Cancel culture: punishment or social conscience?

Cancel culture is sold as a tool for social justice, but it hides a paradox worth thinking about. If the goal is for someone to acknowledge a mistake and grow aware of it, does it make sense to get there through public punishment and pile-ons? In this stretch of my chat with psychologist Barbara Diez we turn that contradiction over without falling into the easy slogans of either side.

Barbara frames it within something bigger, polarisation. The old divide and conquer works because it casts each of us as the absolute defender of what’s good and the enemy of what’s bad, and from there whatever the other side does is always terrible. She sees an almost tribal streak in it, the pack attacking the one next door, only now with technology in the mix. Add the anonymity of social media and you get the diffusion of responsibility: you don’t put your name to it, you hide behind a handle, and that emboldens everything. The key question, the one almost nobody asks, is what the real goal is. Because defending against reprehensible behaviour is one thing, and expecting my opinion to count while trampling yours is another. For the first we already have the rule of law and the courts.