Cancel culture, as discussed on The Bob Zadek Show, refers to the suppression of dissent and the punishment of those who depart from received opinion. In a 2021 episode, host Bob Zadek and guest Frank Buckley, a professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law, treated cancel culture as the unifying factor behind a cluster of troubling developments in American life, including censorship, polarization, and an “epidemic of loneliness.” Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Cancel culture as anti-curiosity
Zadek framed cancel culture as the prevention of individuals and institutions from sharing information with the public, so that the public never gets to decide whether an idea is good or bad. On his account, cancel culture says the information will not be made available at the outset, so no one gets to be curious about the idea. He asked Buckley whether cancel culture and wokeism are as anti-curiosity as a movement can be. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Buckley agreed, and connected curiosity to wonder, noting that Aristotle said philosophy begins in wonder. He argued that an attitude of wonder impels a person to follow curiosity and seek answers, but that this does not work when looking at what is out there can be dangerous. He said curiosity is something one wants to avoid in 1984, and that America is far closer to Orwell’s dystopia than at any time since the country’s creation 250 years ago. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Buckley tied this to liberty: if a person is not curious, liberty does not matter to them, because they can be told what to do without complaint. He said that if liberty does matter, it means being willing to strike out and ask questions without worrying about the consequences, and that this does not describe America in an age of cancel culture. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
The mechanism of silencing
Buckley described cancel culture as involving a shifting set of misstatements and bad thoughts, such that what was innocuous ten years, ten months, or ten days ago can quickly become toxic. He said it is getting to the point where one wants to have a tape recorder on whenever talking to somebody else, to have an accurate record of what was said, and that anyone who thinks this is a good idea has described a purely sociopathic society. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
He also described college students being encouraged or told how to report on their professors, so that an idle comment or a joke can trigger a student and lead to charges. He characterized the state of mind he opposes as a form of sociopathy, defining a sociopath as someone who does not need other people. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Loneliness and the narrowing of conversation
Zadek raised Buckley’s phrase the “epidemic of loneliness,” connecting it to the experience of governmentally imposed loneliness through lockdown during the virus. Buckley said the term is not in the DSM but that he thinks it belongs there, and attributed the condition to people turning themselves incurious by focusing on a very narrow set of issues. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Buckley gave the example of a call-in program where he presented his book and callers wanted to talk not about the book but about the January 6th “insurrection.” He said that for some people the only thing that matters is a very narrow set of political issues, and that this is deadening. He said that to be curious one has to break out from received learning and the list of narrow topics one is supposed to think about, and that doing so makes people angry—as it made people angry at him, prompting tweets asking why he was allowed on television. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Buckley argued that this produces real loneliness for people excluded from the conversation, including all the people who voted for Trump, and even for those he called the kingdom of the blessed, the people with the correct thoughts: if all one gets to talk about is that one issue, there is nothing to talk about. He said friendship depends on revealed confidences, where one confesses something about oneself that might be turned against one, and that it is dangerous to do that now, and extremely dangerous to tell a joke. He described a friendless society where suicides are up and a majority of Americans describe themselves as unhappy. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Zadek characterized this as driven by fear, saying fear and curiosity are adverse to each other, and compared censorship, wokeism, and cancel culture to a quarantine of ideas—a fear that exposure to another’s progressivism, freedom, or openness will cause one to leave the reservation. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Ideology as a mental shortcut
Buckley attributed the hardening of opinion to partisanship and to the growth of ideologies, giving as an example ideologies surrounding the 1619 Project of the New York Times, which he said would have it that we are irredeemably a racist society. He described an ideology as a mental shortcut, like a key supposed to unlock all doors, and said that buying into one avoids the need to look at conflicting evidence—something that would require curiosity. He likened ideology to a mental trash folder that sends contradictory facts where one need not pay attention to them. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Buckley connected this to morality: a big part of curiosity is curiosity about other people and how they are affected, and if one does not care how others will be affected by a policy because one is a pure ideologue, one is incurious. He said he wanted to argue that curiosity seemed to him the foundation of a good part of our morality, because morality is about how other people fare and how we treat them, and thinking about the consequences of one’s actions upon other people requires curiosity. He concluded that the deeply incurious person is also a deeply immoral person, and that incuriosity is the root of all evil in many ways. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Deliberation and the Senate
Zadek raised the United States Senate, sometimes called the world’s greatest deliberative body, and said he could not find an example in his memory of a senator changing his or her mind as a direct result of deliberation. He said this means there has never been deliberation. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Buckley said he could think of examples where senators changed their minds, citing civil rights and Senator Vandenberg, a Republican isolationist who after Pearl Harbor decided to forget isolationism because we were at war—though Buckley noted Vandenberg changed his mind because of circumstances, not because he was persuaded by other people. Buckley agreed the Senate is not a deliberative body in that sense, in the way Parliament in England can be, and cited May 1940, when the Chamberlain government fell and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, following a series of speeches in which Chamberlain was ripped apart, with the result that about 70 members of the majority Tory party decided not to support the government. He said real deliberation can happen, but that any deliberation in Washington happens offstage. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Zadek asked whether opinions, once formed, can always be changed or whether there is a dynamic by which they become permanently baked in. Buckley said this is happening all the time, and returned to partisanship and ideology as the reasons. Curiosity & American Capitalism (2021)
Across episodes
Only one episode in the excerpts, the 2021 interview with Frank Buckley, touches on cancel culture; the excerpts show no development across episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe any specific cancellation incident, employer, platform, or legal proceeding, and do not name any statute, bill, or court case bearing on the topic. They do not state the legal status of speech restrictions or distinguish government censorship from private action beyond Zadek’s remark that social media censorship is not censorship because it is not the government. The excerpts also do not give a definition of cancel culture beyond the speakers’ characterizations, nor do they present any guest who defends the practice.