The Pillory, the Stock, and Cancel Culture

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Getting fired is only the end of the beginning for victims of cancelation.  It’s the transition from the “acute” to the “chronic” stage, as a canceled colleague describes it.

Life in the chronic stage may sound familiar: triggers and flashbacks, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, unexplained physical pain, prolonged unemployment, social withdrawal, self-exclusion — and, frequently, suicidality. 

Public humiliation at the scale digital media make possible can induce a symptom cluster that mirrors the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder. 

Benjamin Rush, Founding Father and the father of American psychiatry, presaged this in 1787, writing, “Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death,” in an essay arguing against public punishments.  Rush opposed capital punishment and permanent banishment, yet he believed that “there is more mercy to the criminal, and less injury done to society, by both of them, than by public infamy and pain, without them.”

The neuroscience behind humiliation and social disconnection are validating Rush’s insight.  Research indicates that the brain responds more strongly to humiliation than to happiness or anger.  Because social connection is a requirement for survival for many mammals, including humans, the brain processes social traumas in regions directly adjacent to where physical pain is processed.  That may explain why we physically “feel” break-ups, bereavements, humiliation, and exclusion.  Often, the more severe the social trauma, the more severe the physical pain.  The desire to alleviate extreme levels of social pain, physical pain, or an interplay between the two can lead sufferers to seek any relief, even death.

Rush argued that even “temporary” public punishments, like the pillory or forced labor, as opposed to branding or other mutilation, have a permanent effect.  They “leave scars, which disfigure the whole character.”  These scars, not the acts that ostensibly justify them, seal the offender’s humiliation as a life sentence.  “The infamy of criminals, is derived, not so much from the remembrance of their crimes, as from the recollection of the ignominy of their punishments.”

“The internet is forever” extends Rush’s observations across time and space.  A publicly punished criminal of the revolutionary era could, in theory, go to another state, colony, or territory, or to the far side of the frontier, and attempt a new start.  As long as no one who witnessed his punishment followed him, he had a chance of a clean slate.  Today, there’s no escaping Google and social media.  Anyone, anywhere, at any time who looks up the name of a new neighbor or job applicant becomes the latest witness to his public humiliation via search results declaiming “racist,” “sexist,” “workplace bullying,” “allegations of sexual harassment,” or “toxic culture” — or, quite recently, “praising assassination attempt.”

Many of the canceled people I’ve spoken to have told me that prospective employers will tell them that they don’t put much stock in the accusations, and they understand how these things work, but they “can’t take the chance” on someone with this kind of online history. 

The offense don’t follow them.  The punishment does.

Rush noted that public punishments fail to reform offenders and deter witnesses.  More concerning to Rush was his conclusion that “[a] man who has lost his character at a whipping-post, has nothing valuable left to lose in society. … He probably feels a spirit of revenge against the whole community.”

This is the most significant deviation between Rush’s perspectives and my experience with victims of cancelation.  One explanation could be that Rush was writing about convicted criminals.  Although many of the crimes that carried public punishments seem foreign and primitive to our modern perspectives, in Rush’s time, acts like adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, and fornication fell under the criminal code.  Offenders were sentenced after a similarly foreign and primitive judicial process, but a judicial process just the same.

Few cancelations have an analogue in the criminal code.  Cancelations normally follow from modern social transgressions: various “-isms” and “-phobias,” or vague descriptions of professional misconduct. 

This could explain why the cancelation victims I’ve spoken to rarely express even the smallest interest in revenge or retribution.  The impulse for evening the score tends to reside with those in the blast radius of their cancelation: family members, neighbors, former athletes and mentees. 

Stepping outside that close circle, Rush understood the tribal dynamics currently playing out between social media and the real world. 

People who have no connection to the punished other than as witnesses will become callused to the acts done in society’s name at the pillory or stocks.  Witnesses who believe that public punishments are divorced from actual offense will develop “a disposition to exercise the same arbitrary cruelty over the feelings and lives of their fellow-creatures.”  Public punishments “are calculated” to reduce or eliminate witnesses’ “sensibility.”  “[S]ympathy, after being often opposed by the law of the state, which forbids it to relieve the distress it commiserates, will cease to act altogether. … Misery of every kind will then be contemplated without emotion or sympathy.”

We see that today, commentators on the political right shrug “their rules” when a retail employee is publicly identified, shamed, swarmed, and fired via social media.  Increasingly, “their rules” isn’t a justification, but a moral principle guiding, perhaps dictating, future action.

The phenomenon, and the trauma, of cancelation is at the intersection of the practical and the psychological. 

Unemployment is the immediate practical consequence of cancelation.  The digital scarlet letter subsequently attached to the canceled’s name robs him of the fulfillment he achieves through the productivity, independence, and sense of self that come from work.  That’s true whether we’re talking about an hourly worker, an Olympic coach, or a CEO. 

Rush’s enquiry is similarly practical and psychological.  He does not scrutinize public punishments from the perspectives of justice or the will of the divine.  Rush observed the direct psychological effects that public punishments have on the offenders and the witnesses.  Citing data from England and the colonies, he explains how those psychological effects ripple through society with the practical consequences of increasing crimes, building the notoriety of and sympathy for the offenders, and “render[ing] labour of every kind disreputable.”  He crescendoes to asking, in another echo of the modern day, “From whence arose the conspiracies, assassinations and poisonings, which prevailed in the decline of the Roman empire?  Were they not favoured by the public executions of the amphitheatre?”

Physical pain was as much a part of colonial-era public punishments as the ignominy.  Cancelations are bloodless, but their long-term consequences are no less physical. 

Dr. Christine Marie is a media psychologist and consultant who is lobbying the American Psychiatric Association to recognize media humiliation as a potential precursor of post-traumatic stress disorder.  “The mental health impact on a person who goes through a cancelation is beyond what I believe the people who are doing the canceling can even fathom,” she says.  Modern neuroscience is revealing that humiliation, social exclusion, and PTSD can each, independently, induce chronic physical changes in the brain, which in turn affect physiological functions and overall health throughout the body.  The mental health effects of cancelation are additional catalysts in this destructive cycle.

Rush hoped that “the time is not very distant, when the gallows, the pillory, the stocks, the whipping-post, and the wheel-barrow (the usual engines of public punishments) will be connected with the history of the rack, and the stake, as marks of the barbarity of ages and countries.”

“Their rules” retribution locks us into a cycle that Rush would recognize in its impulses and effects, if not its modern instruments of personal and cultural destruction.

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