Cancel Culture, Margarita

What is cancel culture, and what does it reveal about its impetus? Within totalitarian ideologies and realised systems, opposition is not tolerated. It is cancelled. Thus cancel culture. Totalitarianism seeks to takes control of everything, including all thought and artistic vision, so when you see this cancel culture, you know it’s the natural outpouring of a totalitarian ideology or desire. Totalitarianism tolerates, or seeks to tolerate, nothing but itself.

Obviously there can be a sane degree of self-regulation within a society, and so for instance pornography might be felt to be a toxicity society could well do without - for the reality of that “industry” itself and the evil it inflicts on for instance even children targeted and trapped within it; and also its effect on society as a whole. You’ll notice though this is not the kind of target aimed at by modern cancel culture! In fact it would probably be appalled if that world were targeted. It would be presumably declared a great intolerant blow to freedom were it “cancelled.”

This might be going off slightly on a tangent, but here below is an extract from an interview with Russian author Victor Pelevin talking of the effect of the novel Master and Margarita upon someone like he who grew up living within the the USSR: “The evil magic of any totalitarian regime is based on its presumed capability to embrace and explain all the phenomena, their entire totality, because explanation is control. Hence the term totalitarian. So if there’s a book that takes you out of this totality of things explained and understood, it liberates you because it breaks the continuity of explanation and thus dispels the charms. It allows you to look in a different direction for a moment, but this moment is enough to understand that everything you saw before was a hallucination (though what you see in this different direction might well be another hallucination). The Master and Margarita was exactly this kind of book and it is very hard to explain its subtle effect to anybody who didn’t live in the USSR. Solzhenitsyn’s books were very anti-Soviet, but they didn’t liberate you, they only made you more enslaved as they explained to which degree you were a slave. The Master and Margarita didn’t even bother to be anti-Soviet yet reading this book would make you free instantly. It didn’t liberate you from some particular old ideas, but rather from the hypnotism of the entire order of things.”