Find-Fix-(Finish or Forgive?)

Forgiveness, vengeance, or simply understanding why start with knowing who denounced you. Who wouldn't want to know that?

Forgiveness is not something most cancelled people are interested in extending. Maybe that’s partly why I get along with them so well.

Two canceled coaches I’ve spoken to are the type who will pull over to the side of the road if they see a wounded animal or a lost dog. One told me that he ran over a bird the morning we spoke and he felt terrible about it. Then his voice started shaking as he told me about how he tries to live his life as a Christian—and how crucial his faith was in getting him through and keeping him alive during his cancelation—yet he can’t shake the violent thoughts he still has about his canceler. The other coach said he’s at peace regarding the athlete who first made claims about him. But he doesn’t know what the limits of his reaction would be if he ever encountered the writer who used those claims as the starting point for a now-discredited (not that it does the coach much good) national news front page article.

Some canceled people don’t even know whom they would forgive. They were taken out by the mob. They know which of their bosses caved to the mob’s demands and fired them, and they can see the bylines of whoever laundered the mob’s accusations into the media. But they often don’t know who started it, and who accelerated it.

They do know—acutely—who did nothing to stand up for them, but that’s a different article.

Michael Capiraso’s cancelation took off in the summer of 2020 when an anonymous Instagram account became a burn book for a handful of current and former employees. Then a change.org petition went up using the same handle. Two years later, Capiraso filed a defamation suit against the “John Doe” behind those accounts. Over nearly a year of litigation, Capiraso subpoenaed Meta (parent company of Instagram), change.org, Google, and Verizon in order to ascertain the instigator’s identity.

Maybe it’s because Capiraso was one of the first canceled people I spoke to and therefore set all those first impressions and precedents, or because he did what I would do, but his effort to learn who took him out seems like the logical, in fact, obvious thing to do.

I was at least two dozen cancelations into my research when “Carmen” was canceled on the basis of an anonymous, decades-old accusation. In our early conversations, Carmen provided a few thoughts about who might know some of the back story behind the cancelation, and told me what to watch for to see who might benefit from the situation. I tried to follow those leads, and periodically looped back to run some ideas past Carmen or ask for a bit more direct help.

Then Carmen staked out a unique place in my work: they are the only person to explicitly tell me that they have put the cancelation behind them, are not interested in talking about it, so basically, stop texting.

Serendipity worked wonders for Carmen: an incredible opportunity arose almost concurrent with the cancelation, and it was of a nature that they really could move on.

I would never say to Carmen or anyone else, “You owe it to other canceled people to speak up and fight for the truth.” Small-o objectivist that I am, no one owes anyone any such debt (I have mixed feelings about that final scene between Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in “Good Will Hunting”).

But I cannot understand at all not wanting to know, slightly out of curiosity but mostly so I could decide freely and clearly what, if anything, I wished to do about it: lawsuit, confrontation, “gaucking” them to their social circles and professional colleagues… What if the canceler was someone socially or professionally close to them? Might they still be in a position to hurt them? Might they still be interacting with, maybe confiding in, their Personal Judas? Would you want someone who did this to you to be part of your life in any way? For your own safety and the sake of those around you, wouldn’t you want to purge them for at least several degrees of separation?

Wouldn’t you want to just really f—k them up??

Michael Malice and Peter Boghossian approached these questions on an episode of Malice’s podcast, “Your Welcome.” Their conversation is the first time I heard about the book, The File.

Disclosure days

When Germany unified in 1990, the new government created the Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic. That is, the records of the secret police of East Germany, the Stasi. This became known as the “Gauck Authority,” after its first commissioner, Joachim Gauck.

The agency allowed citizens and non-citizens to view the file that the Stasi had on them. The records would include the names of everyone who reported on you as an informal informant, or as an agent or operative of the Stasi.

Timothy Garton Ash was a British student journalist in East Germany from 1979–1982. British, student, journalist: three reasons for the Stasi to have a file on him. In the 1990s, he went to the Gauck Authority to view his file. After seeing who provided information on him, he traveled around Germany to confront them about it. The File is his memoir of that endeavor.

Amongst his own story, he tells us to “imagine conversations like this taking place every evening, in kitchens and sitting rooms all over Germany. Painful encounters, truth-telling, friendship-demolishing, life-haunting.”

Vera Wollenberger “discovered from reading her file that her husband, Knud, has been informing on her ever since they met. They would go for a walk with the children on Sunday, and on Monday Knud would pour it all out to his Stasi case officer.” A writer learned that his older brother informed on him. Another woman had been imprisoned for five years for attempting to escape East Germany. “[S]he found out, by reading her file, that it was the man she was living with who had denounced her to the Stasi. They still lived together. Only that morning he had wished her a good day in the archive.” (emphasis added)

We don’t know if those people approached their files with a sense of suspicion, perhaps trying to confirm a grim hunch; or if their worlds shattered with the turn of a page.

“Had the files not been opened, they might still be brother and brother, man and wife—their love enduring, a fortress sure upon the rock of lies.”

Malice and Boghossian were on different sides of “Would you want to know?”

Malice “couldn’t handle the trauma of knowing someone who has been a great friend to me, but has also done something which has caused me no negative consequences and now has been resolved. And I don’t know why [they did it], I don’t know what pressures they were facing.”

Boghossian replied: “I guess my orientation to truth is very different. My orientation to vengeance is probably different than yours as well. I would want to know as much as I can. I wouldn’t want to know everything.”

“But what would you do with that information?”

“I would completely excise people from my life.”

Maybe forgive, definitely don’t forget

Growing up Catholic, the concept of forgiveness was wrapped up in God and penance: a few sets and reps of Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s in the pews upon exiting the confessional. Occasionally, the priest would have you do something beyond prayer, like helping out around the house without being asked. The whole thing seemed hollow to me. There was little in it for anyone that you actually harmed, you didn’t have any skin in the game, and God did the heavy lifting of forgiveness—whatever that even meant—instead of the person you wronged. As long as you felt bad and pledged to go forth and sin no more (an impossibility since we’re all “fallen creatures,” but that’s another digression), you’re good to go.

The contrition-forgiveness-absolution axis was one of many things I happily dropped when I walked away from Catholicism / Christianity.

Rorschach: Cross offering forgiveness, or crosshairs on the target? Credit: Matthew Rutledge CC BY 2.0

Forgiveness in a secular, practical, or tangible sense wasn’t any more apparent to me. And I never really saw a need for it. To borrow a phrase, I was quite content to completely excise people from my life for far less than ratting me out to the Stasi.

During a re-read of Atlas Shrugged a few months after following, from a distance, in silence, the first cancellation of somebody I knew, this exchange overtook my thoughts for the following weeks.

Mrs. Rearden: “Are you really incapable of forgiveness?”
Henry Rearden: “No, Mother. I’m not. I would have forgiven the past—if, today, you had urged me to quit and disappear.”

Forgiveness is not exactly part of Ayn Rand’s brand. But even in a 1,000+-page book, she’s parsimonious with her words and exacting with her concepts. She wouldn’t toss “forgiveness” into a couple throwaway lines between two morally opposite characters whose relationship throughout the book shapes one of the most important character arcs.

What does Ayn Rand, of all people, have to say about forgiveness?

I asked this question in 2020 on a podcast AMA with the chair of the Ayn Rand Institute, Yaron Brook.

“Forgiveness depends on the context. There’s not one form of forgiveness,” Brook said. “You can imagine forgiveness being a second chance, giving somebody another chance at a relationship with you, or an opportunity to trade or engage with you in some kind of activity.”

“Forgiveness in Rearden’s context would mean ‘I won’t think ill of you. I’ll drop it.’ But I don’t think Rearden can have a relationship with his mother moving forward. She would have to do a lot more than encourage him to leave.”

If the harm is severe enough, there is no possibility of forgiveness.

“I find it horrific when someone murdered a child and then the parents forgive him. There’s no second chance! I’m going to hate your guts for the rest of my life, forever, and hope that you rot in whatever hell of existence you’re going to have on earth.”

For lesser offenses, “they would have to admit [them]. They would have to ask for forgiveness and express explicitly that it won’t happen again. I’d be willing to not think ill of them and maybe even have a relationship with them if I believed that they would not do it again. “

I revisited the question this year with cancelled author and fellow “small-o” objectivist, Christina Dalcher. She doesn’t need subpoenas or a government disclosure to know who cancelled her. They are the signatories—“We the undersigned”—to an English cosplay of a yakuza banning order, a hamon-jo.

“There has to be some kind of an exchange. It’s just not enough to say ‘I’m sorry,’ and then I go ‘Oh, I forgive you,’” Dalcher said.

“I don’t need them to kowtow. I want them to take their name off the letter, even if they don’t publicly apologize. Just remove your name from the letter. They don’t have to say anything about it, because I’ll know that they went and put their money where their mouth is. They can do it completely quietly.”

Like Brook, Dalcher expects recognition, action, apology, and the assurance that it won’t happen again—the latter being the tripwire for whatever relationship they have going forward.

Often the ones you most expect

Malice and Boghossian get stuck in the specific context of The File: citizens informing on family, friends, neighbors, and others in a totalitarian dictatorship controlled by a pervasive secret police. Malice, in particular, repeats that he would not want to know who informed on him and could not pass judgment on anyone who did (with a big caveat that we’ll get to shortly) because “it’s very different for us in a relatively free country. When you have these totalitarian dictatorships, everyone has to be part of the problem. You can’t have clean hands and live.”

Malice is an anarchist, so he might appreciate how America spawned individual initiative and countless little platoons over the last decade to see to the work of compelling “voluntary” betrayal, denunciation, pillory, and exile.

Many coaches are not surprised when they learn who is behind accusations to their athletic department, university administration, federation, or media. Do the job long enough and you develop a good sense for which athletes are toxic in the locker room, who sandbag their efforts, and blame their under-performance on everyone else.

Closing the trap, sometimes the media figures who write and promote these articles were those athletes. Whether it’s their former coach or another like him in the cross-hairs, they have their long-awaited prey.

Capiraso’s legal efforts revealed that a former employee, who had been furloughed when the reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic threatened the future of mass participation events (such as marathons), was behind the Instagram account and change.org petition. This individual was the first to comment on the change.org petition—the petition that he started anonymously.

Such double-dipping abounded. The first major media coverage of the effort to oust Capiraso was an article in Runner’s World in October 2020. That article relied heavily on the Instagram account as the source of the grievances to justify the mob’s actions. However, the article also quoted the instigator by name. He was one of only two people who spoke on the record. The author of that article, Sarah Lorge Butler, did not respond to my questions asking whether she knew that she was giving two voices to the same person.

With co-workers, peers, and media like these, who needs government?

Who knew what, when: Malice aforethought

By the time the Stasi started keeping a file on Timothy Garton Ash, the Germans had about a half-century of knowing what happens when somebody gets reported to the secret police.

There are no certainties: some people survive despite having a large file on them, others were taken away for relatively minor infractions (real or perceived). The informant doesn’t have any control or even influence over what happens after they make their report to the secret police. Some police official or bureaucrat up the chain of command decides who gets taken in the next round. The informant spins the cylinder, aims the gun, and pulls the trigger—with no way of knowing if the chamber is empty or loaded. The arbitrariness is part of the terror.

But there are also no surprises. If you denounce or inform on somebody, you can’t say you didn’t know when one day, well…

“I was not a victim of [my] informers, as many East Germans really were of theirs. They did me no serious damage. Yet, knowing how the system worked, I may fairly guess that they did harm others,” Garton Ash writes.

If Michael Malice was one of those who were harmed, he would want to read his file.

“If I got sent to jail, we have a different situation. Then I want to know because then I need to know who the rat is.”

Cancelations don’t have a middle man. Some participants do more harm than others, but everyone involved contributes directly.

Most people still don’t know what cancelation actually entails. They think it means getting fired, getting some bad press, and being cut down to size. Those are hopefully the goals of the people who instigate cancelations; and of the people who pile on, assuming they think about what’s down-range of their click or e-signature.

Hopefully, because the alternative is they knowingly drove their targets into depression, drug and alcohol abuse, professional ruin, social isolation, post-traumatic stress, flashbacks, suicidality.

The first canceled coach I spoke to told me about the “dark triad” personality: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathology. Whenever I, in turn, introduce a canceled coach to the concept, there’s always a cold silence before I hear “Oh my god.”

“The impulse, the flash of malice, the infantile destructiveness he could understand. The wonder was the depth of the girls’s rancor, her persistence with a story that saw him all the way to Wandsworth Prison.”
- Ian McEwan, “Atonement”

Christina Dalcher is willing to forgive a mistake, not malice. Some people probably signed the petition not knowing what it would do to her and her career. Others signed it hoping for exactly what happened, at least on the professional side of things.

“I don’t know whether they really bought into it or if it’s about fear of being ostracized,” Dalcher said. “I think they probably put things on the scale. ‘Who do I value more? Who could do me more damage? What would hurt my career or my reputation more?’

“On the one side of this, me, my feelings, damage to my career. On the other side, there are all of these people who are far more interesting, important, revered, and well-known.”

But if they go back and take their name off of the petition, “they would be saying, ‘I’m sorry, I wish I hadn’t signed it. I never would have signed it if I’d known what it was.’ Now that they know what it is, they’re doing something to rectify that.”

Four years after an article in The New York Times sealed Capiraso’s fate, The Athletic—owned by The New York Times—wrote an article that vindicated him. The Athletic contacted the former employee who instigated Capiraso’s cancelation. He provided one of the most callous statements of privilege I can imagine:

“I have moved on. I don’t want to get back involved in it.”

Canceled people consider, attempt, and sometimes commit suicide because they rarely have the choice to move on and not be involved. For all practical purposes, their story is over. When someone believes that, it’s a short step to making it true.

Now that they know, now what?

Freedom to choose

The similarities between cancelation and what Garton Ash describes in The File—both in the dynamics and in the consequences—are much closer than the average person might think. Even if you’re still not convinced, Garton Ash warns us about the trap of minimizing our own context by holding it up next to East Germany under the Stasi:

“[T]here is an opposite fallacy: to make our condition look better by contrasting it with something so much worse… If you wish to make gray look white, put it against black.”

Michael Malice could not condemn the East German informants because they may have been forced or coerced into informing, or because they saw it as their least bad option. He gives them that dispensation because they were so much less free than us.

Garton Ash agrees that “we, who never faced these choices, can never know how we would have acted in their position, or would act in another dictatorship.”

But we can come close. The moral panic mobs of the last decade gave us ample opportunities to pile on, speak out, or keep our head down hoping the mob would be too busy to notice us; to accept the mob’s judgment or to decide for ourselves; to believe the worst anyone could say about someone else or to stand by our own experiences with that person.

Someone who did and said nothing publicly when their friend or coworker was cancelled would be no braver when faced with the choice of informing on that person in return for a travel visa (a common motivation that Garton Ash uncovered) or to try to keep themselves out of trouble with the secret police.

Moreover, the inverse of Malice’s argument is that someone who informs or denounces or goes along with the mob in a free society is starkly culpable. They have no secret police to hide behind. Their actions are their own, and they should be judged accordingly.

Not condemned, necessarily. Judged.

“Vast anthology of human weakness”

Yaron Brook “would be willing to give some people a second chance. Somebody’s done something that you believe is immoral. There’s tons of immorality out there! Immorality in objectivism means you evaded. I think a lot of people evade a lot of the time. I don’t think it’s unusual for someone to do something immoral.”

Dalcher speaks a lot about the rareness of integrity, and how its absence runs through everybody who contributed to her cancelation. Capiraso repeats the word cowardice every time we talk about the events of June to December 2020.

Garton Ash:

“What you find here, in the files, is how deeply our conduct is influenced by our circumstances. How large of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure. What you find is less malice than human weakness, a vast anthology of human weakness. And when you talk to those involved, what you find is less deliberate dishonesty than our almost infinite capacity for self-deception.” (emphasis in original)

Malice (the attribute, not the podcaster) is the spark and the fuel for many cancellations, but weakness is the oxygen that keeps it going.

I don’t know if Carmen has given blanket amnesty to her cancelers. I don’t think she can forgive them without knowing who they are. As Yaron Brook said, you can’t forgive without knowing the context; and nothing is more important to the context than the person.

Similarly, only the canceled person can forgive. Garton Ash quotes from Zbigniew Herbert’s poem The Envoy of Mr. Cogito:

“do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn”

A few lines earlier, Herbert has something for those us who are not in the position to forgive:

“your helpless Anger—may it be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten
may you never be abandoned by your sister Scorn
for informers executioners cowards”