Cancel Culture and The Folly of Crowds

There are four blogs/newsletters that I pay for, and Rachel Botsman’s rethink is one. A few weeks ago I responded to her post on the Power of learning to unlearn, and her current post, Cancel culture through a trust lens is what inspired this post.

In cancel culture,

1. Someone says something
2. Somebody objects
3. The objection goes viral (I’d even say goes cancerous)
4. The results are “absurdly harsh consequences including getting shamed by digital mobs or fired from a job.”

We seem to have lost the ability to play with ideas with which we disagree, instead we often attack the person. As a result we a) are ourselves unwilling express our thoughts out of fear of the backlash, and b) we lose out on gleaning whatever we can from these ideas because we are locked into a limbic fight/flight mode and the playful and resourceful parts of our brain are shut down.

These issues are further compounded by our mirror neurons, which mushroom to collective illusions. We all know about the wisdom of crowds, but collective illusions are the folly of crowds. As Todd Rose wrote in his book Collective Illusions,

Collective illusions are social lies. They occur in situations where a majority of individuals in a group privately reject a particular opinion, but they go along with it because they (incorrectly) assume that most other people accept it. When individuals conform to what they think the group wants, they can end up doing what nobody wants.

My recommendations

1. Everyone should have the skill to recognize when they are in fight/flight mode, and so not thinking resourcefully, especially when those reactions are amplified by the folly of crowds
2. Everyone should learn the skills of intercepting their primal reactions and switching to their resourceful parts of their brains
3. Everyone should learn to become comfortable in liminal states, in those times when we don’t really know the answers and we are exploring, even when we are surrounded by people demanding we adhere to some group norm
4. Everyone needs to learn the techniques of connecting with others, especially people with whom we disagree; techniques like motivational interviewing and nonviolent communications.

These just happen to be the skills that the course, Mindshifting techniques for collaboration, conflicts, and opposition focuses on. That’s an online course that starts Tuesday, January 16, consisting of 6 90-minute sessions.

Hope to see you there.