A civilization imbues some people with power—judges, politicians, billionaires—and then supports that power through its existence. The reason that people are afraid of the Gossip Trap, in which social pressure holds more power than courts of law, isn’t because they are afraid of a regression of the human race. The people who are afraid of the Gossip Trap (or Cancel Culture, Woke Mobs, the Media, or whatever you want to call the kind of social pressure that can create change) are the ones who have reason to be: they have outsized power in our society, and they want to hold on to it.
