rights. Even more significantly, this danger comes not from evil tyrants, but rather from people who consider themselves “woke”, “do-gooders,” and “progressives.” Many are motivated by good values and a desire to make our world better and fairer. But, as Justice Louis Brandeis warned: “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men and women of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
The Pervasive Power of Cancel Culture: Cancel culture does not include standards or processes for determining whether a cancelling allegation is true or false. The accusation itself becomes the story, and thus becomes a part of the historical record, even if demonstrably false. One of the great dangers of cancel culture is that it stifles creativity. Intellectuals are terrified about being cancelled if speculations made years earlier are wrenched out of context and become weaponized in the war against political correctness. Young professors and students trying to survive today’s cancel culture are deterred and disincentivized from saying anything that might come back to haunt or cancel them in years to come. Cancel culture has no statute of limitations. It goes back to the earliest days of a person’s career. Cancel culture has infected politics as well. Viable candidates have been cancelled and precluded from running for higher office because they did not act politically correctly when they were prosecutors or defense attorneys.
Cancel culture combines the worst of self-righteousness and judgementalism. Its advocates and practitioners sit in judgment often of great people. Many of these who sit in judgement over whom to cancel have accomplished little in their own lives. They can’t be cancelled because there’s nothing to cancel.
Cancelling Freedom of Speech for Thee, but Not for Me! Among the major problems with this new effort to justify censorship by cancellation is that it does not even purport to be politically or content neutral. It argues for cancellation and censorship only of right-wing, conservative, anti-left speech, while demanding total freedom of speech for comparable advocacy, even if hateful, directed against conservatives and people of privilege.
Cancelling Due Process and Weaponizing Criminal “Justice”: Cancel culture is a direct attack on the due process of law in that it cancels people – some innocent, some guilty, some in-between – with no semblance of any process for determining the truth. This attack on the rule of law and basic freedoms is part of a broader phenomenon that has weaponize our justice system for ideological and partisan advantage. Our system of investigation and prosecution is unique in the democratic world. Nowhere else are prosecutors (or judges) elected. But in the United States, prosecutors are not only elected, but the job is often a stepping-stone to higher office.
Cancelling Meritocracy: Cancel culture and the broader “woke” or “progressive” movement of which it is a part goes beyond cancelling individuals. It also seeks to dismantle the entire structure of meritocracy – of judging people on the totality of their accomplishments and virtues – and replacing it with a hierarchy based on “identity.” Meritocracy was introduced in this country precisely to replace the European hierarchy based on nobility, bloodlines, class, religion, and other identities. Cancel culture’s effort to replace meritocracy with identity privilege is the woke mirror image of discrediting hierarchies of the past. The American dream, which many generations of Americans were brought up to believe in, is that in our country, as distinguished from the old world, intellect, creativity, moderation, and other commonly accepted virtues. Here, there is no hierarchy. Anyone could make it to the top.
Until recently few, if any, in America have been against the theory of meritocracy: that merit – perhaps differently defined – should be a decisive factor in allocating benefits in society and selecting individuals to perform important services. But from some among today’s so called “woke” generation see the very concept of meritocracy as inherently hierarchical, racist, sexist, and unwoke.
Conclusion: Cancel culture is a cancer on American democracy, meritocracy, due process, and freedom of expression. It is metastasizing through social media. It is chilling creativity, miseducating students, erasing history, empowering extremists, destroying hard-earned legacies – all without accountability or transparency. Cancel culture causes more problems than it solves. It falsely accuses; it applies a double standard of selectivity; it fails to balance or calibrate vices and virtues; it has no statue of limitations; it provides no process to challenge cancellations; it is standardless, unaccountable, not transparent, and often anonymous; it hides personal, ideological, and political agendas; it can be abused for revenge, extortion, and other malign motives; it is un-American to the core. It must be stopped, lest it destroy the heart, soul, and values of our nation. Source: Cancel Culture by Alan Dershowitz (2020)
THE IMPACT OF TECH: We have spent the first years of this century trying to understand a communications revolution so huge that it may yet make the invention of the printing press look like a footnote in history. We have had to try to learn how to live in a world where at any moment we may be speaking to one other person or to millions around the world. The notion of private and public space has eroded. What we say in one place may be posted in anther, not just for the whole world but for all time. And so, we are having to find a way to speak and act online as though we may be speaking and acting in front of everyone – with the knowledge that if we slip up, our error will be accessible everywhere and always. To speak in public is now to have to find a way to address or least keep in mind every possible variety of person, with every imaginable kind of claim – including every imaginable rights claim. At any moment we might be asked why we have forgotten, undermined, offended or denied the existence of a particular person and others like them. To think aloud on the issues which are most controversial has become such a high risk that on a simple risk/reward ratio there is almost no point in asking anyone taking it.
Silicon Valley is not Morally Neutral: As anybody who has spent any time there will know, the political atmosphere in Silicon Valley is several degrees to the left of a liberal arts college. Social justice activism is assumed correctly – to be the default setting for all employees in the major companies and most of them, including Google, put applicants through tests to weed out anyone with the wrong ideological inclinations. Tech companies are rarely capable of practicing what they are so willing to preach. For instance, Google’s workforce is only 4% Hispanic and 2% African American. At 56%, whites are not overrepresented compared to the wider population. But Asians make up 35% of Google staff and have been steadily reducing the number of white employees despite accounting for just 5% of the U.S. population.
On each of the maddening issues of our time – sex, sexuality, race and trans – the Valley knows what is right and is only encouraging everyone else to catch up. It is why Twitter is capable of banning women from its platform for tweeting “men aren’t women” or “What is the difference between a man and a transwoman”? If people are “wrong” on the trans issue in this way, then Silicon Valley can ensure that they do not have a voice on their platforms. So, the moment that a person says that they are trans and announces a change of name, anybody who calls them by their previous name or refers to them by their previous pronoun had their account suspended.
Machine Learning Fairness: In recent years the Valley has not just adopted the ideological presumptions of intersectionalists and social justice warriors. They have embedded them at a level so deep that this provides a whole new layer of madness in any society which imbibes them. It does this by building into the computers a set of attitudes and judgements that have probably never been held by any human being. It is a form of fairness of which no human being would be capable. Yet it is only since users started to notice that something strange was going on with some search engine results that tech companies have felt the need to explain what “Machine Learning Fairness (MLF)” is. Machine learning allows computers to solve problems by “finding patterns in data.” So, it is easy to think there’s no human bias in that. But just because something is based on data doesn’t automatically make it neutral. Even with good intentions it’s impossible to separate ourselves from our own human biases. So, our human biases become part of the technology we create. There seems to be a deliberate effort – on specific occasions – to push things that have been asked for. What appears to be happening is that something is being layered over a certain amount of MLF: it is MLF plus some human agency. And this human agency seems to have decided to “stick it” to people towards whom the programmers or their company feel angry. The one overwhelming problem with this attitude is that it sacrifices truth in the pursuit of a political goal. Indeed, it decides that truth is part of the problem – a hurdle that must be got over. So, where diversity and representation are found to have been inadequate in the past, this can be solved most easily by changing the past.
Source: Madness of Crowds by Douglas Murray.
GASLIGHTING: Gaslighting is a tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality. It works much better than you may think. Anyone is susceptible to gaslighting, and it is a common technique of abusers, dictators, narcissists, and cult leaders. It is done slowly, so the victim doesn’t realize how much they have been brainwashed. Typically, gaslighters use the following techniques: They tell blatant lies, they deny they ever said something, even though you have proof, they use what is near and dear to you as ammunition, they wear you down over time, their actions do not match their words, they throw positive reinforcement to confuse you, they know that confusion weakens people, they project, they try to align people against you, they tell you or others that you are crazy, and they tell you everyone else is a liar.
Source: Psychology Today: 11 Warning Signs of Gaslighting by Stephanie A. Sarkis.
Examples: Today, we are living in a perpetual state of gaslighting. The reality that what we are being told by the media is at complete odds with what we are seeing with our own two eyes. And when we question the false reality that we are being presented, or we claim that what we see is actual reality, we a vilified as racist or bigots or just plain crazy. Here are some examples.
- We see mobs of people looting stores, smashing windows, setting cars on fire and burning down buildings, but we are told that these demonstrations are peaceful protests. When we call this destruction of our cities riots, we are called racists. So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy? No, you’re being gaslighted.
- We see the major problem destroying many inner-cities is crime; murder, gang violence, drug dealing, drive-by shootings, armed robbery but we are told that it is not crime, but the police are the problem in inner-cities. We are told we must defund the police and remove law enforcement from crime-riddled cities to make them safer. But if we advocate for more policing in cities overrun by crime, we are accused of being white supremacists and racists. So, we asked ourselves, am I crazy? No, you are being gaslighted.
- The United States of America accepts more immigrants than any other country in the world. The vast majority of the immigrants are “people of color” and these immigrants are enjoying freedom and economic opportunity not available to them in their country of origin, but we are told that the United States is the most racist and oppressive country on the planet, and if we disagree, we are called racist and xenophobic. So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy? No, you’re being gaslighted.
- Capitalist countries are the most prosperous countries in the world. The standard of living is the highest in capitalist countries. We see more poor people move up the economic ladder to the middle and even the wealthy class through their effort and ability in capitalist countries than any other economic system in the world, but we are told capitalism is an oppressive system designed to keep people down. So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy? No, you are being gaslighted.
- Communist countries killed over 100 million people in the 20th century. Communist countries strip their citizens of basic human rights, dictate ever aspect of their lives, treat their citizens as slaves, and drive their economics into the ground, but we are told that Communism is the fairest, most equitable, freest, and most prosperous economic system in the world. So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy? No, you are being gaslighted.
- The most egregious example of gaslighting is the concept of “white fragility.” You spend your life trying to be a good person, trying to treat people fairly and with respect. You disavow racism and bigotry in all its forms. You judge people solely on the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. You don’t discriminate based on race or ethnicity. But you are told you are a racist, not because of something you did or said, but solely because of the color of your skin. You know instinctively that charging someone with racism because of their skin color is itself racist. You know that you are not racist, so you defend yourself and your character, but you are told that your defense of yourself is proof of your racism. So, we ask ourselves, am I crazy? No, you’re being gaslighted.
- Gaslighting has become one of the most pervasive and destructive tactics in American politics. It is the exact opposite of what our political system was meant to be. It deals in lies and psychological coercion, and not the truth and intellectual discourse. If you ever ask yourself if you’re crazy, you are not. Crazy people aren’t sane enough to ask themselves if they are crazy. So, trust yourself, believe what’s in your heart. Trust you’re eyes over what you are told. Never listen to the people who tell you that you are crazy, because you are not, you’re being gaslighted.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 19_nihilism_cancel_culture_--_segment_19.pdf |