Actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck lamented what seems like the eternal punishment that cancel culture will impose upon certain people, destroying their lives beyond redemption.
The longtime creative duo shared their thoughts on the scourge of cancel culture during an interview with famed podcaster Joe Rogan when promoting their Netflix film The Rip.
“I bet some of those people would have preferred to go to jail for 18 months or whatever and then come out and say, ‘No, but I paid my debt. Like, we’re done. Like, can we be done?’” Damon said. “Like, the thing about getting kind of excoriated publicly like that, it just never ends.”
Damon said the public’s unwillingness to let people’s past mistakes go means the mistake will “follow you to the grave.” Affleck agreed with Damon’s sentiment, adding that people “have dark, fucked up instincts to isolate people.”
Affleck even went as far to say that people take joy in watching others in downfall – a form schadenfreude.
“Maybe because part of us is saying ‘it’s not me,’ So if you can point the finger, everyone’s looking over there. We feel safer, you know?” Affleck said. “And to take any forgiveness out of it is a really fucked up thing, because then it makes it impossible to actually go, ‘All right, yeah, I did that… That was wrong. I get it,’ You know, because it doesn’t matter. Once you’ve said you’ve done it, you become like an outcast.”
Affleck called out the hypocrisy, believing that nobody ever really wants to think that people are the “sum total” who they are in their worst moments.
Damon and Affleck’s appeal to grace and forgiveness for people who have been canceled echoes sentiments expressed by singer Nick Cave, who called it “mercy’s antithesis” in a 2020 blog post.
“Mercy ultimately acknowledges that we are all imperfect and in doing so allows us the oxygen to breathe — to feel protected within a society, through our mutual fallibility. Without mercy, a society loses its soul, and devours itself,” Cave wrote. “Mercy allows us the ability to engage openly in free-ranging conversation — an expansion of collective discovery toward a common good. If mercy is our guide we have a safety net of mutual consideration, and we can, to quote Oscar Wilde, ‘play gracefully with ideas.’”
Paul Roland Bois directed the award-winning Christian tech thriller, EXEMPLUM, which has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes critic rating and can be viewed for FREE on YouTube, Tubi, or Fawesome TV. “Better than Killers of the Flower Moon,” wrote Mark Judge. “You haven’t seen a story like this before,” wrote Christian Toto. A high-quality, ad-free rental can also be streamed on Google Play, Vimeo on Demand, or YouTube Movies. Follow him on X @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.
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