From Cancellation to Assassination

Why Ideological Conformity Is Everyone's Problem

Last week, America bore witness to a flesh-and-blood enactment of something that’s been happening in the bowels of comment sections and online forums for years: The silencing of dissenting opinions. But this time, the muzzle to free speech did not come in the form of public shaming, character assassination, deplatforming, or cancellation, but in the form of a single, well-aimed bullet.

Say what you will about Charlie Kirk. Speaking personally, I toggled back and forth between thinking he was a genius and a moron, an oracle and an idiot. But whether you love or hate him, one thing is for certain: He was a truly independent thinker. I disagreed with many of his views, but respected that he expressed his unique somebodiness with the world, and courageously forged an intellectual path that was agnostic to what others wanted from him.

But this essay isn’t about Charlie Kirk. It’s about the modern day assault on critical thought and free speech. What follows is a psychological, philosophical, and historical exploration of the nature of ideological conformity, the unique pressures of conformity in our modern world, and the dire need to create safe spaces for open dialogue.

Conformity, Now and Then (Spoiler: It’s Getting Worse)

Psychologists and philosophers have long-lamented the dangers of conformity.

To Søren Kierkegaard, conformity was represented by the crowd; to Friedrich Nietzsche the herd; to Martin Heidegger the they-self; to José Ortega y Gasset the mass man; to Carl Rogers and Donald Winnicott the false self; to Rollo May the inauthentic self; to Carl Jung the persona or the shadow, depending on how ingrained said conformity is. These and many other terms have been coined to capture the idea that when we as humans tend to absorb the values, ideas, and attributes of those around us, trading in our individuality for a sense of belonging.

According to these great minds, we conform because we are terrified of our aloneness. Erich Fromm explained that we surrender our individuality to the group because we are overwhelmed by the uncertainty and freedom we face as humans, which Søren Kierkegaard aptly captured when he wrote, “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” Jean-Paul Sartre referred to this as bad faith, a form of self-deception in which we evade freedom and responsibility by hiding behind social roles and excuses.

To be certain, the pressure to conform is nothing new. In the 1st century, Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish teacher who preached messages of love and equality, was charged with sedition and treason by the Roman state and executed by crucifixion. In the 17th century, Galileo Galilei was found "vehemently suspect of heresy" for his views of heliocentrism which challenged church doctrine, and spent the last nine years of his life under house arrest. In the 19th century, Frederick Douglass, the Black abolitionist and orator who escaped slavery, was pressured by white abolitionists to downplay his intellect so he could more convincingly play the role of the raw and grateful ex-slave.

In centuries past, Fromm notes that the demands of conformity were often quite explicit: You must obey the doctrine of your church, laws of your government, and the norms of your gender, race, or class — or else. There were specific expectations for conformity and ensuing consequences for nonconformity, which made people more aware of the fact that they were playing a role that wasn’t a reflection of their true selves.

In our modern world, however, Fromm says that we face a much more insidious type of conformity: One in which we are not explicitly told what is right or wrong, but we are indirectly or covertly guilted, pressured, or cajoled one way or another. This produces a highly dangerous form of inauthenticity — what Fromm calls automaton conformity — in which we assume we are acting freely, but are not. He describes the pressures of conformity in centuries past “a much crueler, but in fact a much healthier method” relative to the pressures of the modern day.

Why so Conforming? Inauthenticity as Adaptation

A confluence of unprecedented factors, largely driven by technology and social platforms, are driving our modern push for ideological conformity.

We cannot discuss ideological conformity without a nod to cancel culture. A movement which originated on Black Twitter to combat racism, cancel culture has since been adopted by the masses as an attempt to disinvest in someone or something in response to perceived moral improprieties. While supporters argue that cancel culture is a method of representation, accountability, and elimination of biases, it is nonetheless a subjective assessment of morality and unmoderated mode of justice that creates a new bias: Us versus them.

While it may seem as though cancel culture only affects those who it, well, cancels, research indicates that it’s preventing us from expressing ourselves in the first place. Across a 20-year period, we are at our lowest in our need for uniqueness, our desire to be seen as different, especially when it comes to not wanting to defend our beliefs in publically and caring more about what others think of us. We are particularly concerned about communicating unpopular or controversial opinions on social media, where our opinions to be more public, permanent, and vulnerable to policing.

Unsurprisingly, our rates of social anxiety — the fear of being negatively evaluated in social situations which causes us to adapt to the group in ways that improve our social desirability and avoid ostracism — are through the roof, especially among young people. The fear of being judged has given an entire generation a perhaps literal panic attack, resulting in highly detrimental adaptations: Self-silencing, inauthenticity, and conformity.

But social media is not the only space where ideological suppression runs rampant. In academia, a historical haven sor critical thought, there is a growing sentiment that cancel culture has restricted dialogue and suppressed a diversity of opinions. In a not-yet peer reviewed study, researchers found that 88 percent of students adopt more progressive views than they truly endorse to succeed socially or academically, and 80 percent said they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views to conform ideologically with their professors.

In line with this adaptation theory, many have realized that ideological conformity can improve their social standing, as demonstrated by the widespread use of virtue signaling, performative allyship, and other public gestures of morality. While the desire to advocate for disadvantaged groups is often rooted in good intent, research has shown that it is often a behavior of advantaged groups to attain personal benefit, like boosting our reputation or gaining popularity. Indeed, allyship is often an aesthetic concern over a moral one.

In our culture of safetyism, a cultural trend in which emotional safety is prioritized over open debate, resilience, and responsibility, we have perhaps triggered ourselves out of the ability to hold space for uncomfortable and ideologically-challenging experiences. This fragility is not just emotional, but intellectual, resulting in a culture of individuals who are largely unable to engage in nuanced, paradoxical, contradictory, and otherwise dialectical thought. The inevitable result is a weak ego that can only tolerate the comfort of dichotomies: Right or left, good or evil, white or Black, ally or foe, Palestine or Israel, and so forth.

Instead of forging ahead as distinct individuals, many of us have leveraged identity politics, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of oppression based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion, for purposes that aren’t life-affirming. Beyond injustices that would typically warrant victim status, researchers note that we are now more likely to see ourselves as victims for smaller grievances, like microaggressions, and that this is often an attempt to boost our own moral standing, even among privileged or advantaged groups.

All of these factors are rooted in or at least exacerbated by our use of social media. In the echo chamber of a virtual environment, we are perhaps more likely to fall prey to the spiral of silence theory, which refers to our tendency to remain silent when we believe we hold minority opinions, which further magnifies the sense that the majority view is dominant, as well as pluralistic ignorance, a phenomenon in which we mistakenly believe that most people hold views that we privately reject, which creates a group consensus that doesn’t actually reflect the group’s real views.

To be clear, absolutely none of this is to suggest that we should forgo any genuine beliefs that we hold, nor dismiss efforts in advocacy and activism that mean something to us. Instead, it’s to underscore the dangers to the human organism and society alike when we trade in our truth for the rage, victimhood, or hatred of the herd. In the best case, we destroy ourselves; in the worst case, we destroy each other.