Thinking about a certain cashiered film star who is now doooomed to haunt only the Kevin Sorbo level of movies reminded me of an old colleague, sociology professor Fang Deng.
1/

Not, let me hasten to add, that Fang was transphobic or anti-Semitic! No, what reminds me is that Fang wrote this thesis (I helped edit it) about how people wind up surprised by bad outcomes that other people saw coming a mile away.
2/

Fang's example was China's crackdown on the democracy movement, culminating in...
3/

Fang had been part of the movement before fleeing to the US, though she wasn't at Tiananmen Square, and she pointed out a LOT of things that I'd never considered.
4/

A) The activists were mostly elite types--children of privilege who'd gotten educated, often overseas, and had a broader perspective. They had expected to go into positions of influence and authority.
5/

B) The activists did not want to get killed. (OK, yes, that one I had considered.)
6/

C) The government and the army absolutely did not want to kill the activists. This one surprised me but yeah, even absent their position, turning the military on your own citizens is never a good look. Lots of Chinese believed the People's Army would NEVER fire on citizens.
7/

The question in her thesis was "If the activists didn't want to die, and the government didn't want to kill them, how did we wind up with a massacre?"
It's a good question!
8/

The answer is, it was an incremental process. Every time the activists said they were going to do something, the government said "Don't do that or we'll crack down!"
9/

Then they'd do it, and the government would weigh the internal and international consequences of machine-gunning a bunch of appealing young people, and say "Well we're letting you off with a warning, THIS time."
10/

Rather than threatening the activists, like they intended, the government was accidentally teaching them "You can do this stuff and we have to pretend we're mad, but we won't actually stop you."
11/

Lather, rinse, repeat. The activists escalate. The government fumes but won't act because they know it'll be a huge stink internationally and at home.
12/

But at some point a tipping point is reached. The government feels a genuine threat to its own power and authority and THAT'S when they have to shrug and say "We warned you, and warned you, and warned you, and now..."
13/

Does this mean I think disgraced movie stars are like democracy activists? Uhm, not morally! But psychologically and behaviorally? Sounds about right.
14/

These entertainers don't want to derail their gravy train, and their employers don't want the headaches of replacing them and dealing with the whingeing of conservative pissbabies. And yet, it keeps happening!
15/

Creative does something edgelordy and racist, and get a warning and nothing else, so they conclude (as a weirdly large number of bigots do) "Everyone SECRETLY agrees with me but only I am BRAVE enough to speak the truth!"
16/

They keep doing it and at some point the issue of "This actor/comedian/director keeps shitting the bed in public" combines with "this actor/comedian/director is defying my authority" to tip the calculus.
17/

Result: A company with a headache and a shocked, shocked creator waking up to discover that 4/5 of their audience did NOT, in fact, secretly agree with them.
18/

The crazy part is, I'm not sure there's a better way! Much as we want every issue to be clearly Good/Bad, there's a lot of confusing gray areas, the specter of NUANCE, and the matter that the odds of any individual making a dumb comment in public approach 100%, over time.
19/

You can't undergo the massive hassles of uprooting part of a creative team just over one dumb comment, or one that's easy to misunderstand. (Language is ambiguous, y'all.) You have to give people a chance to get back on side.
20/

Unfortunately, some people are going to interpret warnings as permission. Until we fix that, people are going to keep falling into the Fang Trap.
21/End