OCD, mental illness and "cancel culture"
In the space between mentally ill people, and a morally ill world
I want to use OCD as a lens to understand and critique what is sometimes called cancel culture.
Fear of cancel culture is moving like an infection through the OCD sufferers. Why, and what does this tell us? Someone posted an interesting thread on the OCD subreddit recently:
“Does anyone else have an OCD-fuelled fear of being "cancelled"?
Throwaway because this is a subject I'm mega anxious about!!!
Basically, the title: Does anyone else have really distressing obsessive thoughts about being "cancelled" online/losing their livelihood etc. because of stupid things they did as a teen? I'm just petrified that people will find out about bad stuff from my past, they'll tell my employer, I'll lose my job and never find one again, my life will be ruined, that kind of thing. When the thoughts hit they just cycle and cycle around my brain and I find it so hard to function because what's the point in doing anything if my life will eventually be ruined for things I regret doing? I have to go through all of these compulsive behaviors like Googling my name to see if anything bad comes up and seeking reassurance from loved ones just to feel slightly better, and even then the fear still remains a bit.
Am I totally alone in feeling this way, or have other people experienced it to? If so, how did you manage to overcome it?”
Some interesting comments on the thread:
“I've even stopped pursuing my dream of being a published author because I'm scared that it'll only lead to being "cancelled"...”
“i'm still pursuing that same dream but i'm gonna use a pen name.”
“Cancel Cultures themselves have probably made the same or similar mistakes as the person that they are canceling. Either they have forgotten about it or kept it to themselves.”
“I’m so happy I found somebody who understands this I’m crying”
“ALL OF THE TIME!!! Seriously! I always ask my friends if anything I did back then and even now is awful or worthy of being cancelled, etc, and they look at me like I’m crazy.”
“One thing that helped me was realizing that people have had these kinds of concerns across cultures and eras and found them very disturbing. I don't know why, but seeing 'reputation' on this list of the eight worldly concerns really helped contextualize my own fear and put it into perspective (I am just one person feeling afraid about their reputation).”
“Very much. I’m waiting for someone to unveil the person I truly am underneath and for me to lose everything. Like sometimes it’s from things I know I’ve done and other times it’s just a vibe that the end is coming for me.”
There were the dozens of comments along the lines of “wow, were you in my brain”, “yes, 100% this” etc.
Finally, I saw this comment, which was so good I’m going to draw special attention to it:
I honestly believe that cancelling predates cancel culture... it's a part of a general belief system that people are disposable cogs in a machine that pervades our culture as a whole. Like in the past you could get 'cancelled' by major film studios for being gay, for example. It connects to the idea that if people are 'a problem' you can 'get rid of them' by firing them, locking them away, etc. to keep the core 'pure.' As OCD sufferers we're disproportionately impacted by all forms of purity culture, which has deep roots in our society connected to racism, homophobia, and so on.
Then this caught my attention:
“Im a psychologist and this is becoming a super common theme for my clients”
So I did a bit of searching to see if it really does go beyond this. I found dozens of other threads about the fear of being cancelled on the OCD subreddit, many with dozens of commentators, picking one at random:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OCD/comments/hdup6b/cancelcallout_culture/
Then there were threads on many other forums
There were podcasts:
https://www.fearcastpodcast.com/2020/07/14/real-event-ocd/
And articles:
https://carleton.ca/determinants/2019/cancelled-overcoming-the-fear-of-a-social-media-presence-in-a-growing-call-out-culture/
https://adaa.org/learn-from-us/from-the-experts/blog-posts/consumer/metoo-latest-ocd-trigger
https://cognitivebehavioralstrategies.com/ocd-in-the-age-of-metoo-revisited/#.YHdvSegzZPY
This blog post by a sufferer is particularly good
https://notmakinglemonade.com/myblog/2020/2/5/im-so-ocd-about-scrupulosity
Etc.
So from research, It looks like a number of psychologists and psychiatrists are reporting a lot of OCD sufferers coming to their practices scared of being canceled, Metoo’d, or similar. Patients are also talking about it on the internet. I find this interesting and want to understand it, as a way of critiquing- and understanding- “cancel culture”.
OCD is an opportunistic pathogen as one blogger noted. There are a lot of OCD sufferers paranoid right-now about the coronavirus. This phenomenon of people being scared of cancellation because it’s in the news isn’t surprising in some ways, but I want to dig down into what it can further tell us.
I find the category of “cancel-culture” a little frustrating because it focuses attention on celebrities. The etymology here is telling “cancellation”, coming from the idea of canceling a show, movie, book, or whatever due to a controversy. The old label of “callout culture” seems more adequate in that regard- less focused on big names and celebrities who can be, metaphorically and literally, pulled off the air. I care a lot less about some celebrity being canceled (although I do care) than I care about some poor nobody getting called out, screamed at, told to kill themselves, etc. on the internet.
But the move from “callout” to “cancel” is, in some ways, more accurate. “Cancellation” captures the killer instinct inherent in the phenomena. All pretense to a moral corrective in the term “callout” is now gone.
The other interesting thing about the lingo of “cancellation” is that an ordinary person who fears being canceled is implicitly comparing themselves to a celebrity. I think they are both very right, and very wrong to do so.
They are very right to compare themselves to a celebrity because the internet, particularly Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have turned fame into a matter of degree, rather than a qualitative distinction. I’m not famous, but if I desperately want 10,000 people to read something I write, I can make it happen. The line between “a big account” and internet famous is extremely blurry, and so is the line between internet famous and real famous. This is not to say that there are important distinctions between famous and not here, but more than ever, they are quantitative rather than qualitative.
We are in the future that Andy Warhol imagined. We have our 15 minutes of fame, or at least the chance to strive for it. However, all that fame consists in is the bad bits of being a celebrity- the whiplashes in public opinion- with none of the cash or groupies, and with no agent to manage our PR.
Yet it is also very illogical to consider yourself like a celebrity in this sense. If you’re an ordinary person, unless you get very unlucky (I’m not denying it’s possible), no one cares if you said the N-word on a forum once when you were 15.
I’m not saying ordinary people are immune to cancellation. I once sat down to list everyone I personally knew personally IRL who had suffered a major reputational blow of some kind- from being accused of sexual assault to being exposed for some past act of racism. There were well over 30 people on that list. Some were pretty much as deserved as these things can ever be, others were tragic (an abuse victim accused of abuse by her abuser).
The truth, then, is complex. OCD, as it often does, has a cruel grain of rationality at its core. People are being cancelled. Somewhat randomly, sometimes with weak cause. The odds of it happening to you though, especially in a way that matters, are pretty small.
Who is vulnerable to shaming?
There’s a quote I once saw on, of all places, a Magic: the Gathering card that has influenced my life ever since. “Those without a guilty conscience need one. Those with a guilty conscience don’t”. How does that apply here?
And just who is most affected by shaming online? I don’t mean here just people who get explicitly “canceled”- the celebrities etc. I mean people who are, in one way or another, humiliated, shamed, defamed, or otherwise caught up in the rough and tumble of online argument in which reputations are cheap.
Tautologically, the most harmed people by anything are the most vulnerable. The people most vulnerable to shaming come in a lot of varieties
Materially that is:
1. those who are easily fired or deprived of their livelihood.
2. those who without the money for a legal or PR team.
But also, emotionally and relevantly to OCD:
3.Those with pre-existing mental health problems or an anxious/depressive disposition and
4.Those with strong consciences.
An inevitable effect of shaming online in which, as one of the commentators above noted, people are treated as disposable cogs, is that it is not necessarily elites who are going to be driven out for their deviancy, but the weak, vulnerable and caring. All in the name of protecting the weak, vulnerable and caring.
One user’s comment about how this stuff had gotten under their spiritual armor stood out to me:
Yep. I struggle with this. For me, it's more internal, though - I'm less worried about the potential effects of being "cancelled" (I do still worry about those as a creative - and also about the actual social interactions that would come with such a thing since I'm autisitic and have social anxiety, but those worries are less obsessive somehow) and more about "what if I really am a bad person?" It's sort of a metaphysical contamination theme at it's core for me. I sometimes explain it as the bad parts of Twitter "cancel culture" living in my own head.
Now if my argument were that we should challenge cancel culture because it can be upsetting to people with OCD. That would be stupid. All sorts of things can be upsetting to people with OCD. My argument is a bit subtler than that. My argument is that the boiling-intense moral economies associated with these online spaces are more dangerous to psychologically and materially vulnerable people than to anyone else. OCD is just one example of this. Other examples include not just mental illnesses, but situations and conditions of precarity in all kinds and varieties.
Tu quoque
One of the reoccurring themes in that thread and others that I found interesting was “why are these people doing this? Don’t they know that they’ve surely done things that they could be canceled for as well?” A while ago I did a survey on justice and mercy. One of the main hypotheses that I wanted to test was that people who had a negative appraisal of their own past would be less likely to engage in judgmental behavior online- or at least express the view that they should be more reluctant to engage in such behavior. Surprisingly I did not find such a link. Yet here was a thread full of people remarking that they think it’s foolish to judge when we all have skeletons in our closets. Perhaps there is a link between aversion to judgment and a sense of guilt about one’s own past, but only in certain kinds of mental illness? Much to ponder.
Regardless, I think we OCD sufferers have it right here. Judge not, lest when you are inevitably judged, your judges add insult to injury by also calling you a hypocrite.
En passant: “Cancel culture” and religion
At the moment there’s a debate going on about whether that strange iteration of left-liberalism calling itself “social justice” can be considered a form of religion. I think I might write more about this later, but I wanted to make a few remarks.
As an atheist, it’s hard for me to see it from the inside, but religions are often dialectics between mercy and justice. Such tug-of-wars have occurred many times in history, but intriguingly 2000 years ago a radical preacher from Nazareth came into conflict with the religious authorities of his day, in perhaps the most direct iteration of the clash between mercy and justice.
I’m not religious, and this isn’t a religious, blog, but the words of Jesus here have interesting parallels with the present. He argued that in their tendency to emphasize strict adherence to the law over mercy, the existing religious authorities inevitably made hypocrites of themselves, because they preached rules that were too strict and comprehensive for themselves to keep, and preached them without exception. Thus they did in secret what they said not to do in public, corrupting their own virtue, even while they were concerned to demonstrate virtue. He compared them to tombs, bleached white and shining on the outside, but inside filled with rot and corruption.
Genuine concern for other people, he argued, was much, much harder to uphold than a list of laws. It demanded infinite concern and activity, rather than a box checking approach to goodness. It would require being honest about one’s failings over respectability, and seeking forgiveness for those failings, even as we granted forgiveness to others. Genuine concern though, was more authentic than legalism. This is to say, in the dialectic of justice and mercy he championed mercy. In championing authenticity and direct concern over rules and habits, he was perhaps also the first existentialist. 2000 years later as we talk with each other about justice while trying to throttle each other on the internet I find that interesting. What would a Social Mercy Warrior look like?
Hi!
I have this type of OCD only I am not afraid of being cancelled or called out. I am actually canceling myself. I feel ashame. At one point I felt like I didn’t deserve to live anymore. I can justify the fact that I am not afraid of being cancelled as my compulsion is to confess to the people I care the most the things I am ashamed of. My OCD is focused on the fear of acting, saying or even more thinking stuff that are against my moral values. I volunteer in non profit organization, I am an activist etc. But OCD is a disease that brings guilt, shame and doubt. It sticks to the things you care the most in world. Acting against my moral values hurting people by saying or doing stupid stuff is scary for me. My mind is anxious and sticks to the things that scares me to justify this anxiety. Did you know that many mothers who just gave birth had this OCD related to killing or hurting their child? They are so scared and anxious of hurting thé baby that they doubt that they actually did and they have to check over and over that they didn’t.
I really like the "Social Mercy Warrior" idea/phrase!
I've long felt like, if we were to perform a really comprehensive (and accurate) accounting of 'social injustice' – and we decided to allocate blame, or impose any costs, on the living descendants of past 'criminals' – that everyone would be fucked.
There's this great prayer/quote (I think) that's something like 'God grant us mercy because we wouldn't survive justice'. I couldn't find it, but it's stuck in my head (in a weird degraded form) because I think it captures an important and true aspect or morality and ethics.
This also reminds me of the 'ethical policing' that is portrayed in The Culture books: hurting (let alone imprisoning or killing) someone should be a last resort. Sadly, I think our 'ethical policing tech' is so weak that we probably need to resort to it a lot. But one aspect of what the books portray that might be a good initial focus for iterative development is to focus on preventing future harms, e.g. monitor or surveil people that have harmed others in some way to prevent them from doing so again.
The consequential logic is tricky, but I feel like _aiming_ towards 'mercy' (as a tradeoff with our ability to protect past, present, and future victims) is more likely 'correct' (ethically) than a strict adherence to 'justice' (especially as some kind of 'fixed'/'eternal' notion of justice in any detail).