The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All—But There Is a Solution

by Greg Lukianoff

And Free Speech Culture embraces some new idioms, too, such as “always take seriously the possibility you might be wrong,” “it’s always important to know what people really think,” and “just because you hate someone doesn’t mean they are wrong.”

And we especially like American Enterprise Institute fellow Christina Hoff Sommer’s proposed definition: “cases where individuals face absurdly harsh consequences for relatively minor lapses. Sometimes there are no lapses at all.”47

the uptick beginning around 2014, and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is—or would be—protected by First Amendment standards and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick.

Scholarship, science, and democracy itself all rely on a humble realization: that we may all be wrong. Therefore, rather than cancel our opposition, we must listen carefully to what they say. Then we can refute it, accept it, or come to some new position. But Cancel Culture is an attempt to shrug off that responsibility.

Whereas once freedom of speech was correctly understood as the necessary tool of the powerless against the powerful, very powerful institutions now argue that it’s the weapon of the powerful against the powerless. This is a weird inversion only possible in an environment as insular as American higher education.

“And these days freedom of speech needs defenders, for when I look around, I find it under attack everywhere. Blacklisting, cancel culture, libraries being closed or defunded, classic works of literature being banned or bowdlerized or removed from classrooms, an ever growing list of ‘toxic’ words the mere utterance of which is now forbidden no matter the context or intent, the erosion of civility in discourse. Both the Rabid Right and the Woke Left seem more intent on silencing those whose views they disagree with, rather than besting them in debate. And the consequences for those who dare to say things deemed offensive have been growing ever more dire; jobs lost, careers ended, books canceled, ‘deplatforming.’ ”1 —George R.R. Martin, bestselling author

Meanwhile, the American Psychological Association suggests viewing patients through a gender-based lens. In their first ever guidelines for practice with boys and men released in 2019, the group said their recommendations “draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage. The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful.”

In her speech, Satel discussed the roots of substance abuse, the devastation it causes, and the misconceptions she argues have dragged out the crisis. The lecture was well received, but a month later John H. Krystal, chair of the psychiatry department, received a letter of complaint from an unnamed “group of Yale Psychiatry residents.”