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

by Greg Lukianoff

Members of Gen Z are not shy about speaking up against injustice, but they generally do so only when they believe that most of their peers share their views and they will receive online affirmation for their statements.

The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.

The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.

The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

The last thing we need, in a complex multiethnic liberal democracy, is for educators to teach young people to divide everyone up into groups and then to teach them that some groups are good, others are bad.

She pulled from the minds and mouths of all her people the unproductive ways of arguing. No longer could they focus on the personal failings of whoever made an argument. They could only address the merit of an argument itself. Gone were cheap, rhetorical dodges that wasted time and contributed nothing to the pursuit of truth.

But, over the last several decades, many of the institutions tasked with teaching us how to argue productively have failed in their duties—most notably, American higher education.

Here, we will focus on a single new Great Untruth that we have dubbed The Great Untruth of Ad Hominem, which supposes that “bad people only have bad opinions.”

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.

“The politically correct people are not concerned about social justice. They care about putting scalps on the wall.… We want to beat our chests and vanquish the other side. Compromise seems like a dead concept.”1 —Bill Maher

Those on the left were beginning to associate freedom of speech with the production of hate speech, rather than an essential protection for minority points of view.

Just for some perspective, in 2021 the market size of the U.S. higher education industry was approaching $1 trillion.2 That’s more than three times larger than the U.S. food and beverage industry3 and over two times the size of the U.S. electricity industry.

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.

Today, Yale University has more employees than it does students. In fact, the school has 2.44 administrators for every faculty member,21 and one administrator for every four students.22 That’s the same ratio the government recommends for childcare of infants under twelve months.

“A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job it is to inform everyone else,”

The argument goes that minorities cannot be racist because they do not have institutional power, and therefore any generalizations about white people are excusable.

The gender gap in college degrees awarded is wider today than it was in the early 1970s, but in the opposite direction. The wages of most men are lower today than they were in 1979, while women’s wages have risen across the board. One in five fathers are not living with their children. Men account for almost three out of four “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide or an overdose.”14

While the right once decried the dangers of curtailing campus discourse in the name of political correctness in the nineties, some conservatives are today wielding the very same tool to influence campus discourse for their own ends.

According to a report from the American Library Association,17 2021 saw the largest number of banning attempts recorded in their twenty-year history. The group recorded 729 individual challenges to 1,597 book titles—up from just 273 in 2020 and 377 in 2019.

As Will Creeley put it, “No matter what your beliefs, no matter what your party affiliation, you should be very nervous because that axe swings both ways. Today, folks are coming for books dealing with the LGBTQ community, tomorrow they’ll be coming for books dealing with faith.… Once you start banning books, it is a very slippery slope.”

It may come as a surprise to readers that more professors came under fire from the right than the left in 2017.

The right’s efficient fortress, on the other hand, arose largely out of everyday politics and talk radio. As a result, it’s much leaner. The Efficient Rhetorical Fortress is rooted in the right’s growing distrust of authority—a distrust that’s sometimes been well earned by the experts appointed to lead us.

Polling reveals that anti–free speech tendencies are spreading among the entire conservative populace—who have a decreasing affinity for democracy and an increasing acceptance of violence as a legitimate means of opposing political enemies.

American Perspectives poll from that same month found similar results, with 39 percent of Republicans agreeing with the statement “If elected leaders won’t protect America, the people must act—even if that means violence.”

“Reform has to come from within. Right has to reform Right, and Left has to reform Left. And that means that the in-group moderates have to find their voices.

“A common thread in these directives,” wrote Dr. Sally Satel in an article for the Spectator, “is the total disregard for the patient’s agency, assuming that social forces are the singularly important determinant of their problems.”

For a vivid portrayal of how exclusion makes polarization, paranoia, and radicalism far worse, we highly recommend Andrew Callaghan’s This Place Rules,

Make of this what you will: “Although they’re ostensibly heroes within the Star Wars universe, the Jedi are inappropriate symbols for justice work. They are a religious order of intergalactic police-monks, prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic lightsabers, gaslighting by means of ‘Jedi mind tricks,’ etc.).”

Now she’s president of Let Grow, a nonprofit she cofounded with Jonathan Haidt and former FIRE chairman Daniel Shuchman, to promote childhood independence.

Bringing free play back into children’s lives should help them better navigate and negotiate interpersonal interactions with each other. Parents need to empathize and empower rather than swoop in and solve.

There’s something obnoxiously small-minded and elitist in the assumption that, just by some strange historical coincidence, you or your group is somehow the first to land on the universal truths of morality. And yet many American progressives seem to at least subconsciously hold this to be self-evident.

And just like that a diversity, equity, and inclusion executive was squeezed out of the literary world—for the offense of condemning antisemitism while not calling out other forms of prejudice. “The world that we’re in right now leaves very little room for error,” Powers warned. “Canceling someone is a sport, and in this case it is a blood sport.”9

by shielding young readers from ideas and concepts that are deemed “offensive” or “unsafe,” publishers send a chilling message from day one: you as a reader and an independent thinker must rely on others—whether they be sensitivity readers, publishing employees, or self-appointed Twitter mob activists—to protect you from ideas and concepts that they feel you are far too fragile to encounter.

Consider taking a page out of the Netflix book. After hundreds of employees walked out in October 2021 protesting Dave Chappelle’s comedy special in which he made jokes about transgenderism the company refused to capitulate. In fact, they even unveiled a new workplace policy, telling prospective employees, “You may need to work on [movies or shows] you perceive to be harmful. If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the right place for you.”

The goal of K–12 education is creating thoughtful citizens, not activists. Students need to know how to think, not what to think.

“It’s very ironic that we live in an era when we talk a great deal about diversity and inclusion, but in a very real sense, the ethos of cancelation culture is actually exclusion, monoculture and conformity of perspective—driven so much by this forceful ostracization of people who are perceived to have the wrong sorts of ideas.”

Evan Mandery’s 2022 book Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us.

The news media serves as an intermediary between the public and the rest of the world. It was never intended to act as a parent—yet, in recent years it has become much more paternalistic.

we need to get back to an ethos of protecting ourselves based on our own level of sensitivity, rather than make everyone retreat from reality because it makes a few people uncomfortable.

“There is a fundamental difference between reacting to ideas one loathes with scorn or criticism and demanding that specific viewpoints be purged and their authors and enablers punished with loss of livelihood or disciplinary sanctions.”1

Even though it’s legal, employees knowing they could easily be fired for voicing an unpopular opinion on Twitter is bad for democracy and bad for pluralism. It sends a message to many Americans that they have to hide what they believe just to make a living and put food on the table for their families.