Martin v Staden: Don’t blame the ‘cancel culture’ mob – blame the appeasers

In the debate over cancel culture, the real culprits aren't the mobs but the appeasers who enable them. While social ostracism has its place in maintaining societal norms, appeasement only fuels the fire, sacrificing principles for temporary peace. From businesses to political parties, caving to cancel demands erodes integrity without satisfying the mob. True accountability lies with those who abandon their convictions, not the rational actors pursuing their cause..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..The seventh BizNews Conference, BNC#7, is to be held in Hermanus from March 11 to 13, 2025. The 2025 BizNews Conference is designed to provide an excellent opportunity for members of the BizNews community to interact directly with the keynote speakers, old (and new) friends from previous BNC events – and to interact with members of the BizNews team. Register for BNC#7 here..By Martin van Staden.In the age of so-called "cancel culture," it takes two to tango: the cancel mob, and those who tolerate and appease them. We might be misallocating attention by focusing too much on the mob, which is acting rationally in pursuit of its cause. It is the appeasers who need to be held accountable..Cancel culture is nothing more than social ostracism, which is an important tool that we should be careful about rejecting in principle. The alternative to ostracism – "cancel culture" – is not, as many philosopher-kings believe, "open and constructive discourse," but rather state censorship. And we should certainly pick non-violent social pressure over coercive government interference..That does not mean cancel culture does not – like all things – have its excesses. South Africa has its fair share of excessive cancel culture, and we should attempt to mitigate its effect without throwing the baby out with the bathwater..But in this process, we should also be careful to identify the people who are, truly, to blame for unjustifiable cancellations: the cancel mob, or those who bow to the mob?.Disproven strategy.Appeasement has been proved a thoroughly ineffective strategy that only serves to enable, not neutralise, wrongdoing. .In the case of cancel culture, the temptation to appease is great, as people just want the mob to go away. But it is important for the uninitiated among us to understand that appeasement does not work, and most likely never will work – with negligible exceptions – to make the mob go away..It simply throws more fuel on the fire..And while it is important to teach the would-be appeasers (at least those who are well-intended and have passably defensible values) not to apologise, but to stand by their convictions, at some point we need to recognise that appeasement is part of the structure that threatens liberty and civilisation. .Appeasers, through their conduct, convert themselves from being a hapless collateral simply swept up in tides, into active participants..Giving the mob what the mob demands means one has gone from being an innocent bystander to being part of the mob..I, for one, am therefore increasingly losing sympathy for those who end up being crushed under the weight of their own appeasement. .Small business owners who open their doors to the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) when the party comes to conduct its pencil tests on "illegal" staff probably deserve to have their stores ransacked..Businesses that go out of their way to racially window-dress to appease the transformania mob – and predictably fail – probably deserve the turmoil they go through..School principals that engage mobs rather than immediately putting a pin in anyone's agenda to fiddle with pupils probably deserve to be cancelled themselves..In our quest to appease we always sacrifice not only our own principles, but those of others around us. .Read more: When good intentions backfire: From raccoon mobs to policy failures – James Peron.After being headhunted, Roman Cabanac was thrown under the bus by John Steenhuisen. .After 13 years of loyal service and uncompromising defence of the Democratic Alliance (DA) – even against my own criticisms – Renaldo Gouws was also thrown under the bus in an attempt to appease the mob. .The DA has not been and will not be forgiven its initial "sin" of hiring Cabanac and Gouws in the first place. By helping the mob cancel Cabanac and Gouws, the DA has gained nothing, and has succeeded only in sacrificing its principles and those who stood by it. As such, it probably deserves any further pain it experiences from this kerfuffle. .The mob or the appeaser?.Cancel mobs do exactly what they must for their cause. .If I found information about something Julius Malema did 35 years ago that could get him thrown out of Parliament, I would use it. I would attempt to "cancel" him, and I will not care one bit that "he has changed" between then and now..This serves my cause and the cause of my mob..It would make no sense for Malema to blame me. I would be acting entirely rationally. He would have to blame the people who could actually decide to kick him out of Parliament..At a meeting of influential civil society organisations recently, I pointed out to my colleagues that we might be wasting our time trying to win new converts to "sensible" and "sober" policy and political thinking, when those we assumed are already converted are not. .Every time a liberal member of Parliament "apologises" for doing nothing wrong, or someone from the usually ideologically fortified Afrikaans community "apologises" for practising their culture, it is clear that much work on the inside of the circle still needs to be done.."Decent society" and bottoms lines.We make the mistake of thinking that there is decent society on the one hand, and the cancel mob which exists mostly on Twitter, the press media, and in the universities on the other. .It is not this simple, because it takes appeasement from those in "decent society" to make cancel mobs function. Here I specifically have employers – usually the CEOs of large companies – in mind..We get up and go to work every day, not actively regarding our bosses as potential enemies. In a healthy society, we should not have to. .But we need to ask ourselves whether our bosses will – as they must – delete any email "exposing" something we did as teenagers (long before they met us, in other words) or whether they will call us in for a meeting that ends up with our being ordered to issue a grovelling apology, and then being fired anyway. Who are the kinds of people we surround ourselves with?.Read more: 🔒 The Economist: Has social media broken the stockmarket?.The usual rejoinder here is that we cannot blame the bosses (or the DA, for that matter), because they are rightly concerned with their bottom line and their voter share. The feelings of their unfairly-cancelled employees are not important in the greater scheme of things..This line of reasoning, however, necessarily assumes that the cancel mob has any leverage to harm the bottom line to begin with. .The DA would have lost no votes if it kept Renaldo Gouws in Parliament, for example, because those cancelling him were committed non-DA voters. .I tried to find out whether the H&M retailer lost any custom due to its ad featuring a black youngster in a "Coolest Monkey in the Jungle" hoodie, for which it apologised. It does not seem that it did, nor do I think it would have in the long term, given the short attention span of those who usually participate in cancel mobs..Forget about the bottom line. Employers fire because they – at this stage, wilfully and recklessly – are ignorant or, less likely, because they agree with the cause of the cancelers. .Either way, it is they – not the cancel mob – who are to blame for the cancellation..Accusations of racism and other forms of bigotry can still destroy people's lives, not because anyone really cares anymore, but because a very small group of socially-uninvolved people misattribute the value of racism. .These are usually the CEOs of large companies. .They do not exist in the same spaces as 99% of other South Africans. They exist only in one another's spaces, and what they know about the rest of South Africa they get from the mainstream media and Twitter. .So they – perhaps they alone – might believe that white-on-black racism is the "problem" in South Africa. So-called "black Twitter" certainly knows it is not a problem, but those "influencers" understand that racism is all they have and will continue defining themselves within that discourse. .It is only because the CEOs have wilfully isolated themselves from reality that we need to continue worrying about false accusations of racism. We should hold them accountable for it, not the mob. The mob is acting as expected. The appeasers are, ultimately, the proximate cause of any unjustifiable cancellation..Read also:.Italian mafia shifts to white-collar crime, exploiting post-COVID recovery fundsChuck Stephens on Israel and Hamas: Enough is enoughPeeling back Sicily's tourist facade: Revealing the Mafia's economic grip.*Martin van Staden is the Head of Policy at the Free Market Foundation and former Deputy Head of Policy Research at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR). Martin also serves as the Editor of the IRR's History Project and its Race Law Project, and is an advisor to the Free Speech Union SA. He is pursuing a doctorate in law at the University of Pretoria. For more information visit www.martinvanstaden.com..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission

Martin v Staden: Don’t blame the ‘cancel culture’ mob – blame the appeasers

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