[MAN] I’m curious, do you believe 
that there’s a noble root underneath 
cancel culture and censoriousness?
And if you grant such, 
can it be explained through 
an evolutionary lens?
[HEATHER] You don’t need to 
grant such to try to explain it 
with an evolutionary lens.
But I would say the stories that 
we are most familiar with, including 
the Evergreen story,
look like there are some bad faith—
pick your mood disorder—
narcissists, sociopaths, whatever,
at the center of it, who capture 
good faith people who actually 
believe in what they’re doing.
And for the most part, 
it’s those good faith people
who actually believe in 
what they’re saying and 
what they’re doing
who are on the front lines.
Who are the poor souls who get 
shown on video, and who, 
5 or 10 years from now,
are going to be going, 
“Oh my god, I can’t believe I did that.”
So they were easily captured.
Perhaps they were just 
naive because they were young.
Perhaps they were seeking 
community because it’s hard
to find community now, 
in an age when most of the
traditional sources of community 
have disappeared.
There are a lot of reasons to 
have sought something and 
to have been snookered by it.
So on some level, that’s the 
evolutionary answer, too.
Is that seeking a group with whom you share something,
and whose other members you think 
legitimately might have your back, makes a lot of sense.
The thing with cancel culture is, 
they don’t have each other’s backs.
They pretend they do. 
Right?
But once they get rid of the next group, you know, we saw this at Evergreen.
I can’t remember the 
order in which it went,
but the various demographic groups started falling by the wayside.
You’ve got more intersectional 
points than I do
because I’m straight 
and a woman.
And just being a white woman 
isn’t enough anymore to be included.
And I’m going to take a guess here 
and say you’re a cis straight 
white male, and, my god.
You just have no authority 
whatsoever to speak.
[LOU] He’s manspreading 
right now, too.
(laughter)
[HEATHER] So clearly this particular movement doesn’t actually have anyone’s back.
It’s pretending to have people’s backs, and people are getting fooled by it.
But it doesn’t actually.
[BRET] I’d just add one thing to this, which is,
I want you to put yourself 
in the mind of an ancestor
who discovers that they are 
suddenly the only person in the group
who believes something on which 
something important depends.
Even if everybody else is wrong, 
the pressure to rejoin the group
and say what they’re saying,
even if they’ve got it wrong,
is immense because the alternative 
is literally starvation.
So if you imagine what Heather 
is saying, you’ve got bad actors 
and you’ve got confused people.
The confused people are being 
manipulated by
basically being threatened with 
the equivalent of modern 
starvation if they step out of line.
And that makes them 
tools of something unholy.
But when you approach them, 
realize you’ve got one 
important question at first.
Am I dealing with a bad actor, in which case I’ve got one set of problems?
Or am I dealing with a 
confused person who’s being 
manipulated by fear? Right?
Then it’s a whole different set of issues.
And categorized that way, 
you will see a different landscape.
