Lee Jussim Ph.D.
Rabble Rouser
Ten Ways to Defend Against a Cancellation Attack
The mob is denouncing you, demanding you be punished. Now what?
Posted May 12, 2021
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Reviewed by Kaja Perina
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The self-righteous and self-appointed grim-faced commissars of cancel culture, the everything-is-racist/sexist/bigoted/silence-is-violence-but-looting-is-protest/free-speech-for-me-but-not-for-thee offendetrons are coming for you. They are probably denouncing you on social media or writing nasty emails about you to your boss, implying or outright demanding that you be fired or punished. It might even be your colleagues and coworkers, or, for academics, your own students, denouncing you.
A little prep can go a long way. These attacks have a surreal quality to them and, if you are not familiar with them, you may be taken down before you know what hit you. The first thing you must do is familiarize yourself with the Orwellian nature of these attacks. Early detection can be crucial to your ability to survive.
Source: Lee Jussim
What Alternate Universe Did I Fall Into?
Everything about such an attack may seem nuts. You committed no worse behavior than what you called "retraction." Yet in the alternate universe, you’ve got this all figured out.
Why Delusion Centers May Be Responsive to Cancellation Attacks
The overall pattern of behavior to be confronted with is more complicated than the short description given above. A first step is to understand the psychology of prejudice and victimization.
Profession of Shame: A Person Becomes Toxic
People find a trait, like arrogance, smugness, or superiority, and then they become obsessed with that trait, which they believe is associated with social status and superiority. The victim ends up with an eating disorder.
To scapegoat for a psychological problem, one assumes that the problem has to be blamed solely on a single individual, blames them, accepts that they caused the problem, and refuses to seek help.
Eliot: The Unbearable Faseness of It All
The victim of emotional abuse is subjected to unrelenting verbal assault, humiliation, gaslighting, bullying, and manipulation to get them to say what they want to say, so that the verbal assault becomes an intense verbal assault. The abusive behavior continues even after the abuse has ended. The victim may say anything to derail the ongoing assault, but they’re too exhausted to think of anything to say.
The Bridge: A Toxic and Continuing Assault on Privacy and Selfhood
I talked with Lisa Feldman Barrett, Peter Biehl, and the good people at the Center for Ethical, Social Care, and the Patented Freedom to access archives of the original 1974 report entitled “Toxic Fears and Toxic Rewards in Psychological and Social Distancing Behaviors.”
The report is a kind of cautionary tale of the dangers of toxic people and what they do to others. It is extremely well written, with many factual errors and fallacious assumptions. And it should be no surprise that I was unaware of the report itself, as it is authored by a political newcomer to the Minneapolis Public Schools board.
The board members didn’t know much else about the history of obesity and objectification, and I wasn’t getting the memo. I knew that my neighborhood is culturally made up of a large number of older black families. None of them had heard of Olive oil and the Dr. Pepper that was so beloved by African American youth.
Suddenly I found myself in conflict with both the director of the center and the CEO, both of whom are white and both had attended a training by the American Psychological Association a few months earlier.
The story began with a grilling presentation by the CEO, an eminent professor and social activist who had persuaded the organization to create a committee to study the very topic of black cultural competency.
The committee met monthly for three years until they heard in 1975 that an obesity course had been approved by the association for graduate students interested in gaining skills in weight control. The topic of the study was approved, but a heavier emphasis was given to the study’s recommendation to conduct a study in collaboration with a black cultural expert.