Yesterday, I published a post arguing that cancel culture is a subset of call-out culture, which is a bigger problem. I defined calling out as an attempt to enforce conformity by publicly shaming someone for non-conformity (especially wrongthink), implicitly threatening them with disassociation.
Some readers challenged my assumption that call-out culture is a problem. One posited that call-out culture is only bad when the values being enforced are bad.
An example might help resolve this issue. I’ll start by considering the enforcement of values that I and my critics agree are bad.
Let’s say a social justice warrior gets wind of someone expressing a heresy against the woke orthodoxy. The SJW publicly “calls out” the heretic. A woke mob begins to gather and joins in the “struggle session.”
How might the heretic respond?
She might get angry at the attacks and as a result resentfully cling even more tightly to her heresy.
Or she might get rattled by the denunciations and frightened by the threat of disassociation implicit in the attacks. She doesn’t want to lose friends, fans, followers, customers, business partners, etc. So she kowtows, expresses regret, renounces her past heresy, and professes the orthodoxy, even to the point of becoming an orthodoxy-enforcing inquisitor herself.
Now, why would she do that?
It’s conceivable that the shaming and its implicit threat might have driven her to reexamine her beliefs which might have led her to accept wokeness in her heart and genuinely repent.
But it’s much more likely that she is conforming with the orthodoxy primarily for the sake of self-preservation and self-advancement: for preserving and advancing her social standing among the woke set.
That was exactly what her inquisitors were probably doing when they called her out in the first place: virtue signaling for the sake of woke cred.
That is not education. That is indoctrination.
Education is helping someone accept a set of beliefs by helping them understand those beliefs. Indoctrination is using imposed consequences (either carrots or sticks, like the “stick” of disassociation ) to induce someone to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.
Now, it’s possible to indoctrinate people in true/good beliefs like the freedom philosophy. But it’s not advisable. Indoctrinated beliefs tend to fade away once the carrots and sticks that instilled them are withdrawn.
Moreover, indoctrination is a losing game for proponents of good/true beliefs. This is because successful indoctrination depends on how effectively the indoctrinators wield their carrots and sticks, and not on the goodness or truth of the beliefs being indoctrinated.
By joining the call-out/shaming/indoctrination game, proponents of good/true beliefs are throwing away their single, unique, decisive advantage in the contest of ideas.
The winning game for good/true ideas is not indoctrination, but education.
As Leonard Read wrote, libertarians must “rid ourselves of that troublesome notion which leads many people to conclude that the techniques used by communists, for instance, to destroy a free society can be effectively employed to advance an understanding of freedom.”