Ouroboros: The Return of Moral Guardian Puritanism - VERY Belated Post-mortem

Does it really matter who stifles who?

Hindsight being what it is, it makes me wonder why I hadn’t looked back on this sooner. My first successful submission to Areo Magazine in 2019, it covered the emergence of a new chapter in the cycle of “Moral Guardian Puritanism”. Rather than being the old Horseshoe Effect in action, however, it’s more akin to an ouroboros - radically different ends forming a closed circle where those ends blur together.

I’d like to say that things have changed in the four years since publication. In certain respects, it is both true…and sadly not.

Covid-19 not only disrupted many parts of the globe but also brought more people to using the Internet than before, possibly accelerating the trend of being “terminally online” that had already become a meme beforehand. Andrew Torba’s Gab and Nick Fuentes’ groypers have largely given way to the likes of Andrew Tate and “doomers” in the online zeitgeist. Meanwhile, “woke” activists and censorious mobs have been supplemented by the emergence of puritans among Western zoomers in social media; while not universally shared among Gen-Z, such “Puriteens” are vocally scornful of whatever’s deemed problematic or degenerate.

It might take all day covering how this has played out in the intervening years, and more talented minds certainly have, as seen with recent works like Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Cancelling of the American Mind.

Perhaps one of the more peculiar manifestations involves the indie horror visual novel The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, a game that gained infamy for its dark humor and motifs around cannibalism, isolation, co-dependency and sibling incest. On November 27, 2023, following significant harassment and a partially-successful doxing attempt against the developer, a statement was released announcing that while she would still contribute art and have final say over the game (now controlled by freelance studio Kit9), she would be “permanently and completely” terminating her activities online from here on.

Source

Amidst the ensuing drama over her leaving the Internet (much of which being due to puritanical indignation over the game’s “problematic” incest memes) it was also found that “ground zero” for the doxing was a 4chan spinoff message board called soyjak.party, with the anonymous culprits justifying their actions both on the grounds of said “problematic” motifs and out of transphobia against the creator (who was falsely speculated as being transgender).

Blame games were almost inevitable, with people pointing accusatory fingers at each other online. Some pointed squarely towards the “channer” trolls as being at fault, playing into common caricatures of bigoted, reactionary transphobes associated with the Right, particularly the self-proclaimed traditionalist corners of it. Others, meanwhile focused nigh-wholly on the critics who either harassed Nemlei or celebrated her doxing, many of whom seemed to fit stereotypes of puritanical and censorious progressives among the Left. If anyone expressed otherwise, however, there’s a likelihood of being seen as a bigot, a woke scold, if not even complicit.

It is as if two things couldn’t be true at the same time, things like “cancel culture” are just dog whistles for one side, or that a single, toxic Sword of Damocles somehow negates the existence of another simply because the flag is different. The players may change, and each of them wouldn’t be caught dead being associated with the other in any way. Yet once more, the ouroboros is in full view.

Granted, there’s more awareness of this nowadays. After all, most people loathe a killjoy, no matter where they come from. Though as attested by persistence of Moral Guardian Puritanism even among zoomers, with the “Puriteens” being seen as a continuation of the same mutual conflagration of sex-negative zealots and radical ideologues that motivated yesteryear’s culture wars, this can’t be pinned neatly along partisan lines.

When the ends, divergent as they seem, may as well be the same in mindset and practice, does it really matter who stifles who?

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