Crime and Punishment and the Tragedy of Cancel Culture, Pt2
Contemporary Mass Movements and Frontier Justice
(Photo by Zhang Ye)
Fast links to my review series, “Crime and Punishment and the Tragedy of Cancel Culture”:
A Tangential Conversation about Justice, Punishment, and Forgiveness
Contemporary Mass Movement and Frontier Justice
The irony of reading Crime and Punishment in our time is that the untruthful and obscure fate of Rodka is invertedly inflicted on the rest of us who only conspired with the justification of crimes. In the world of novel and literature, there is still the linkage for Rodka and the rest of the world to redeem from conspiracy and lying by Rodka mustering the courage to lay out the details of the murder in a plain and matter of fact confession. What was required was the strength of character which Dostoevsky so convincingly instilled in the character of Rodka whose indifferent rationalism seems almost like a form of martyrdom ready to sacrifice for the lies he believes. Rodka is able to, in the language of Hannah Arendt, “ redeem himself from his wrong doing for who he is.” For who Rodka is, and for his admission of crime, the society is able to forgive Rodka in spite of his crime.
In our time, such strength of character is almost irrelevant for most of the population, and for those who actually committed heinous crimes, there are no signs of character whatsoever. The pain Rodka inflicts on himself by inventing a category of untruthfulness, we now inflict on ourselves by obscuring the crimes that we ourselves did not commit. As we complicitly accept the corruption of our vocabulary to appease the crime that we did not commit, we are left with a landscape of hyperboles that is impossible to navigate. With our vocabulary so disjointed from adequately expounding the real crimes as what they are, the soul of our language is corrupted by conflating ingenious hyperboles with reality. Under the false normality, we use the same hyperbole languages to celebrate life, beauty, and joy. But once in a while, reality pierces into those among us who still have a golden heart. It voices through Dmitri’s eerie question: “did you do it?”
But these eerie feelings against our biennial sense of normality are often hard to navigate through the mazes of our deprived sense of nominal sensitivity, deranged perception of justice, recognition and forgiveness. In a hasty generalization, these feelings about something being terribly wrong are often translated into a sentiment of mass guilt. It came from an uninvestigated conclusion that a crime of cosmetic scale must have involved collective participation, whether knowingly or unknowingly. But these hastily admitted mass guilt only lead us further into the maze where we lost our way to see the truth.
The often suspected “white guilt” among those who relatively benefited from the system is not controversial for the also often suspected lack of genuine conviction. The “white guilt” sentiment is provocative for those who actually suffered from injustices because it pronounces an ambiguous confession which the victim is now coerced to accept as a supplement for truth and recognition. It promotes a false criminal to lure the victims to exercise their collective vengeance. And when the ruse becomes conspicuously ridiculous, the system turns its back around and claims: "there was no crime committed in the first place,” further abusing the emotions of the victim and our common sense. While the sentiment of “white guilt” may be emotionally genuine from case to case, there is no possible genuine intellectual conviction to an oblivious admission to mass guilt. When 80 percent of the population is guilty of an unspecified crime, everyone becomes equally innocent, the real monsters and the guiltless alike.
On rare occasions of outbreaks of ominous feelings of collective guilt and rage, we scramble together our broken language in a makeshift manner with an imperative sense of emergency. These hasty slogans conflate the feelings of victims and the previously inactive bystanders to form an united front in an attempt to enact mass justice. But in the modus operandi of mass movement, mass action is always prescribed to nameless crimes; recognition of truth is always omitted. Hence, they always leave room for untruth to seep in, to appease the grotesque reality. #Blacklivesmatter appeals to the rage of the very real racial exploitation, and the vague feeling of how it takes place in the everyday life of those who did not suffer from it. Hence, #Alllivesmatter, suddenly becomes a snooty plausible comeback to the racial problem whose past and present are never recognized adequetely. Occupy Wall Street appeals to the rage against very real frauds, and the obscure recognition of the exploitive logic of capitalism. Hence, we slipped back to the myth of free market economy that covers up the dirt trails of political power compensating the greed of those who believe in the incessant expansion of market and consumption.
Without ever being able to recognize the true crimes behind mass rage and mass guilt, we are never quite able to resolve any problem, nor deny their existence. As the news cycle of mass rage and guilt reaches its end, there are always warm stories of regular joes on both sides reaching across the aisle seemingly reconciling their differences. But the reception of these heartwarming stories are cruel in nature. Regular people already suffer the consequences of the exploitative system inflicted on them to various degrees. With the gibberish and hyperboles constantly pumped into their vocabulary by the ubiquitous cycle of mainstream media, they were never quite able to express the pain and sufferings inflicted upon them in the concept of definable crime and wrong doings. And so, just like the inception of mass guilt and mass rage, they adopt a set of biennial narratives in an equally desperate attempt to reach for peace. They say, “at the end of the day, we are all humans. We just need to recognize the humanity in each other.” But the truth is, regular people are unjustly and unreasonably burdened with the responsibility of reconciling for peace, solving abysmal political problems in our individual capacity, while we are separated by our isolated circumstances that are inflicted on us by crimes we did not ourselves commit.
To the question of cancel culture, adopting the term with naive acceptance of its apparent definition, “cancel culture” is a form of blatant frontier justice against blatant crimes that has been constantly committed among us. It is an illusion of justice we cling to, to create a desperate illusion of being human. It is to say, “there is no hope of communicating en masse what is obviously a crime, so I am going to gather my friends to punish the criminals. At least, in our confined and isolated circle, we don’t need to lie to each other anymore.” It is saying, “ there is no hope of convincing people what rape is without being gasslighten. Therefore I am going to put my career on the line, yelling 'rape’ out loud, until it is too obvious for anyone to deny that I am raped.” In a desperate attempt, we try to stipulate crimes as what they are within spiteful tribes where the mechanism for forgiveness is permanently broken.
But the sad truth about cancel culture is that “cancel culture” is but another hyperbole the vicious news cycle announces to preemptively excuse crimes of large and small. It was first coined by the mainstream right wing media to denounce “woke culture” and “critical race theory”, for whatever those terms could mean in their ambivalent media usage; then, mindlessly and suspiciously acknowledged by the mainstream “liberal” media as a valid talking point. Taking the definition of the term, “cancel culture”, and examining its claims through the lens of real life politics, the temporary outrage against its supposed “canceled victims” has always been a subject to the oblivious nature of mass politics. Neither the recognition of the criminal nor the crime could really withstand the constant white wash of the ever shifting news cycle.
Cancel culture taken by its definition is a mass exercise of social expulsion to punish wrong doings in parallel to the verdicts of the judicial system. Its hopes and wishes lie in remedying the broken judicial system that is obviously operating with a duel standard in revealing those cases that are worth punishing and those that are not, by erecting social consensus about criminality and its insufficient punishment. But such collective frontier justice is also subject to the ever shifting rhetorical gymnastics which is ever creative in finding excuses to appease the crimes committed by those in power. The cancel culture’s stipulation against criminal activities committed by those who held real power never successfully generated lasting recognitions about criminality, hence the subsequent mass oblivion and the bizarre social reconciliation.
George W Bush stepped out of office with the lowest approval rating in modern politics, rightfully so for his criminal war in Iraq and his complacency with the fraudulent activity of the financial sector deregulated by Clinton. But some 10 years later, his approval rating resurged higher than the current and previous president, Trump and Biden. Using Hannah Arendt’s language, “the mass is ready to forgive the man for who he is and forget the crimes he committed.” We brush off his criminal activities with a bizarre joke, “how do you like me now,” and candies exchanged between Michael and Bush.
In the same manner we forgive the criminals by forgetting their crime, we forget the crimes by attempting to forget the criminal. In the mainstream left wing media’s attempt to “cancel” Trump, they fuel the left wing propaganda with very real suffering and atrocities to promote the illusion of moral integrity of the “liberal” politicians. We were constantly informed about the mechanical and bureaucratic oppression against immigrant families in border concentration camps. We are told that political asylum is the reflection of the moral value upon which the United States asserts its legitimacy on the world stage. But when the masses are convinced of the moral integrity of the so-called liberal politicians, the “liberals” continue the crimes they accused of Donald Trump in concentration camps. The border concentration camps are not disseminated, they simply fell off from the mainstream news cycle.
From time to time, when the crimes completely offend our sense of decency and humanity, we flood the streets en masse with the calling, “no justice, no peace.” But before the battle for justice is waged against the crime, it always destroys the illusion of peace between us as we scramble our words to piece together an idea of justice. Anybody who has ever been to a mass protest would know that the chaos on the ground is always an ideological battle royale where everybody fights for themselves. There is always an reversed identity politics where the currency for volume depends on the sufferings of our performative identities. Against this war of everybody against everybody, once in a while, if we are lucky, the mainstream media will harvest our movement and impose an uniform narrative on our struggle. After the blood sport struggle for justice, sometimes justice will be served in its revisionist form.
April 29, 2023
Kado
Photo by Zhang Ye// @sh.bos.ny, @yeahzhang
An entry for Zhang Ye’s photos is coming next week.