When I was writing some passages of this book, I experienced the fear of being canceled first-hand. I considered leaving the risky parts out. In these emotionally loaded moments, I was anticipating the reaction. I foresaw that some people may be offended. You may think that this is a natural process accompanying writing. However, I have not experienced this type of fear in my previous writings. Becoming aware of the cancel culture current has brought me to have more vivid imaginary anticipating canceling. Something has changed in broader culture or my perception of the context to my publications.
Despite this newly acquired fear, I have reasoned that my value in life is not peace, calm, and comfort at any cost. In contrast, I value health and life in general. I mean that I try to reinforce what brings people towards actualizing their potential and acting towards their vitality. In my view, cancel culture and some acts committed in the name of wokeness do not meet this standard. Having compared two goals, namely either offending many or helping one person to wake up and change their perspective on canceling or engaging in futile battles, I decided that the former is the lesser evil and the latter is the greater good in terms of its impact on society. Even if only one person sees through the agenda of dividing society and dispersing our energy, this will be a huge gain for the world.
It is important to name the fear of being canceled and understand its dynamics in order to make conscious decisions about our stance and conduct in life. In my case, fear of being canceled manifested as pain in my chest, a feeling of heaviness, and the tendency to procrastinate. There was a more intense moment of feeling deeply sad and discouraged. I talked about this with someone and felt better the day after.
How and why we self-censor seems to be an urgent topic to study. We often talk about the reasons to do something but the reasons why we have not done a certain thing are hardly ever narrated publicly. I hope that the current wave of canceling can teach us something about social dynamics and manipulation mechanisms to gain more independence as citizens. For example, the 800 people who have signed an open letter to retract an article from Hypatia academic journal would be a great sample to study group dynamics of such behavior. I wonder whether some of them were motivated by a preemptive canceling. The fear of being canceled may lead to chain reactions.
The growing number of whistle blowers who disagree with the diversity trainings in schools can help us understand the factors contributing to such an act in contrast to those who criticize these programs but only privately. We have a lot of potential data being cooked up in front of us.
If you happen to be searching for a topic for your master thesis, you are lucky. You are in the position to witness an interesting data set unfolding in front of yourself.
