I’ve been developing an Abandonment Theory of institutional evolution. Sometimes an institution in trouble is neither disrupted, nor reformed, but abandoned by all capable of keeping it sustainable, with the relevant ground left fallow to recover for a creative-destruction cycle
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What happens once a major institution is on its deathbed? Two possibilities: 1) Fallow cycle is the default. Nothing growing for a while. 2) Non-default outcome is a “trust-fixing” cycle, by analogy to nitrogen-fixing legumes that are often rotated with grains.
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The “legumes” among institutional types are ones with such extraordinarily high trust and investment in mutuality, they are immune to cancel/call-out culture. By which I mean “family” as the archetype. So, small family-style orgs replacing large impersonal/due-process orgs.
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This isn’t a deep point. Due process (Gesellschaft) is only as good as the organic trust (Gemeinschaft) underwriting it. It only works to the extent everybody agrees it does. Undermine it with a cancel-culture pathway may be quicker justice in the short term but atrophy long-term
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Again — and I keep repeating myself because it is both true and tempting to ignore — no moral judgment here. This is just how the lifecycle of organizations works. Particular institutional deaths may or may not represent net loss of societal wealth.
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To go macro, I’m not even asserting particular broad outcomes as desirable or not. Perhaps the whole industrial institutional landscape needs burning to the ground, perhaps only 5% of the worst rot needs cutting out. There’s probably an upper burn limit for successful recovery.
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All this of course assumes there is some degree of governance and restraint possible on the cancel side; that it is a true public capable of some deliberation and conscious choices; that it is not always a zombie mob of true believers led by psycho authoritarians.
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If it is, then this is all moot. It’s a zombie apocalypse, and the vampire elites have to go into hiding while the humans band into family-structured units for everything.
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To complete the analogy, the libertarian werewolf packs think they’ll inherit the world after the vampires and zombies destroy each other and they eat the humans on the way to their Galtian fortresses, but they’re mostly weresheep in practice and can be safely ignored as NPCs.
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Final point: I haven’t said much about the target class of cancel culture, unaccountable institutional elites of some sort. The ones analogous to extractive vampire-farmers in this convoluted mixed metaphor. They are harder to generalize about since they are more varied.
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Raging zombies are all alike, every predatory vampire is predatory in its own way. Universities, Hollywood, gaming communities, legislative bodies, corporations, courts, each is extractively destroyed in its own way.
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End of conversation
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