I finished Steven Pinker’s new book the other night—When Everybody Knows that Everyone Knows. It’s an interesting read. Pinker maps out how knowledge travels through a crowd, how signals become symbols, how people speak in euphemisms precisely to avoid the clarity that would turn embarrassing realities into common knowledge. He’s basically sketching the blueprints of a human mind built to operate in groups—sometimes wisely, sometimes disastrously.
In the chapter called “The Cancelling Instinct,” Pinker rings the alarm bell about academic speech and people who want to put a muzzle on it. The book was obviously written before the Trump administration declared open warfare on universities, which he does not discuss. He focuses instead on the excesses of “woke” culture, noting that “between 2000 and mid-2024 there were more than thirteen hundred attempts to punish scholars for constitutionally protected speech in American colleges and universities.” Examples include “a biologist who had said there are two sexes, … an epidemiologist who had signed a conservative amicus brief on gay marriage eight years earlier, … a feminist scholar who questioned the policy of housing violent men who identify as transgender in women’s prisons” and “viral videos of professors being mobbed, cursed, and heckled into silence.”
Pinker sees a threat to intellectual freedom. He’s right. Where he’s too gentle is in explaining why this happens.
He says the cancelers are driven by noble goals gone off the rails—anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-bigotry. In his telling, the problem is a category error: They fight to suppress speech which seems to undermine these moral goals because the cancelers “blur the pursuit of objective knowledge with the upholding of moral norms.”
Maybe so. But I’ve lived long enough to know that when cruelty starts flooding the streets, it’s rarely because people care too much about morality. It’s because morality is the mask they put on when they want permission to hurt somebody.
That’s not cynicism—it’s psychology.
The Motive for Mobbing
Awhile back I read some observations by psychologist Jonathan Schedler which are insightful enough that I’ll quote them here in their entirety:
One of the most important things I’ve learned:
Severe personality problems find camouflage. No one thinks “I’m a sadist” or “I’m a malignant narcissist.”
They find a belief system/social group that validates their most hateful, destructive impulses and construes them as virtues.
The most toxic and hateful people in the world are 100% convinced they fight for what is true and right.
They find a way to give free rein to their cruelty, to attack, to treat others cruelly and viciously. And they find allies to cheer them on who also believe they are on the side of all that is true and good.
For colleagues looking for more theoretical explanation, the psychological processes are splitting, projection and projective identification. Splitting means not recognizing one’s own capacity for hate, cruelty, and destructiveness. The person is blind to the bad in themselves.
Instead, they project the badness onto some designated other. And this other person, via the defense of projection, is now seen as the repository of all that is bad and evil and necessary to destroy. That’s the projection.
The person now feels fully justified in unleashing their viciousness and hate on the other person, who is now seen (via projection) as someone monstrous who must be destroyed. If the person who is projected on responds to the provocation with anger, this is now seen as further confirmation of how hateful and destructive they are (this is what is called “projective identification.”) The end result is that the person can deny their own sadism, cruelty, and hate—while simultaneously acting it out without restraint. And feel themselves to be 100% on the side of truth and right as they do it.
Reigns of Terror
None of this is new. If you’ve ever watched a Twitter pile-on, you’ve seen these processes in action. It’s human nature with the brakes cut. Past historical examples were much worse than the “cancel culture” in academia (or than Twitter, for that matter). They include the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, witch trials in Europe and Massachusetts, the Nazi holocaust, and the racist violence of the Ku Klux Klan in the southern United States.
Pinker has written one of the best treatments I’ve read of the the human propensity for violence in his earlier book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which discusses not just the history of violence but practical insights into how to curb it. I’m sure he is as aware as I am that cancel culture and Twitter mobs are penny ante compared to the paroxyms of “purifying” atrocities to which human societies have descended on multiple occasions and whose recurrence remains a continuing danger.
Malignant behavior crops up across the political spectrum and is independent of the question of whether people who behave this way have valid beliefs. In a separate blog post, I’ve written about the Weather Underground in the 1960s, whose legitimate anger against the Vietnam War and racism curdled into bombing campaigns and other acts of violence.
Every era thinks its moral crusade is unique. And every era has used morality to justify mayhem.
Make America Hate Again
Cancel culture is usually framed as left-wing, but cruelty is bipartisan. From the Trump administration and its supporters on the U.S. right, we are currently seeing talk about jailing journalists, arresting protesters, executing “traitors,” and deporting “undesirables” by the millions. This is driven by the same psychological machinery that Shedler describes, only with more horsepower and fewer guardrails.
In Erich Fromm’s 1941 book, Escape from Freedom, he argued that authoritarian movements thrive by redirecting people’s unconscious aggression onto designated enemies. Adam Serwer said it best about Trump-era politics: “The cruelty is the point.”
They don’t do this because cruelty is a necessary means to an end. The cruelty is an emotional bonding ritual. Moral or political justifications are just the excuse.
The Lesson Pinker Misses
Pinker thinks cancelers are morally confused. He thinks they’re misapplying principles.
I think they’re doing something more primal:
They’re using moral language as a hall pass for aggression.
You can see it in the delight of the mob. You can hear it in the cadence of denunciation. You can feel it in the way cruelty energizes rather than exhausts.
When righteousness gets a taste for blood, it stops caring what it was supposedly fighting for. Moralized aggression is a recurring human pattern, not a quirk of twenty-first century social media.
Why It Matters
For freedom to prevail—anywhere, on the left or right—we can’t just remind people about First Amendment values. We have to recognize that inside every crowd is a struggle between our best selves and our worst impulses.
The challenge isn’t just to defend speech. It’s to defend ourselves from our own appetite for moralized aggression—the ancient, seductive urge to destroy someone and call it justice.
The danger isn’t just cancel culture or Trump or MAGA. The danger is human nature running downhill.
Leave a Reply