A few months back, I watched a very interesting documentary about Mike Wallace.
I have no strong feelings about Mike Wallace as a public figure or as a person. But I think his story is interesting as a Biblical parable about the arrogance of those who make their livings as bloodhounds of human frailty.
Specifically, those who professionally terrorize unimportant people under the guise of “news.”
For years, Mike Wallace ambushed and persecuted all sorts of people big and small with gotcha interviews, publically shamed them, and otherwise made their lives a living hell.
Finally, at a very late date, after becoming a celebrated public figure, he was hit with an embarassing libel suit from General Westmoreland.
All of a sudden, Mike Wallace is overcome by strange, alien feelings. Depression. Sadness. Anxiety. Shame. A sense of 24/7 persecution.
Poor Mike Wallace. He has never even considered what it might be like for the shoe to be on the other foot. Like most people in the media, he thought he would always and forever be running in the great hunt with the wolfpack, not as one of the hunted. Like the medieval baronies, his role god-granted and god-insured.
Everyone has their own, what they believe to be, nuanced and sophisticated view of why some people deserve cruelty and “justice” and why others don’t.
Most people are decent and just want to live their lives in peace and mind their own business. At the same time, most people are cowards who want to avoid the wrath of crusaders. They want to stay uninvolved and peacefully live their lives and don’t really much care if a few innocents get swept up with the bad apples, who cares, that’s just the cost of progress.
But the moral Zealots, they’re highly motivated—they genuinely believe they’re participating in a great project to purify the world and ferry unclean souls down the river.
They never imagine that it’ll be their heads on the block.
The Zealots genuinely believe people admire and respect them.
And to an extent they do. But driving the over-the-top admiration, just below the surface, is fear and the drive for self-preservation. People nuzzle up close, they want a spot under the Zealots’ umbrella of holiness to keep themselves safe and dry.
The Zealots don’t understand this. They genuinely, naively believe that people like them and respect them.
The people seeking shelter under these umbrellas don’t realize that they’re not actually safe. Until it’s too late.
There’s an internet joke about this: “Live by the woke sword, die by the woke sword.” First as canceller, then the cancelled.
As for the Zealots, when they’re no longer feared and become the resented, it’s their turn to go down. And human beings, when they smell the tide turning away from one dominant group to another group, oh, they can be not-so-nice. String ‘em up! Stomp them and shoot them and take photos with the bodies then hang them upside down in the public square.
But the Zealots, when it finally touches THEIR personal lives, when the chickens come home to roost—oh how they cry and piss and moan and weep and gnash their teeth. They do all sorts of contortions, they twist themselves up in knots to explain why it’s actually more complicated in their unique particular case. Their situation, you know. It’s so unique and special. It was never supposed to be like this. Poor them!
Some of them all of a sudden decide they’re against cancel culture.
They do all sorts of moral contortions, they twist themselves up in knots to explain how their special unique situation is like, really, really unfair.
Some of them—some who are true believers and unbelievably naive virgins to the world—get a weird kind of Stockholm Syndrome. They think they can preempt and short circuit their own fall by being the Most-Believing-Believer, being really apologetic and lashing themselves and being even more against themselves than those who are out to get them.
They fall on their sword and make a big disingenuous show of publicly apologizing and self-criticism and making amends. They beat their chests and cry and say yes, they “deserve” to be punished, they apologize over and over, they promise to “work on their shit” and “do better” and this is their way to keeping their ideological connection to the tribe. They still believe.
But it never really works. The spell is always broken somehow. Whether it’s genuine or earnest or believable or not, people just roll their eyes and feel tired and kind of take a step back, they don’t come closer. This person is tainted now. They no longer have the authority to assist in performing the function of self-preservation.
I’m being unfair to Mike Wallace, using him as an example. He wasn’t really a zealot in the modern way, but he was on a kind of a crusade—a crusade typical of his time—probably driven mostly by innocence. At the peak of his career, he probably believed there was good and bad people in the world and his role was to celebrate the good people and persecute the bad people. A lot of people think of themselves this way. But they don’t understand the greater logic driving things, they don’t understand how the whole process goes down.