We’re living in an age of social activism. We value personal expression and social inclusion more than ever before, and this is a good thing. It means that, as a society, we are learning to value greater diversity.
Unfortunately, we haven’t all learned the importance of discretion. The current callout culture is symptomatic of the social disease of emotional unaccountability. It places responsibility for any person’s feelings with the message sender, not the receiver. This is inherently childish.
There’s value in being considerate of others, but when consideration is expected rather than freely given, it becomes entitlement. This creates resentment, both in the receiver—who feels it’s the world’s responsibility to protect them from offensive stimuli—and also in the sender, who’s unfairly expected to prevent any possible negative reaction by signposting or censoring.
I recently had an experience of being called out and attacked here on campus. I was accused of being a vile person for sharing controversial writing that was incorrectly assumed to align to my personal beliefs, and then collectively roasted by my entire class for not including a trigger warning, which they believed should be mandatory.
They argued that a trigger warning shows respect and awareness. This may make sense, but it masks a dangerous assumption. The triggered reader feels it’s disrespectful for someone to expose them to discomfort. They feel that since the writer is not aware of the inner lives of the reader, they should tread lightly, and completely exclude sensitive material not accompanied by an explicit denouncement.
However, this is an unreasonable expectation. It’s impractical and inconceivable to protect everyone from the possibility of emotional upheaval. Throughout most of life, we cannot control what we’re exposed to. We must learn to modulate our emotional responses; it’s a fundamental aspect of maturation.
As students in the First World, we’re more or less divorced from most visceral suffering. With no objective evil against which to rally, we fight against perceived evils in our own society. Looking for people to crucify, we scrutinize our neighbours for signs of injustice or dissent from the status quo.
This serves to divide people, and also creates internal duplicity—when there is no necessity to examine one’s own perceptions and feelings, there are fewer opportunities taken to undergo emotional maturation.
Internal suffering manifests as externalized discontentment. A deeply unhappy person sees the aspects within themselves that cause discomfort, and then projects them on others to absolve themselves of emotional accountability. They blame others for their intangible internal pain, and, therefore, see no reason to resolve the issues causing this suffering in the first place.
Callout culture is the epitome of this. Social vigilantes are running amok, letting their emotions cloud their judgments and destroying lives in the process.
The more emotionally secure people are, the less likelihood they will be outraged at personal injustices.
To foster a better society, we must individually work on emotional accountability, to call ourselves out. Consequently, we will feel less triggered by others’ perceived wrongdoings against us. We’ll also create less misery through lashing out, because we’ll be happier, and this will quickly spread to others.