Surviving cancel culture

There is a part of the world, ours, where not so much power but the individual's own sensitivity generates a despotic order and a rewriting of reality.

What is new, in stable democratic societies, is that there is no longer a violent and even bloody struggle to change a reality imposed on the subjects —as in many other parts of the planet—, but rather that reality is erased and reset and reformulates to adapt it to a soft indignant sensibility.

Everything that does not fit with that hypersensitivity of the offense dressed as a moral demand is denounced, persecuted, made to disappear, cancelled.

Although tyrannical governments abound in the world, however, in Western democracies power seeks to adopt a soft face, it does not want to show itself as a dominating Leviathan.

And while governments secretly try to disguise their authoritarianism, we see it grow where the hope of rebellion lay: in individuals.

For a long time, two opposite poles were considered: on the one hand, individuals;

on the other, the power that annulled them.

Subsequently, the unconscious way in which humans introject that power and obey the rules without realizing it, with the vain illusion of being free, has been delved into.

It has been the dictatorships that have usually imposed repression, even when, to a large extent, the rules could be assumed by the subjects, in a “voluntary servitude”.

Repression (not only sexual) has been sublimated with moral, religious or social justifications: it seems, then, that a desublimation should lead us to true freedom.

But Herbert Marcuse already coined the term “repressive desublimation” to show how assumed coercion nested under the face of supposed freedom.

Festive hypersexualization does not free us from the normativity —today diverse, desiring and inclusive— with which the map of its truth is drawn.

The famous pamphlet

of Stéphane Hessel, 15-M, even the gruff gesture of Greta Thunberg proposed an uprising against an adverse, unfair, predatory world..., all this seems to dissolve into an offended narcissism plagued by censorship, persecution and ferocity, in which the emotion replaces reason.

Taking the Bastille or conquering the Winter Palace have become old symbols of this overthrow of absolutism, they were the object of revolutions, fueled by theories (the Enlightenment, Marxism).

Currently, sentimentality replaces the theoretical scaffolding, a social change is not sought but a compensation for the wounded identity.

It is not intended to modify reality, but to invent it, correct it retrospectively, and force public and legal assent to this purification: the new normality as a collective psychosis of political correctness.

culture

performs the following translation: I feel offended, then there is a real offense (leap from feeling to objectivity), all dissent is a show of hatred (argumentation is rejected), then those who offend me in this way deserve to be canceled (I I don't hate, I repair injustice, says the canceller).

We are witnessing an omnipotence of desire that erases those who do not show the required correction, and, on the other hand, a manipulation of guilt.

We will never be able to live up to those who belong to an oppressed group —or try to show themselves as such—, their legacy of humiliation means that any word can reopen the wound, it is not possible to speak, to reason, but to show solidarity with their oppression, make us forgive belonging to the group of oppressors.

In addition to the personal dramas that the "cancelled" can suffer, it seems important to me to point out a substantial consequence: the canceled culture, and, beyond that, the falsified culture.

All those books and movies that are no longer recommended because they contain elements that are now prohibited.

from its catalogue

, but, betraying history, it chooses a black actress as Anne Boleyn in its miniseries of the same title, similar to Garth Davis' desire in his film

by turning Saint Peter into a colored man.

Is that the effective way to overcome racism?

And in the event of any other impropriety, will we hide artistic works? Will we resurrect the index of prohibited books or will we only rewrite a few paragraphs?

Why not critical contextualization instead of censorship?

The real doesn't matter, it's imperfect, my desire must prevail —thinks the new censoring narcissus.

We change the past, bodies, nature.

The feeling generates rights, laws, reality.

This is the background of the

, inscribed in what Michel Foucault called the “regime of truth” —or fiction— of our time.

We are losing reality, history, and turning culture into a story for fearful and spoiled children who cannot bear the slightest scratch, but can push those who do not share their vision to nothing.

We must prepare ourselves to survive the daggers wrapped in cotton.

Rosa María Rodríguez Magda

is a philosopher and writer.

She is the author, among other books, of

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