The Village and the Woods

The Village and the Woods: An Essay On Social Panic, Purity Politics, and the Left is a map, an extended metaphor, and a prayer. It is a response to longstanding and emotionally intense polarities within progressive political communities on responses to conflict and harm, social exiling as a practice, and the devastating impact of dogmatic political puritanism on social movements and marginalized communities. In short, it is my response to the “cancel culture” debate.

Using a mythopoetic lens and creative non-fiction as the guiding structure for this piece, I attempt to find my own understanding and generate a helpful set of concepts and guidelines for understanding and resisting social panic and punishment culture. This eBook is likely to be challenging and perhaps even controversial, as it directly challenges some prevalent cultural norms in progressive spaces and compares Leftist dogma to its right-wing counterparts.