The Psychopathology of Cancellation

Trying to cancel someone is a crazy way to behave

Apparently, Cancel Culture is on its way out (although I’m yet to be fully convinced). And so we are in a period of reckoning, of looking anew at the grotesque harms inflicted on the victims of cancellation, in books such as Jenny Lindsay’s Hounded and the recent BBC podcast Anatomy of a Cancellation about the cruel treatment of author Kate Clanchy. Clear-sighted recognition of these harms is absolutely necessary, and so too is it necessary, I think, to look equally clearly at the Cancellers themselves, and question how such pathological behaviour has become widely accepted and even championed.

There is often a reluctance to home in on the specific individuals who’ve instigated cancellations, and a preference to instead see cancellations as the products of a hazy collective ‘madness’. This reluctance is understandable. Those who have borne the worst harms of being cancelled often have no appetite to inflict such pain on others, even upon their own hounders. And I think that many of th…