Eternal prison of the unforgotten past

Why a lack of forgiveness is keeping us trapped in the past

As I neared the end of my sophomore year of college I had two epiphanies. The first was that I wasn’t going to elope and join the Marines. The second was that I wanted to spend my summer break in New York City. One of my uncles has lived in Manhattan since the Paleolithic period and I took it for granted that I could sleep on his couch while I looked for a place to live. This was a mistake.

I sent him an email with my plans and didn’t hear back for several days. Then one gloomy gray morning I received a chilly reply. My uncle formally informed me that I would not be welcome in his home. He gave several justifications for this hostile hospitality, the primary one being that six years ago I had asked a question about LSD on Yahoo Answers. He therefore assumed me to be a disreputable character who couldn’t be trusted around his appliances.

Admittedly I was the first teenager in America to ever express an interest in mind-altering substances, but this rebuttal of my character seemed distinctly unfair. My uncle hadn’t asked about my present beliefs, my motivations in coming to NYC or what changes I’d made to my character since asking that ominous question.

A slip up from the past, that I didn’t even remember, had become my executioner in the present. I was angry, but mostly I was sad and disappointed. I’d always liked my uncle and had been looking forward to seeing him. Alas.

What to do, what to do. When Plan A is a bust, break out Plan B. I packed two backpacks and took the midnight bus to Manhattan. I left the Port Authority bus terminal at 7:30 in the morning with no place to live, thirteen $100 bills in my sock and no backup plan save for a vague notion that I could sleep under a bush in Central Park for a night or two if it came to that.

I went to Starbucks, got on Craigslist and started making calls. The mere minutes of research I’d done prior to my journey indicated that one to three hundred new rooms were posted for rent every day and one of them could be my home, I thought. Sure enough… That’s how by 5 pm I ended up in Weehawken, New Jersey, renting a tiny bedroom from a gay artist who painted murals for night clubs. No Central Park for this narrator.

Forgiveness, we don’t have enough of it. More to point, we no longer have cultural norms to enforce forgiveness in the internet age. Here’s an excerpt from Douglas Murray’s book: The Madness of Crowds.

The second thing that is important about stories like those of Norton, Jeong and others is the question that the internet age has still not begun to contend with: how, if ever, is our age able to forgive? Since everybody errs in the course of their life there must be - in any healthy person or society - some capacity to be forgiven. Part of forgiveness is the ability to forget. And yet the internet will never forget. Everything can always be summoned up afresh by new people.

When I was fourteen I shot my sister in the butt with a BB gun. Woops. Atonement was accorded and apologies were allotted. All is forgiven in love and war. Several decades later, if my sister were to hold my trigger-happy escapades against me I would call her out for being unfair. Part of the social contract is that we forgive one another’s transgressions, and once forgiveness is awarded the event is archived in the past where it belongs. How can you tell when a married couple really hate each other? See if they dredge up long-forgotten offenses to use as foot soldiers in their skirmishes.

We forgive and forget because it’s healthy and necessary in a world in which every human is flawed. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet learned how to apply this logic to the internet. In the hellscape of social media a Tweet from twenty years ago can get someone fired, irrespective of how the Tweeter’s views have changed in the last two decades. We find ourselves trapped in the eternal past, where the sins of yesteryear hold as much brain deadening mercury as the transgressions of the present. This is unhealthy!

Until very recently a slip-up or error made even by a very famous person would be whittled away by time. There are some things so big that they will never be forgotten. Someone being tried in a courtroom or going to prison keeps that on their record. But living in a world where non-crimes have the same effect is especially deranging. What court can be appealed to? Especially when the nature of the crimes, or what constitutes a crime, can vary almost from day to day.

While the far left’s campaign of cancellation is the most prominent example of eschewed mercy, this is a near universal phenomenon. Any person with a grudge against a political adversary, coworker who got a promotion, or former boyfriend, can sort through their online past for politically inopportune statements. It’s immaterial whether a person transgressed last week or ten years ago, it’s all the same gristle for the internet’s meat grinder.

A lack of forgiveness is already toxic for adults, but it may be even worse for children. Douglas Murray argues that this ever present threat of persecution perpetuates anxiety in the younger generations.

It is wholly unsurprising that studies show an increase in anxiety, depression and mental illness in young people today. Rather than being a demonstration of ‘snowflake’-ism it is a wholly understandable reaction to a world whose complexities have squared in their lifetimes. A perfectly reasonable response to a society propelled by tools that can provide endless problems but no answers.

The trouble also is that the Overton window is changing too rapidly. The most politically correct person today may find themselves on the wrong side of a witch hunt in just a few years. Many things that were PC in 2013 are anathema in 2023, grounds for the ruination of one’s career. What kind of world is that to live in?

I avoid the worst of this insanity by having a minimal presence on social media. Also, I like to imagine that I’m at least partially anti-fragile. One of Nassim Taleb’s most brilliant concepts, when you’re anti-fragile you get stronger the more someone tries to break you.

If the mob came after me they would draw considerable attention to my Substack. Some people would call me a icky names and try to ruin my career. However, while the witch burners were in the process of discovering that I have no career, many others would read my common sense writing and become regular readers of my once weekly scribes. Anti-fragile.

Returning to our theme, one of the most basic steps we could take to restore sanity into our hyper-online world is to create a new set of norms about forgiveness. No, someone cannot lose their job because they Tweeted an off-color joke seventeen years ago. That shit just isn’t going to fly anymore.

Should there be a formal statute of limitations for what we write online? Imagine if anything more than three years old couldn’t be held against you. Wouldn’t it be freeing to know that you wouldn’t be in danger of losing your livelihood in the event that someone discovers a drunken Facebook post you made in 2017?

We have a choice, and at a certain point we need to draw the line. There needs to be amnesty online the same way we forgive our friends and family in person. The alternative is a society that rips itself asunder under the unbearable pressure of unforgivable transgressions, ever accumulating grievances until every last person has been cancelled and the internet is a bleak uninhabitable wasteland where the corpses of good faith, kindness and human decency litter the battlefield like too many good men struck down in their prime.

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