Cancel culture is a very interesting term. People all around us are talking about it. Today, with the rise of social media, cancel culture has become a rampant phenomenon. Any celebrity, who is thought to be doing objectionable or offensive stuff that is disliked by people gets ‘cancelled’ or boycotted. Movies with actors who have done something which people don’t like are being cancelled constantly.
So, what is this phenomenon?
Cancel culture is as old as the hills. It is boycotting someone for doing something which is not aligned to the norms of society. It is also called call-out culture.
When someone does something which is not considered good or proper by a large number of people, they decide to boycott the person. This practice has been around for a long time. Excommunication from religious groups through religious diktats, or from a village by the panchayat, and ‘desh nikala’ or exile, were common punishments for undesirable elements of society.
This was considered a middle-ground and such a ‘cancelled’ person was considered worse than dead through this kind of boycott. In homes, disowning a family member was also an unfortunate possibility although socially acceptable. Even today, rare stories of a ‘cancelled’ son or daughter surface sporadically. Refrains of an oft repeated movie dialogue, ‘tum hamare liye mar chuke ho,’ (you are dead for us now) can still be heard in some rural pockets.
Among soldiers too, cancel culture is practised sometimes, as a way of toughening the mind of that soldier who isn’t a good team player. The brotherhood of soldiers is strongly knit and such grave decisions to cancel a colleague are taken very rarely, and always collectively. Such a ‘cancelled’ colleague isn’t welcomed into the bonhomie and camaraderie that the band of brothers thrives on until found deserving. He desperately craves his tribe’s acceptance, learning his lesson quickly, and often ends up becoming one of the tribe’s strongest team players.
In team sports like hockey, basketball, cricket and football, when someone tries to become too prominent and overshadow others, they are quietly cancelled and boycotted by other team members, however brilliant they might be.
In spiritual communes, cancel culture is practised quite a bit. It is a terrible punishment when hundreds of ashram inmates ‘cancel’ someone and ignore them on their guru’s explicit orders. Such community chastisement is very rare, but extremely effective. People do not even make eye contact with such a pariah, who doesn’t appear to exist for them at all.
When such cancelled inmates try to communicate with anyone, they are ignored completely. Everyone looks through them, and no one reacts to their presence.
The worst occurs when a disciple is cancelled by their own guru. Such unfortunate spiritual journeyers have been called anaath or spiritual orphans, and go through abject rejection and extreme mental torture, and they have been known to even contemplate suicide. Desperate to redeem themselves, such cancelled inmates come face-to-face with their transgressions and improprieties, and burn in a spiritual fire worse than any hell.
How can cancel culture be of any real use to a serious spiritual practitioner? You have to train your mind to turn away from everything that is detrimental to your self-growth constantly.
Cancel toxic relationships and get away from places that aren’t conducive to your inner peace. In the initial stages of your spiritual journey, it is best that you avoid places and situations where you become restless and agitated.
Going into a spiritual retreat is, in a way, cancelling all worldly elements that can give you stress. Cancel everything that can destroy your joy and stillness and you will come in direct touch with your source, which is pure bliss.
Later, once you have become firm and fortified in your spiritual practice, you wouldn’t need to cancel anyone or anything in your life. They simply wouldn’t affect you any more.
Deepam Chatterjee, the author of The Millennial Yogi, can be reached at deepamchatterjee@yahoo.co.in