The Toxicity of Cancel Culture
Easily offended? It's a trap.
Cancel culture has become more and more prevalent it seems. It’s an interesting phenomenon to behold as people seem to take more offence from the words of strangers than ever before. How did we get to become so easily offended and what does it really say about us as a collective?
Victim Mentality
If you are one of those people who are easily offended it’s worthwhile investigating where this is coming from and whether or not it’s really serving you. When we are easily offended we are essentially giving other people outside of ourselves the ability to make us feel offended and bad. We’re once again giving our power away (I wrote a piece called Take Your Power Back which is a relevant read on this topic).
You might say that you are not willingly giving your power away and that you don’t like being offended but you just are! Well, guess what? That’s the surface level story that you are buying into but it’s not the truth of what is really happening.
Whenever we do anything that isn’t really serving us there’s an underlying reason why we do it. This is often referred to in psychology as secondary gain. You are gaining something from behaving and feeling the way that you are, ie. offended.
What could we possibly gain from being offended? We get to be the victim. We get to be pitied and we get, in theory at least, to be the righteous one. Ooh! That’s very tempting to the ego. Being easily offended stems from having a victim mentality. It’s the opposite of empowering. Essentially you are trading your power for a little bit of pity and a feeling of any moral superiority you may feel by having been ‘wronged’.
Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offence cannot reach it.
- Rene Descartes
This may taste sweet to you in the moment, but ultimately it’s keeping you small and it reinforces an external locus of control.
What does that tell us of the current state of personal empowerment within the collective? It’s virtually non-existent it seems. We have to start realising that we are reinforcing a disempowering belief based on emotional and psychological wounding and moreover we are rewarding that behaviour by ‘cancelling’ those who have supposedly caused that behaviour.
The Perpetrator
Wherever there is a ‘victim’ there is also a ‘perpetrator’. Let’s touch on this briefly as well. By cancelling someone who has said something offensive we feel that we have righted the wrong and restored justice. Yet is this the case? I don’t believe this is about the perpetrator so much regardless of what has been said. Of course no one should go out of their way to say mean and hurtful things to other human beings. That’s common decency. The reality is, however, that we live in a world of free will and people say all sorts of things. The main ingredient for judging it as ‘right or wrong’ in my view is intent. Intent is virtually impossible to establish yet it seems to be ignored all together. The extent of the harm, is the extent to which it offends which is of course entirely subjective. Not ideal.
A Lack of Self-Worth
The irony of all of this is that being easily offended stems, like stated above, from wounding. It stems from a low sense of personal power, an external locus of control and a victim mentality. What does this really mean? It means that it’s those with a low sense of self-worth and personal power who are ironically giving more of their power away in exchange for a temporary high. It’s a crappy deal. Yet they don’t realise this. The ego and the small self want it badly. A moment of power and victory with a dose of some pity love. That’s real love right? Not so much.
This is a sad phenomenon but I believe it’s nothing new. The majority of us have been living with a victim mentality for centuries. We’ve inherited it from our ancestors and it’s understandable. I myself have struggled with a victim mentality in the past. Everything I created and how I lived my life stemmed from this mentality. It’s reductive to say the least. I no longer live from that place and you shouldn’t either.
Where Can We Go From Here
What’s the opposite of giving your power away by being easily offended? It’s personal power. Think of a powerful person. Someone who has mastered themselves. Do you imagine this is a person who would get easily offended? Not likely. Those who have an internal locus of control and have a healthy dose of self-acceptance and self-love are not easily offended or thrown off balance by others.
They maintain their sense of personal power regardless of outside circumstances and they stay balanced and centred in their being. They simply don’t allow the comments of others to carry any importance or to affect them negatively. That’s empowerment. That’s calm assurance.
That which offends you only weakens you. Being offended creates the same destructive energy that offended you in the first place - so transcend your ego and stay in peace.
- Wayne Dyer
We have to remember that our power comes from within us, not from out there. We can decide what we give importance to and who to be in any given moment. I am hopeful that we can evolve to reach this place as a collective as more and more people take their power back by refusing to give their power away by being offended by the remarks of others. Respect yourself enough not to care.
You may lose the rewards of being pitied and feeling powerful when wronged but that’s not real power. It’s keeping you small as a tiny bug in a massive castle. Wouldn’t you rather be a king or queen? I know I would.
Let’s start behaving like the powerful beings that we are instead of playing small like a tiny bug (no offence to bugs who I’m sure are wise enough not to take offence as they have more important things to worry about).
Don’t be offended. You’re better than that.
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Hege you always seem to be ahead of the curve! The part about the victim mentality reminds me of a ‘victim’ I unwittingly defended years ago. I met a woman, and as I often do, I introduced her to my circle of friends and we all got along. We celebrated with her as she got a new job that she was thrilled about.
After a couple of weeks, she suddenly told us that her new boss had been acting completely inappropriately toward her at work. He was attacking her, demeaning her work, being a complete asshole. Me and my friends rushed to her defense instinctively. She ended up leaving the job soon after and we told her how much better off she would be and away from that asshole.
But over time, we would see that our new friend often played the role of ‘victim’, someone was always out to get her. At the same time, I got to know her ‘asshole’ boss at the job she left, and found out he was actually a great guy, completely mild-mannered. It seemed I had jumped to the wrong conclusion about who the real asshole was. I learned a lot of lessons about jumping to conclusions from that whole episode.
Hege, thank you for a truly fascinating, thought provoking and enlightening piece. One which I will continue to come back to and reread I'm sure. It has certainly made me look deeper at how I have, in the past, let the words of others affect me.