Thread by @caylanford

I struggled for a long time to understand why people are often ‘cancelled’ for making true statements in good faith. This didn’t compute for me; there’s nothing immoral about saying true things.

After lots of conversations w/ ‘cancellers’, I understood the problem…

I consider truth to be a form of the good. It’s noble to try to apprehend the order of the cosmos and the laws of nature—which are beautiful and just—and attune ourselves to them. In a disagreement, I take for granted that truth is an authority to which both parties can appeal.

People in thrall to ideology do not believe that truth is a good. They don’t think the universe is well ordered, or that the laws governing it are just. Because they perceive reality as defective and wrong, appeals to truth are meaningless. It has no moral authority.

As I was once told by someone who participated in my own cancellation: it doesn’t matter what’s true. What matters is what *should* be true.

In Marxian terms, “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Proponents of cancel culture believe that if they can stop the accurate observation and description of reality—e.g. by corrupting the meaning of words, delegitimizing hard sciences, and through the threat of social ostracism—they can actually change reality.

Sadly for them, and happily for the rest of us, the fundamental order of being can’t be actually changed, because it lies outside man’s control. In the war against reality, reality always wins.

Further or in the alternative, they don’t believe in the objective existence of truth. The “givenness” of reality is denied, and the order of being is imagined as something that is essentially under man’s control. Truth is whatever (human, earthly) power says it is.