This is the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The America of that time, up until around 1980, had characteristics that were more friendly to those who are different. Those who opposed McCarthyism during the Eisenhower administration, for example, supported the individualism of the right to march to the sound of a different drummer. The same respect for the right to be different made them oppose “guilt by association.” They opposed groupthink, which is now valorized as “solidarity.” They opposed “end justifies the means” rationalization in the name of principled argument, representing individual values rather than group aggrandizement. The chief characteristic of the America of the Great Generation was friendship. The chief characteristic of what America has become is enmity.
This is particularly disastrous for people who are thought to “offend” because of birth defects.
Sociologist Erving Goffman noted that disabled and other stigmatized people have a “spoiled identity.”
Christophe Van Eecke on “Cancel Culture and the Logic of Torture” in Quillette: “Nevertheless, a very similar effect is obtained by destroying the victim’s social world. This explains why it is important for shaming and cancellation to be public events—they are meant to isolate the accused from the community. This isolation is experienced as physical as much as spiritual. The destruction of the world that is achieved in torture by the destruction of the body and its relationship to its immediate physical surroundings is achieved in cancel culture by the infliction of an abject state of loneliness, which equally cuts the victim off from the world.” (Emphasis added)
Unlike other targeted minorities, the clefted, being a minuscule population (1 in 700), and having no governmental or other societal programs once they become adults, do not have a community. We can be, as previous posts have noted, attacked on the grounds of “What’s a misfit doing at a party?” without fear that anyone will come to our support.
Van Eecke continues: “This experience has been most eloquently described by Hannah Arendt in her analysis of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt argues that inducing a state of loneliness in people has the effect of destroying all sense of community, reducing individuals to isolated atoms, and thereby preparing them, through abject fear, for totalitarian rule. As Arendt explains, “Totalitarian domination … bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” As Arendt points out, “Loneliness is not solitude. Solitude requires being alone whereas loneliness shows itself most sharply in company with others.” A lonely man “finds himself surrounded by others with whom he cannot establish contact or to whose hostility he is exposed … In solitude, in other words, I am 'by myself,' … whereas in loneliness I am actually one, deserted by all others.” Solitude can be enjoyed—it is often even a luxury—whereas loneliness is terror.” (Emphasis added)
The disabled “finds himself surrounded by others with whom he cannot establish contact or to whose hostility he is exposed … In solitude, in other words, I am 'by myself,' … whereas in loneliness I am actually one, deserted by all others.”
Van Eecke: “The function of public shaming and cancellation is to inflict loneliness—it cuts the victim off from the family of man. It makes him an abject untouchable and has as its only aim his total removal from society. This is achieved by publicizing the cancellation, which ensures that this person will lose his job, his livelihood, his social circle, and will almost certainly not find another job in the foreseeable future. In close analogy to physical torture, where everyday objects (a chair, the food one eats) and even the body itself are turned into hostile weapons, the shared world is turned into a hostile environment for the publicly shamed person, who is now shunned by everyone. The very people who were only recently friends and colleagues are now the weapons that inflict pain through their absence, confirming the victim’s isolation.”
We know that sooner or later you will be humiliated. “The function of public shaming and cancellation is to inflict loneliness—it cuts the victim off from the family of man. It makes him an abject untouchable and has as its only aim his total removal from society. This is achieved by publicizing the cancellation, … ”
Van Eecke: “In this way, the security a person feels within the human community is destroyed and the world is made hostile. It effectively reduces the limits of one’s being to the limits of the body. Any person who has ever suffered severe public shame will acknowledge that the limits of one’s body are a thin shell between oneself and a hostile environment.”
Sooner or later you will be humiliated. Suffer “severe public shame … ”
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The language of the new regrettable enmity society, and its cancel culture, map a great increase in the already discriminatory tendency of the mainstream toward those born having a birth defect.
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