Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
When online conformity mobs imitate government coercion
When online conformity mobs imitate government coercion
Apr 2, 2025 10:14 PM

The social-media outrage machine is rather predictable these days. It doesn’t take much panies and celebrities to offend the cultural consensus, spurring online mobs to respond, in turn: not through peaceful discourse or by turning their attention elsewhere, but by fomenting rage, abuse, and assault on the subject(s) in question.

The notion of public outcry isn’t new, of course, particularly as it relates to those in the public eye. But such vitriol seems to be more hastily applied, and increasingly so for everyday citizens, whose words and actions are constantly ripped from their context and over-elevated to implicate and denigrate particular peoples or groups or entire schools of thought.

Take James Damore, author of the now-infamous Google memo and the most recent target of this same school of tar-and-feathering. Damore was a lower-level engineer at a massive pany — not an executive or a “whistle blower” or a “public face” — and yet journalists, media outlets, and armchair shame-mongers quickly proceeded to tear apart Damore and his memo for days and (now) weeks in the public eye.

Whatever you think of the memo’s contents, the vindictive and incessant nature of the response begs an important question: Is this any way to maintain and preserve a peaceful, virtuous, and free society?

As Megan McArdle points out, much of the shift in tone is due to a range of social, economic, and technological changes, each leading to our present and peculiar mix of atomized culture and munication. “We now effectively live in a forager band filled with people we don’t know,” she says. “It’s like the world’s biggest small town, replete with all the things that mid-century writers hated about small-town life: the constant gossip, the prying into your neighbor’s business, the small quarrels that blow up into lifelong feuds.We’ve replicated all of the worst features of munities without any of the saving graces.”

Whereas munities have long wielded social coercion as a mechanism for sorting out norms and behavior, the new status quo lacks any sort of personal touch or intellectual empathy, not to mention personal consequences for the “coercers” in question. There is little to lose for those hiding behind their screens.

It’s all part of a trend we’ve grown familiar with. From Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart to Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, we see the same frays at the same seams munity and civil society. Yet for conservatives and libertarians, we tend to point mostly to the eagerness of the State in filling such voids, whether via intrusive policies or political grandstanding. Those are well-founded concerns. But the continued rise of “private-sector” conformity mobs demonstrates that the State is not the only threat we face.

In a country of munities and centralized online platforms, government isn’t the only place from which top-down, detached, and impersonal coercion is a threat. As McArdle explains:

Given the way the internet is transforming private coercion, I’m not sure we can maintain the hard, bright line that classical liberalism drew between state coercion and private versions. We may have to start talking about two kinds of problematic coercion:

1. Government coercion, which is still the worst, because it is backed up with guns, but is also the most readily addressed because we have a legal framework to limit government power.

2. Mass private coercion, which even if not quite as bad, still needs to have safeguards put in place to protect individual liberty. But we have no legal or social framework for those.

Taking into account the grand diversity of the social and economic order, these are the types of attitudes that, when given power and prominence, will flat-line flourishing and tear apart the fabric of modern civilization. Though these mobs wield their power without the force of government, the intimidation they inspire is just as stifling, whether to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or plain-old, hum-drum peace and prosperity.

“And unless it is checked, where does it lead?” asks McArdle. “To something depressingly like the old Communist states: a place where your true opinions about anything more important than tea cozies are only ever aired to a tiny circle of highly trusted friends; where all statements made to or by the people outside that circle are assumed by everyone to be lies; where almost every conversation is a guessing game that both sides lose.”

As for what the “checks” on such power should look like, the answers aren’t easy. In many ways, the solutions are the same as those for our other crises of social capital: find some way to inspire a return to vibrancy for “associational life” in America (or another “Great Awakening,” as Charles Murray recently called it).

In an age where social coercion continues e from isolated individuals on the web or the collectivized bureaucrats of the State, a revival of the “middle layers” or “mediating institutions” of society is sorely needed. Disagreements and disruptions will continue, and until we learn to respond without the foam of enraged mobs or the billy clubs of centralized governments — reviving virtue, trust, and power in munities, churches, schools, and businesses — we can expect our freedoms to fester accordingly.

Image: Angry Mob, Rumble Press (CC BY 2.0)

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
The Great Gaetano Rebecchini: Italy’s hero succumbs to the coronavirus
Gaetano Rebecchini was a great Italian, an extraordinary witness to our traditional national values, while challenging politically correctness and representing the best of our country. Today, Italy lost a good, honest, courageous person, an example for present and future generations e. Read More… Today was the first time I learned of someone I know and respect who lost his battle to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). He was a 95 year-old political warrior and defender of freedom: Gaetano Rebecchini. He returned...
13,000 children are being denied an education over a funding fight
Millions of schoolchildren are currently out of school under state orders intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus. However, in Oregon, at least 13,000 students are being unnecessarily denied an education to benefit traditional public schools’ monopoly over education. Earlier this month, Gov. Kate Brown ordered all Oregon’s public schools closed until the end of March. She then extended that deadline to April 28. This would be unexceptional if not for the fact that she also closed online public...
‘They want to punish the Church’: Italian priest fined for procession to fight coronavirus
The following translation is an exclusive interview that appeared in the weekend edition of the northern Italian daily La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, which has fiercely defended Italy’s religious freedom throughout the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Correspondent Andrea Zambrano interviewed a Roman Catholic parish priest, Rev. Domenico Cirigliano, who was slapped with a €400 fine by local police for processing with a “miraculous” crucifix. Rev. Cirigliano said he was performing essential “work” by blessing the town of Rocca Imperiale in order to...
Acton Line podcast: How to talk about rights in our polarized age
Today, our most contentious controversies are about morality. We disagree about questions of efficiency and democracy, but across political aisles, we also disagree about what’s right to do and who we’re ing as a people. How can we have productive debates with people whose worldviews are very different from ours? Adam MacLeod, professor of law at Faulkner University, addresses this question in his new book titled “The Age of Selfies: Reasoning About Rights When the Stakes Are Personal.” In this...
Three core principles to evaluate the coronavirus stimulus
As epidemiologists scramble to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on public health, economists are evaluating its impact on the global economy. Experts in both fields absorb the flurry of data, interpret it through their scientific training and the lens of similar historical events, and endeavor to mend a path forward. Yet everyone knows that ultimately we are in unchartered waters, and possible es vary widely. As an economist, I am stunned by the nearly 10 million jobless claims...
Creativity will kill COVID-19
It is in the most desperate of times that we must not forget our principles. Globally, we are facing desperate times. In the United States, unemployment rolls doubled in just one week, climbing to 6.6 million unemployment claims for the week ending March 28, 2020. As more Americans are asked to stay at home, many have e unemployed. Additionally, the potential death toll scares us, and we beg for scientists to expedite new tests, anti-viral drugs, and vaccines. These are...
Coronavirus shows us how work impacts civilization
Many Americans are already struggling due to the ripple effects of the COVID-19 lockdown. Just last week, more than 6.6 million Americans filed unemployment claims. Some economists predict that total job losses could reach 47 million. In turn, much of our focus is rightly set on the material devastation—lost salaries, declining assets, and so on. Yet the economic lockdown brings significant social costs as well, reminding us that our economic activity has social value to our civilization that goes well...
April Fools’ Day: Italians are not joking around anymore as civil unrest builds
Culturally the first of April – April Fools’ Day – is the same in Italy as in America. It’s a day of practical jokes and laughs. Only here it’s called April Fish Day, because it is related to the ancient end of the Pisces or Fish sign in the zodiac. It also the day of jokes which Italians inherited from the ancient Roman feast of Hilaria (hilarious in English) celebrated around the spring equinox. During the Hilaria celebrations Romans would...
No one knows what a return to ‘normalcy’ after COVID-19 will look like
At some point, not today but perhaps in the next few weeks, we will be having more conversations about getting people back to work and restoring the $21 trillion U.S. economy. Some signs indicate the coronavirus pandemic may turn soon in the United States. Even if the entire nation makes an all-out effort to restrict contact, coronavirus deaths will peak in the next two weeks, with patients overwhelming hospitals in most states, according to a University of Washington study. The...
Service is love for our God and our clients
For the Italian Nuova Bussola Quotidiana media outlet, I am publishing a series of short reflections on economics, virtue and spirituality during Lent entitled Lentenomics(go here for the first reflection on “sacrifice”). In the second of these six essays I turned my attention to the virtue of “service.” In summary, I write that “service has a supremely essential role within the economy, and not just in the so-called ‘service industries.’ Markets simply cannot function without services. They are the fundamental...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved