There’s a funny phenomenon that has emerged in the past 5 years or so with celebrities. The experience I’m describing might sound familiar to you: a celebrity or some notable person will get in trouble for some reason, and then another celebrity will make a comment on either the first person’s behaviour, or the situation in general. Then, what inevitably happens is someone somewhere in the world will find an instance from the second celebrity’s life in which they totally contradict themselves. This, of course, has the effect of being really funny, because it highlights how the person pretending to be wise was once really just a hypocritical fool.
An example of this would be in 2017, at the height of the Me Too movement, when Ben Affleck commented on his support for women. Within days, someone dug up a video of him groping a reporter during an MTV interview, which he quickly apologized for. Another more recent example of this would be Jim Carrey’s reaction to the Will Smith Oscars debacle: he commented on Smith’s behaviour being obviously inappropriate. Yet, once again: within days someone found a video of him forcefully kissing Alicia Silverstone at, ironically enough, an award show. Carrey said he was “sickened” by what happened at the Oscars, but he himself literally displayed the very same thing he was speaking up against: unprofessional behaviour against a presenter at an award show.
And this phenomenon isn’t just limited to celebrities. “Regular” people who aren’t famous do this to each other constantly. On Twitter, this can be summed up with the phrase, “This you?”, in which one user says something, and another user shares a screenshot of a past Tweet (or something else) that contradicts their most recent Tweet. An easy example of this is with regards to racial comments especially: I’ve seen it happen a number of times now on Twitter where someone will post something liberal and progressive, and someone else will dig up something where the person has somehow said the exact opposite at one point in time. This has become increasingly common as time has gone by due to the fact that the internet makes things very easy to find, and the nature of how our comedy tastes as a society/culture tend to change (e.g. words like faggot, nigga, and retard have done a complete 180 in terms of acceptability: just look at any Hollywood comedy movie released in the 2000s or 2010s for an example). It used to be understood that when someone back then said one of those words, they were pushing the envelope slightly, but also not really considered a homophobe, racist, insensitive to people with disabilities, hateful in general, etc. They were seen as just joking around, and to be offended at that type of language usage would have been seen as silly. Part of the understood joke in the 2010s used to be that people shouldn’t use those words, and the inappropriateness of it all was humorous (e.g., in Shaun of the Dead, this scene has always cracked me up). But now with context removed and the changing of the times, the snapshot becomes evidence of a whole new, somewhat sinister thing.
What I think this phenomenon says about people is a couple of things. The first is fairly obvious, and I know I’m not the first person to say it, but here it is anyway: we aren’t supposed to have a full record of every single thing anyone has ever done, combined with full on high-speed constant interconnectedness. In previous eras, this type of thing was simply not possible on this scale before. In the past, if an elder statesman in a community somewhere commented disapprovingly on a situation being bad, we might take his word for it. In fact, he could even tell us something like, “Believe me sonny, I was once in your shoes, and that’s no way to act at an award show,” and we’d think, “This guy knows what he’s talking about, he learned a valuable lesson, and he’s sharing it. That’s the human experience: a wise elder sharing something they’ve learned.” But the way things work today is not like that of course, the reaction is more of an accusatory tone, “How dare you ever speak again when you did the same thing!”
This is a very distinct difference to understand (learning from someone vs. banishing them forever/“cancelling”) because it marks a shift in how we now relate to each other. One example of this might be a person like Louis CK, who got in trouble for misconduct with women. Yet, years later, even though he discussed what he learned from the whole situation in his first special since the scandal (titled Sincerely) the people who hate him don’t want to hear from him ever again. Although they argue that he’s “doing fine,” and he won a Grammy and he has fans/will always be okay, etc, these same people will never actually watch or listen to the new special despite the fact that it could be helpful to learn from someone who made mistakes with women in the past. It is a valuable perspective to have, regardless of what he did and who he once was. He explains in a way no one else really can, “Check in, because it’s not always clear how people feel. Like, men are taught to make sure the woman is okay. But the thing is, women know how to seem okay when they’re not okay.”
Now, it’s important to note that I’m not exactly defending anyone who messes up and gets caught doing something they shouldn’t have done. That is not the point of this piece. If someone gets cancelled, that’s not really any of my business, and I especially don’t care if they’re rich. I have enough problems of my own to worry about. Especially if they are pretending to be a great person and they haven’t changed at all from their past behaviour and they’re really not good at all, in that case, fuck em. Even though I like Jim Carrey, I could not care less whether someone like him gets cancelled because his life is already going great and I still live with my parents and I’m bitter. Same with Will Smith. Fuck all of them, celebrities honestly get way too much credit for doing shit basically anyone in the world could do. They’re a bunch of pampered pussies overall and I hope they all die of bat AIDS. Who gives a fuck if a celebrity gets cancelled? I gotta wake up at 6AM to get to work, and there’s no reward or upward mobility to show for any of it, it’s all to remain at the same level lol. Fuck celebrities for having so much excess wealth, every single one of them, even the ones I like. But anyway, what I am trying to say is that pointing out the hypocrisy of how people have messed up in the past is not really helpful if there’s no point to it other than shaming. And the making mistakes thing is also not unique to that person being called out, it’s a fairly common human thing, which leads me to the second point.
What I think this phenomenon primarily says about people is that everyone is awful. The fact that so many people have been “This you’d” on Twitter is not a sign that the individuals in question are rare bad people, it is just proof that people in general are flawed beings who constantly make mistakes. That’s essentially what being a human is, no one comes out their mom fully formed and perfect. You have to fuck up a couple times to get shit right, that’s how life works. If your fuck ups are not captured on camera, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist, it just means your reputation is better.
I don’t think anyone is above getting the “This you?” treatment on Twitter, it’s just that now we have more possibilities to have happy accidents of this kind. The truth isn’t that a person who gets caught doing something bad is a shitty person, it is really that people in general are all shitty, and it’s a matter of degrees. I would be willing to bet that anyone who has ever said “This you?” to someone, or dug up an old video of someone doing something shitty, has at least one thing in their past they aren’t particularly proud of. In other words, for every Jim Carrey-esque video we get of “resurfaced” bad behaviour, there are tons more examples that remain unseen and hidden. That doesn’t make the person who doesn’t get caught any better, it just means they weren’t caught. I would argue that most people are like this, but the average person doesn’t have a whole history of award show appearances and a Twitter feed to pick from, so we don’t see it.
I personally believe everyone makes mistakes and everyone is shitty, it’s just a matter of degrees and how shitty a person is exactly. There are serial killer levels of evil, and then there are other more pedestrian levels of sinning, like talking poorly about someone behind their back, or making fun of someone, etc, but it’s all pretty much under the same shit umbrella to me. Bad behaviour is bad behaviour. Everyone is awful, it’s just that evidence exists for certain people and not for others.
From personal experience, I can tell you I have made mistakes and done things I am not particularly proud of currently as an adult man. But I can also tell you that I don’t really think that stuff makes me a terrible person in the present day. I had to murder several drifters late at night I found at the side of the highway and sexually harass multiple drunken women in order to learn those lessons and grow from them, 😂😂😂hahaha jk, I would never do that, but you get my point. In all seriousness, things like using so-called “offensive” words I used to use growing up are one example of “growth.” Although I don’t consider them to be offensive, I do try to watch the things I say now because I know they’re not acceptable to most people. “Faggot” is not a hill I want to die on, but at the same time, I don’t believe in people censoring other people. I still slip up all the time, but what the fuck are you gonna do? Like I said: we’re all shitty people, it’s just a matter of degrees.