One of the most injurious consequences of the effort to maintain political correctness is what’s become known as “cancel culture.” Basically, it means that if someone says or writes something that is not in line with the PC (political correctness) guidelines, that someone is canceled, ostracized, banned from social media, often fired, and always chastised by self-appointed censors of public discourse. Cancel culture is not only nefarious at its core; it goes against the nature of human society, against the nature of being human, and in fact, against nature.
A human being who is excluded from contact with other human beings cannot develop. Human contact is indispensable for human development, and the more diverse the people one meets, the more one develops. A child who grows up seeing only one kind of people, with the same line of thinking, the same beliefs, and the same manners, will evolve to be the exact replica of his or her parents. This is not necessarily bad, but it is also not the purpose of humankind, or of creation.
All elements of nature were created to evolve, to change, and rise to higher levels of existence. Humans are not excluded. Think of water, for example. Water consists of two gasses: hydrogen and oxygen. Alone, they are invisible, undetectable in any way. Even worse—they are toxic. However, if you connect them to each other, you get water—the bedrock of life, and what every creature needs for its survival.
Likewise, connect sodium, which is a type of metal, with chlorine, which is a yellow-green gas, and you’ve got table salt, which gives taste to the food we eat, and which our ancestors used as a preservative. Everything works this way: Take water and flour, and you can make bread or cakes, or pasta. All parts of reality are compounds built upon compounds that create still more complicated compounds, which eventually form the ecosystem that is Planet Earth. Planets, in turn, make up the Sun’s solar system, which form the Milky Way galaxy, and galaxies create the universe.
None of these would have happened if at any point during the making of the universe, cancel culture had been applied to any of the elements of reality. Human civilization, too, would not have evolved if at any point, only one race or one faith, or one culture had managed to take over. When cancel culture was applied, such as in Nazi Germany, it ended in disaster.
That said, opposing cancel culture does not mean that any level or manner of mingling is healthy. Just as compounds in nature do not lose the identity of their particular ingredients, each of us must retain our uniqueness as individuals. However, growth exists only when we combine our individual selves with other individual selves to create something that is new, more complicated, and indeed of a higher order than ourselves. That something will not exist without all of us, yet it is neither of us, but something new that our incorporation has created. Think of the water again: Hydrogen exists in and of itself, and so does oxygen, but only when they work together do they create water, life.
Indeed, life is incorporation of different things that join to create more complicated and higher entities than their individual selves. If we want to develop, we must embrace incorporation for the sake of our collective evolution as human beings. If we want stagnation and death, let’s cancel each other out until none of us is left and evolution will continue in our absence.