What are the advantages of "cancel culture"? (Quora)

I tend to think of cancel culture as a version of totalitarianism. You are allowed to say anything you like, providing it is consistent with currently fashionable moral and political orthodoxy.

Any public espousal of heterodox views will result in a torrent of threats and abuse. You will be reported to the authorities. You may be investigated by the police for committing a ‘non-crime hate incident’. Your employer will come under pressure to dismiss you. Your products or artworks will be boycotted simply because they are yours. You will be falsely portrayed as ‘whatever-it-is-phobic’ by people who do not understand the meaning of ‘phobia’.

In short, you will become an unperson, airbrushed from historic photographs, deleted from records and in all respects treated by bien-pensants as though you did not exist.

The advantages for the bien-pensants include:

1. You don’t have to bother engaging with what a cancelled person actually says. This saves a lot of mental effort.

2. You don’t need to come up with rational counter-arguments. This saves exposing your own limitations.

3. Once the thought-police have pronounced the cancelled person guilty, you don’t need any further evidence. A cancellation is good for all time, since it is well known that leopards never change their spots.

4. You are not exposed to any potentially disturbing suggestions that you might just conceivably be wrong.

5. The people upon whose behalf you take offence will appreciate your speaking up for them. And, if they don’t, they aren’t really proper victims at all but collaborators, and you can be rude to them without incurring the penalty of being cancelled yourself.

6. You get to invent neologisms and acronyms to use as insults towards the people you cancel. This enables you to make your mark on the world and enrich the language. (You should be careful to avoid looking in a dictionary to check for pre-existing words). You can display your erudition by using dead classical languages when making up these new words, even if you don’t actually know what words mean in dead classical languages, because no-one dare argue.

7. If you are a student, you can get rid of any teacher you don’t like or who gives you bad grades.

8. If you are a teacher you can threaten with cancellation any student who might have the potential to expose your ignorance or shortcomings.

9. You don’t need to trouble yourself to invent or create anything good. You could become famous simply for tearing things down.

10. You get to feel self-righteous, superior and smug.

11. You get to hate and be intolerant while still describing yourself as liberal. This gives you the best of both worlds.

12. And by the time anyone realises that nothing original and beneficial is coming out of the conformist and obsequious society you have created, you will be too old to care.