Building Opinions in a ‘Woke’ World
Perfectionism, Building PC Opinions, and Moving Forward with ‘Cancel Culture’.
The writer’s block — a personal lifelong enemy of mine. The fear and anxiety didn’t seem to dissipate throughout 16-years of formal education. But truth be told, besides grocery and to-do-lists, my writing practice outside the realm of school and university was at its bare minimum. The only writing I ever did was in my years of formal education, in systems where I’d only ever write with the intention of ‘perfection’ (i.e. to attain the best score I could reach for, based on a specific institutional grading system). I think this was where I always felt slumped, and probably hindered my progress, not in writing but, in ever removing my writer’s block. But from an objective sense, I could tell that my writing skills improved over the years yet the pre-writing stress never curbed.
I’m slowly trying to remove the goal for perfectionism when I’m leisure writing, or for the appropriate Internet jargon, ‘blogging’. M.G. Siegler highlights this problem in his 500ish piece on “The Blogging Mindset”. He recognizes how he, and I’m assuming he speaks for other bloggers out there, can’t seem to write about anything unless they’ve educated themselves as much as possible on the subject. The author acknowledges that it is a selfish and dangerous move to write more without wanting to do the extra work of ‘studying’.
He writes, “…it calls back to the days when blogging wasn’t meant to be about writing fully-formed, featured articles that might be found in The New York Times or the like. These days, Twitter is far more like that world than blogging is — for better and worse”
On a more meta-sense, I personally find it fascinating how social attitudes have shifted over the recent years on how we approach writing, or more broadly how we build our opinions. I too have been a victim of this ‘mental writing restraint’ with fear of being politically incorrect, and possibly offending someone or two.
To bring this aspect further, Aziz Ansari touched on the topic of excess woke culture in his stand-up show, Right Now. A rather vulnerable piece as he touches on and off on his then-recent sexual allegation. In his show, he insists “we can’t keep looking at past events and texts through 2019 eyes”.
Taking his words out of context (for reasons of staying on the subject… not excusing his past actions), I do believe there is some truth in what Aziz has said. Almost, maybe in fact all of us have been guilty of offending someone one way or the other whether we have the hard evidence for it or not. We all have reasons to be ‘canceled’ in today’s socio-political climate; regardless, we can’t let this fear sit with us. Our overarching fear of being called-out or politically incorrect can be a discouraging factor to speak up as it would imply that our ‘natural views’ are fallacious and/or insufficient. Yet in reality, any opinion we deduce will never be enough to satisfy everyone.
“The world is messy; there are ambiguities…People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you.” Obama on his opinion on call-out culture and political wokeness.
Now, let me just clarify where I’m going with this… I am not here to say we should cancel ‘cancel culture’. I acknowledge and deeply appreciate how empowering this movement is. I also agree that this comeuppance is expected and warranted. Nonetheless, we must also realize that cancel culture is not the ultimate end goal of social activism, it is only the symptom.
Obama proceeds his commentary with an observation, how political wokeness encourage an air of ‘judgmentalism’, and with it a sense of puristic ideal amongst youth activists online. The ultimate objective of social activism shouldn’t be to adopt the most judgmental attitude. That is to say, we shouldn’t be feeling so high and mighty when we’ve managed to pull out a racist tweet from 2008 by someone who recently spoke out about George Floyd’s murder.
Truthfully, a majority of us have been shrouded in privilege; not everyone is as politically and socially aware as we expect them to be, but that’s how it is… Not everyone has had the same opportunities, resources, and the basic time to learn and develop opinions on matters that don’t directly concern themselves. It’s easy now with the Internet’s rapid accessibility to say that ignorance in the age of information is a choice; but what about a century ago when you didn’t have today’s degree of online connectivity? When you were in middle-school and your history teacher was a bore? When you’ve never had the opportunity to live abroad, and mix with anyone other than your own ethnic race? Or maybe presently, if you’re working a 9–6 job, coming home to kids you haven’t seen all day, still needing to work extra hours after dinner and then trenching over 5-hours (if you’re lucky, 6) of sleep? Practically, we’ll only choose to care and fight for issues that directly concern us or our loved ones. Moreover, we’re likely to build our political opinions based on whatever our choice of media platforms or social circle feeds us with.
Does this give us reason to sanction ignorance then? Of course not, but it shouldn’t be an enabling factor for spite and hostility either.
“I would say it is easier to condemn people not ideas because if we were to condemn ideas we would see how those ideas had affected us at one point. We would see how those ideas are embedded in structures that we still defend. No one has a monopoly on toxic ideas, they kind of exist in all cultures.”
Ayishat Akanbi on ‘The Problem With Cancel Culture’.
For that matter, we need to understand that people’s views are not as black and white as it is often portrayed online. Many of us do live in this gray area, still learning and trying to navigate through different perspectives to finally arrive at our own understanding. With the recent blow-up of the Black Lives Matter movement and effectively other racial movements globally, I sensed a huge portion of those in this gray area (myself, included) genuinely feeling intimidated and/or guilty for not being “opinionated enough”. I realized then that being opinionated meant “picking a side”, either you’re for or against the movement. OBVIOUSLY I’m for it, we all instantly claim. How could we not, when we have the Twitter world screaming at those living in the ‘gray’ being total racists? We all want to believe we’re good people, that we’re socially aware, we care, and we aspire for equality.
Ayishat Akanbi makes another interesting point on a podcast interview titled, Victimhood is a State of Mind. She goes, “We’re sort of exposed socially, but we’re not necessarily that engaged with ourselves to know where our ideas are coming from”.
Cancel culture has been good because it’s empowering the voices that society often ignores, and gives them the ability to point our mistakes. Social media has definitely accelerated our awareness, giving us access to these different perspectives. Nonetheless having access to this massive treasure trove of information often drowns out our own views and opinions. We’re forced to think and react quickly, if not you’re automatically deemed an antagonist. We lose our sense of self-reflection and awareness.
I believe there’s a lot more going on in the gray area that people tend to so easily label as plain ignorance. There is always a story behind how we arrive at an opinion, or even a lack thereof. More importantly, I believe we should explore this within ourselves and have dialogues with those who think and feel differently. If we preach for progress, we need to move beyond hostility and digital boycott — it will only take us so far.
As individuals and a collective, we need to move beyond our ego, away from this idea of perfectionism (i.e. ‘purity’). Change the discourse, change the goal. We shouldn’t be moving towards perfection (whatever ‘perfect’ actually means…) but rather towards the gray spot of flexibility, humility, understanding, and accountability — not just for what we’re doing now, but for what we’ve done in the past.
Despite what the current digital landscape may sometime suggest, I do believe people are capable of change (We have evolution to prove that humans are not stagnant). But more than ever, considering how interconnected the world is at present, I think we should aspire and embrace to be in this soft gray spot, and expect ourselves to continuously sift to-and-fro the spectrum. It’s good that we’re constantly developing and shaping our perspectives — that confirms we’re still thinking.
