Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou be like unto him.
Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.
—Proverbs XXVI. 5-6

In Orwell’s account of his volunteering to fight on the ‘left’ Republican side of the 1930s Spanish civil war (Homage to Catalonia, 1938) he found that the supposedly committed, united army was really divided into innumerable, constantly shifting alliances that fought each other as seriously as ‘their dictator enemy'. As Orwell commented,

As for the kaleidoscope of political parties and trade unions, with their tiresome names—P.S.U.C., P.O.U.M., F.A.I., C.N.T., U.G.T., J.C.I., J.S.U., A.I.T.—they merely exasperated me. It looked at first sight as though Spain were suffering from a plague of initials.¹

He and his wife soon found themselves in the suddenly wrong faction and had to escape in fear of their lives.

There is no such thing as a weird human being, It's just that some people require more understanding than others.²
—Tom Robbins

Later when reading Tom Robbins' romantic Still Life with Woodpecker (1980), I found the central female character is excitedly attending a conservation conference in Hawaii only to find the speaking events beset by constant physical, vocal, and lifestyle ego factional attempts at dominance to be completely impossible to endure.

Winston Smith, the central character of George Orwell’s iconic novel 1984 (really a comment on the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s crushing brutal society) has an official occupation of rewriting the history of that world. He removes newly defined enemies of the state from the history books: names, statistics, photographic images—making them non-persons. Removing words, adjectives for an ever-evolving oppressive script; an earlier version of 'cancelling’.

There are many forms of cancelling: official and blatant, incipient, and unspoken. I wrote elsewhere, with reference to Archie Moore’s 2024 Venice Golden Lion winning kith and kin family tree installation, that Aboriginal people were legally defined by state and national government in a series of Aboriginal Protection Acts by blood line and skin tone. As full-blood, half-caste, quarter caste, octeroons, and so on, with decreasing respect and social disdain.³ My own father, Roy Mundine, was obligated to carry a form of internal passport through his adult life up to the beginning of the 1960s (the time of the Beatles and Rolling Stones first visiting Australia). This document described him as a ‘half caste’ Aborigine, allowed him to live off reservation, to some degree, as a normal citizen. But this of course could be revoked at any time. The wider unofficial Australian population generally had their own derogative racist labels: black gin, poor black fellah, abo, boong, sambo, vegemite, licorice, golliwog, chocolate, bomba, dusty, marbuk, black-velvet, black stud, black bird, nigger, coon; and yelllah-fellah, half-a-colour, and half-breed, were common, seemingly endless, and wide spread. Archie was further burdened—his teacher nick-named him ‘speedy’ after his laconic manner of speaking. This sense of derision, insults, and sense of lack of identity were telling on his psyche.

To be a curator is to care. In the mid-1970s I came to work with an Indigenous art marketing company set up and subsidised by the federal government to break through the glass ceiling restricting art made by Aboriginal cultural creatives from entering the western contemporary art world. Things were different then. The western art world was still dominated by solo wounded male artists. So, although there were many Indigenous group art exhibitions, the idea of finding such a solo Indigenous artist was the main strategy to achieve this change. When I moved to the former Methodist mission of Milingimbi in 1979 artists like David Malangi, whose images were reproduced on the new Australian One Dollar Note, was one who possibly fitted this figure. In this socially bonded society it was impossible to be cancelled—it would be a form of execution.

To promote these artists, I developed three rules for exhibiting: firstly, to focus on the artist primary voice—to record their biography, birth date, school attendance, attendance at ceremony, corresponding national events and so on. This was in order to place the artist into the wider national history—the national zeitgeist. The artist had to be present, vocal and be heard. I tried wherever possible to note their cryptic comments. They had to be paid. And something, a catalogue or an artwork collected, no matter how small, by the exhibiting gallery. I also recorded whether the subject matter of the artwork was from their dreaming, their mother’s dreaming, their maternal grandfather's dreaming, or their great grandparents' dreaming. 

Shunning is a form of severe social control where a group or individual deliberately ostracises another. The term is used in Amish society where it can happen. It has many forms and settings. I’ve read that among resident colonial societies, certain individuals may cross a social line and be shunned for instance. I think that cancelling culture could be seen to be a form of this.

I think therefore I am!

Human self-consciousness is/was an immeasurable step but limited if we cannot communicate that to others. In one of Noam Chomsky’s last interviews he put forward his view that the most important development in human evolution that allowed us to come to dominate the world as a species was the ability to create complex language and sophisticated communication.

This is enhanced through technological extensions: language, pictograms, writing and portable writing forms. The printing press, and later electronic forms of communication, replacing the human voice and face to face interaction. What this can lead to is a form of faceless kneejerk commentary without real consideration of deeper issues.

In the 1956 American sci-fi film Forbidden Planet, a spaceship arrives on the planet Altair4 to rescue the survivors of an earlier attempted colony from earth. They find an earlier highly advanced civilisation, the Krell, existed but they all mysteriously died out in a single-night event some time previously. The Krell left a monumentally large, nuclear power reactor system, and commensurate large computer data base. The latter network, using this power source allowed the Krell, and now, present humans to create and move about 3D objects—animate and inanimate—by thought alone. A wonder, a god like automatic power, but as it became apparent, also released, made real, ‘the creature from the id’, human passions of hate, jealousy, and violence.

I was always regaled of the wonder benefits of the internet; immeasurable access to information, data, and communicative interaction. To speak to the world, to come to think we can know everything. Some think that in fact. But although we are now bombarded every minute of our lives with constant information, we seem to know less on another level. Although we now supposedly speak to many we are releasing these same passions, losing the ability to communicate ethically and morally off-screen. 

You may not like your brother-in-law or other relatives but in this Aboriginal society, at least once a year, you will have to collaborate intimately, ritually. Nearly all Aboriginal commercial art exists in, is derived from a song-dance from a continuing constant ceremonial ritual cycle related to a season, a place, and set of individuals. It's where at least once a year, a group of related individuals, across age, gender and social status, collaborate to create art in all forms, magnitude, and duration. Some sing, some dance, others create temporary performance spaces, and sculptures. The bonding ritual is to confirm the participants relationship and responsibility to each other, to their society, to the environment, and to the spiritual cosmos.

It doesn’t mean that there aren’t ever any ego arguments, participants feeling slighted, or jostling in their roles, or opinions on the qualities of the performances. But in my limited experiences these instances are few or momentary and never upset the smooth running or spiritual power of the event.

So, after over a decade of participating in such rituals, I began to refine-choreograph exhibitions of groups of artists across age, and genders and art forms around discussion points, ideas on why we are here. These performative ritual-ceremonies are a glue that bonds the society together.  From these bonding experiences I came to live by three rules of interaction. Firstly, you can never (or should never) tell another adult human what to do. You may give advice, but cannot be forced. Secondly, to remember that an argument is really a conversation so it's important to find the core of the problem being presented. And lastly, you can never hold a grudge or long vendetta but always strive to remain, at some level, in conversation with the other party concerned.