I recall
George Bernard Shaw once remarked that when it comes to changing the world for
the better, it’s unreasonable people who influence most, because reasonable
people tend to just go along with the flow. I’ve said before that the woke,
cancel culture, assault on our society is one of the worst assaults in modern
times. It’s bad for all sorts of reasons I outline here,
here,
and here,
but from an economist perspective, it’s worse because while it hurts everyone in
a thinly spread array of personal costs (both directly and indirectly) it also
hurts a select subsection of society in a more concentrated way, because the
biggest influencers are more likely to be the ones who are censored or
penalised by woke.
Just as rent controls, tariffs and minimum wage laws most negatively affect the people those policies purport to help, woke most negatively affects those who are likely to be the most positive influencers in society – the unreasonable people who can change the world for the better.
Moreover, from the many cases I’ve seen of people being fired, threatened with dismissal or socially ostracised for a particular view, I find I’ve usually agreed with the person expressing the view under scrutiny rather than those who want them cancelled. To that end, it’s probable that cancel culture tends to disproportionately target those who speak the truth and who have the most important insights – especially given that those who wish to censor speech are almost always doing so to protect their own ideological agendas from challenge.
