Indeed, she allegedly told friends that she felt she had effectively been sacked by ITV and her ‘career was over’. Already convicted in the court of public opinion and apparently by her employers, the upcoming trial would just add insult to injury.

For all the talk of online bullying, this crucial element of ‘cancel culture’ has been left out: Insults are not enough. Prosecution is not enough. Often, simple disagreements are not enough. People must be destroyed. Today’s weapon of choice: your job.

Why? The public world of work is where we gain recognition and our livelihoods. The cancellation of one’s ability to earn a livelihood is the modern equivalent of a public execution. In this way, the desire to scrub from public life alleged sinners has a medieval quality to it.

Indeed, we seem to be regressing to pre-modern ideas of what it means to be human. A lack of belief in the human ability to handle freedoms leads to the disappearing of ‘bad influences’. The public now acquires a child-like quality; we cannot be exposed to even a hint of wrongdoing or we will enact it in our own lives.

Ironically, it is this same impulse to cancel people that also drives censorship. And yet Flack’s death is being opportunistically used to fuel the latter. But this will do nothing to stop the toxic and medieval culture which doubts due process and metes out punishment to those deemed impure.

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Ashley Frawleyis a sociologist, a columnist at Compact and COO of Sublation Media.

AshleyAFrawley

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