If you're not familiar: someone finds something someone else did that was politically incorrect (said something insensitive, didn't hire enough minorities for their project, etc.), and posts about it online. A large group of people are then mobilized to post online about the insensitive thing someone did, and continue to do so until that person is met with real life consequences (their business gets boycotted, they get fired, or their show/movie gets cancelled (thus the term cancel culture)).
Problem
The problem with #CancelCulture is that it allows people to think and believe they are doing something to make the world a better place, when in fact they are not doing much at all to change the situation. It's very easy to sit there behind your computer, read a news article about something someone did, and post about it online with a catchy #hashtag. Reading about the offending person facing consequences is temporarily satisfying for the computer activists, but has anything really changed?Do the people involved in getting the thing or person "cancelled" really understand what caused them to act in the first place? Do they understand that, most times, the profit motive causes people to act, and say and do things that are later deemed controversial, and that just because one thing or person gets cancelled, the fact that that profit motive remains as the major driving force of our society means there are dozens of iterations of the same thing waiting to replace it?
I'm not saying that it's not good to extricate negative things from our society. However, when #CancelCulture picks and eradicates a target, there is very little understanding of the underlying issues that created the cancelled thing in the first place. Do any of these people posting online understand why was this person racist? Why did this person say something sexist? Why did they fail to hire enough minorities? By blindly attacking a single person or project, the precursors to why such a disgusting thing got created in the first place are almost wholly ignored.
Rarely do these online activists offer a solution, stopping short in self-satisfaction when the offending element is eliminated. What's created when something is so blindly cancelled is a vacuum, and that vacuum tends to get filled with something equally offensive.
The major problem here is that the profit motive continues to be the primary driving factor in society and all other considerations fall by the wayside when people move to create something.
Solution
As a society, almost anything is applauded if it makes the person money, and as such all sorts of controversial and offensive endeavors are undertaken to produce said money. While cancel culture often focuses on politically incorrect statements, we see this behavior extended to a more horrifying form when major corporations poison workers or our waterways to turn a profit.While the profit motive is apparently the driving force in our world, I'd actually argue that it is the fear of the lack of money that truly motivates us.
Solution: A guaranteed living income.
If and when every person on the planet is guaranteed enough money to meet their basic needs, no loner will we be driven to act in harmful and abusive ways to make money.
Reward
When an economic system is in place that supports each one to access their basic human rights of food, water, shelter, an education, and healthcare, there will be much fewer enterprises engaging in uncouth practices. The end result will be there will be much less things to "cancel" and much more to celebrate.Living Income Guaranteed - The Proposal
