Cancellation
Am currently readiing We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, by Musa Al-Gharbi. The scholar writes the following about cancel culture:
Consider the phenomenon colloquially referred to as "cancel culture."
Although most of René Girard’s (1923–2015) work was published before that specific term came into common parlance, drawing on his work, one could theorize "cancellation" as a secularized religious scapegoating ritual. When people are consumed by anger over a problem, but the real object of their anger is untouchable (or is, in fact, themselves), folks have long tried to collectively focus their rage on some other target instead—to purge, ostracize, or inflict immense suffering on someone who is not truly responsible for the problem that consumes us, but who comes to be representative of that problem in some way.
"It is easier than in the past to observe collective transferences upon a scapegoat because they are no longer sanctioned and concealed by religion," Girard argued, "and yet it is still difficult because the individuals addicted to them do everything they can to conceal their scapegoating from themselves, and as a general rule they succeed. Today, as in the past, to have a scapegoat is to believe one doesn't have any. The phenomenon in question doesn't usually lead any longer to acts of physical violence, but it does lead to a 'psychological' violence that is easy to camouflage. Those accused of participating in hostile transference never fail to protest their good faith, in all sincerity." (I see Satan Fall Like Lightning. 2001)
A recurrent example: some white woman has an unfortunate encounter with a nonwhite person, and part of the exchange is caught on video and disseminated online. People immediately and intensively research her, reach out to her employer to get her fired, and disseminate her contact information, her social media profiles, her physical address, and the identities of her family and friends online in order to subject her and her loved ones to harassment, ostracism, and humiliation. "Canceling" this woman, of course, will not do anything to end police brutality, mass incarceration, systemic racism, or ethnic strife. It's precisely because people feel helpless to solve those problems that they concentrate their ire so intensely on the woman in the video-laying upon her the sins of society and seeking to punish her for these social sins before expunging her from our presence. Although cancelers may feel impotent to eliminate racism, they recognize that they do have the capacity to destroy this person who has come to be emblematic of that ill. In seventeenth-century Salem, they burned witches. Today, we cancel Karens. In both cases, Girard would likely argue, the impulse is the same.