THE PENDULUM SWING

“My therapist says I avoid confrontation” he said.

“Do you agree?” she asked.

He stared politely at the floor.

Somewhere between a fallacy and an eye roll, sits Cancel Culture. The Jack in the Box solution to all life’s problems, like “there there” and refusing to look at your bank balance. Its very mention provokes instant reactions, often dictated by which social hill you’ve decided to martyr yourself on. But to treat it merely as a political stick to beat your least favourite ideologue with is to miss the point entirely. It has metastasised (learnt a new word recently, even better one coming up soon, worth the wait, – trust me) beyond ideology, it is now a cultural juggernaut, a snarling, unpaid intern of fate, firing at will and sacking people for crimes as mild as wrong intonation. To understand it, one must indulge the horrifying pastime of listening to what people think – even the sort whose thoughts sound like the internal monologue of a cheese sandwich. For in these increasingly polarised times, ignoring the barking lunatics only encourages them to form choirs.

Once a noble idea, this movement was meant to usher in the Age of Accountability, but much like a flatulent horse at a christening, it made its presence known in all the wrong ways. What began as an overdue reckoning for the #MeToo movement, soon devolved into an overzealous witch hunt, where the witches were often just mildly confused librarians who’d misgendered someone in a queue. Careers, once proudly built over decades of sweat and inadequacy, now combusted at the mere brush of a misfired tweet. Margaret Atwood, said “a word after a word after a word is power.” Online, it was often felt more like: “a word after a word after a word is…unemployment.”

Meanwhile, culture itself went through what can only be described as a badly staged intervention. Beloved franchises, once as dependable as off milk, were gutted, reassembled, and stuffed with representation like a diversity-flavoured sausage. Doctor Who, whose regeneration into a woman should have felt monumental (I had suggested such a move after David Tennant’s departure), instead felt like the BBC was trying too hard to be a cool dad, whist completely missing the point. Ghostbusters followed suit, remade with an all-female cast as if feminism were a genre and comedy its unwilling hostage. The backlash wasn’t just from traditionalists weaned on test-card nostalgia – it came from everyone who noticed that plotlines had become Trojan horses for sermons, and actors now spoke as if reading out diversity policy between scenes. Advertisements soon resembled forced group photos of every identity checkbox, all smiling with the exact enthusiasm of someone being slowly digested by capitalism. Which is fine, you know… Jehovah’s Witnesses do it with thier leaflets when selling love to your doorstep. Everyone (by everyone, I mean one of each – apparently it is rationed) getting along. Peace and love, peace and love… BUT YOU’RE SELLING DISHWASHER TABLETS!

And then, of course, came the backlash to the backlash. In America, the acronym “DEI” is now met with the same warm welcome that glitter gets at a crime scene. Right-wing legislatures have taken to dismantling inclusion efforts with the glee of Call of Duty players high on energy drinks and injustice, mocking the left’s earlier smugness with an echoing cackle that sounds suspiciously familiar. Cancel culture, once used to mock the stodgy defenders of old norms, now finds itself mocked by the new custodians of conservative outrage. It’s a mirror fight – each side shouting “tyrant” at their own reflections.

The true tragedy of cancel culture is not its existence but its execution, an attempt at moral hygiene that, like most hygiene, rapidly turns obsessive and deeply unhygienic. What could have been an enlightening period of reckoning became instead a witch-burning festival where the flames were kindled by smugness and the pitchforks ordered next-day delivery on Amazon. Had the left spent less time basking in the schadenfreude (word two, told you the wait was worth it, you can leave now) of their opponents’ public downfalls and more time educating with empathy, we might not now be in the middle of this endless pendulum swing, each arc hitting us squarely in the reason.

And what is the pendulum swing, if not society’s favourite tantrum? It is the eternal back-and-forth motion of public opinion, when one extreme becomes unbearable, we hurl ourselves into the arms of the opposite with all the grace of a cat reacting to a cucumber. It’s not progress, it’s oscillation – ideological whiplash disguised as evolution.

But alas, we are where we are, neck-deep in the cultural trenches, hurling slogans like grenades and wondering, as always, who started it. The answer, of course, is yes.