Restoration and Logotherapy in Times of Digital Lynching

Jose Moreno — certified logotherapist, supervisor, international Logotherapy trainer

It has been more than six decades since Viktor Frankl, in works such as “The Unconscious God” or “The Will to Meaning,” warned that when the human being does not find meaning, he tends to dissolve into collectivism—to take refuge in the masses to evade his freedom and personal responsibility. Thus, in Logotherapy we understand collective neuroses as automatic collective behaviors that anesthetize existential anguish, but dehumanize and deprive the person of responsibility.

Among these behaviors, at present, I see one that finds its most fertile ground in the digital ecosystem, a dynamic as toxic and damaging for individuals as for societies. What is remarkable is that it is not something new, but a re-enactment of an ancestral practice that now takes place in technology, and whose weapons are language and massive exposure. I am speaking of digital lynching, a new way of fracturing lives in real time, rooted in collectivism and self-justified by assumptions of moral superiority.

What began as the so-called culture of cancellation has degenerated into a culture of digital lynching, in which a person is punished, censored, and publicly and socially expelled through relentless pseudo-moralistic attacks, which often do not stop until destroying the life—or at least some aspect of it—of the accused of the moment.

As stated, this social neurosis is not new, as it represents a return to the ancestral practice of stoning the adulterous woman (still in effect in some countries), crucifying the thief or the heretic, or violently ending the lives of gladiators in Roman arenas for the morbid enjoyment of the masses in the spectacle of the obscene.

It represents some of the most basic and primitive aspects of our biological and tribal nature and is therefore reductive of our facultative human nature.

Background: A Failure in the Theory of Human Rights

The origins of the culture of cancellation date back barely a decade, with the emergence of the so-called American #metoo (me too) movement, which arose primarily as a commendable method of denunciation. This practice became a culture, nurtured in North American academies, and popularly understood under labels such as “politically correct” or “woke.”

As a background to this movement—and those that followed—is the theory of Human Rights, and more specifically, what in that theory and field is known as “reparation of harm,” one of its fundamental principles.

Although its intentions were and are noble, the practical application of reparation is almost impossible, especially because reparation, as a subjective phenomenon, depends on the implementation of mechanisms intimately linked to the existential experiences of the aggrieved persons and is also subject to the understanding and empathy of the offending person, if it is to be considered authentic.

One of the reasons why the culture of cancellation quickly degenerated into lynching was that those institutional gaps left people without real access to justice—or at least feeling that what they believed justice should be was neither close nor accessible—and it was then that the theory and the field of Human Rights failed as a promise. Unfortunately, it only takes a simple look at the world and its many current wars to see that, in general, the Western civilizational project based on Human Rights has not been fully realized.

Thus, over time we have seen that what should have been a legal process of restitution turned into social revenge, a visceral response that no longer seeks justice but satisfaction.

Censorship, Lynching, and the Destruction of Lives

The culture of cancellation became an ideology, an identity policy, and developed a characteristic of censorship that became increasingly evident: as it escalated, it became clear that questioning meant being excluded from the discussion and often censored, passively or actively.

The explanation lies in that this ideology needs, to establish itself, a hegemonic rhetoric of progressivism as the only thought aligned with virtue, justice, and the truth of things. The popularity it found among masses resentful of injustices was overwhelming, and its global adoption was imminent.

Today we face the most recalcitrant version and expression of that ideology: the culture of lynching. In it, restoration is the collective punishment of a specific person, self-justified by a masturbatory discourse of virtue and justice. That is, the language of human rights is instrumentalized at convenience as a validation of digital lynching: it is the “you deserve it because you caused harm,” without space to understand context, history, or subjectivity. In that logic, there is no possibility of restoration—only of chastisement.

It has already been well documented that digital lynchings constantly wreak havoc on the lives of those cancelled and lynched. It is not hyperbole to say that people are dismembered from their vital axes such as work, interpersonal relationships, family, and places of life, and that the trauma caused by this has been sufficient in many cases for people to decide to say “no more” to that life, before the passive and even satisfied gaze of many who participated in the lynching.

A similar phenomenon is found in the dozens of cases of abuse experienced by American children in their schools, who famously decided to end the lives of their classmates knowing that it meant ruining—or ending—their own. Although bullying is more concentrated and private, the dynamic of carrying out punishment and abuse hidden in a collective until breaking the other in some way remains.

In this collectivism, in this collective neurosis, the individual chooses to set aside his judgment, individuality, and personal responsibility, to join the anonymous collective that, behind a keyboard, participates in digital lynching. From an existential perspective, it is worth asking how it affects people to participate in this cruelty disguised as virtue. As Logotherapists in these times, we must then ask ourselves: What happens to the individuals who participate in these acts?

Logotherapeutic Approach

From Logotherapy and existential psychotherapy, all human pain interpellates us, regardless of whether the law labels it as criminal or not. Suffering cannot be measured or compared between persons or social groups, because the experience of an emotional-psychic rupture is unique, and only the one who lives it can understand it from within. Any attempt to compare pains through statistics or sociology proves superficial and useless if we truly wish to approach the intimate experience of human pain to seek genuine reparations. Both the lynched and the lyncher are obviously suffering from something.

Each wound is unique because each life is unique. Therefore, we cannot understand or transform harmful behaviors if we cling only to collective ideologies. Nor is it possible to find healthy and sustainable reparations within a culture of lynching. Only in the deep human encounter is it possible to touch another’s pain without reducing it to an instrument of narrative.

The need for public punishment is often fueled by an anxiety that has little to do with ethics. Rather, it is a neurotic behavior: it is the will to power, the desire to position oneself above the other, the desire to destroy the ideological and identity-based other, the one considered an enemy.

All this, in existential terms, finds some explanation when recognizing that these neuroses also mean for the individual the momentary relief of existential frustration and a distraction from the fear of one’s own finitude, phenomena intimately human and behind many addictions. Thus, we could speak of cancellation and lynching as a social addiction (neurosis): each lynching is a dose that momentarily reduces the discomfort of living without meaning, but leaves more emptiness once the effect passes, and therefore needs more.

Frankl insisted that the antidote to escape collective neuroses is conscious self-transcendence: assuming personal responsibility and finding a unique and non-transferable meaning, without dissolving into the mass. Viktor Frankl not only articulated this but practiced it by example: as a survivor of concentration camps, he never sought personal revenge nor incited censorships or collective lynchings. His conciliatory response did not come from a Judeo-Christian morality but from a profound recognition of the human as finitude, suffering, and also as faculty and transcendence. For him, to restore was not to repair the world ideally, but to respond to life by saying yes to it, to orient oneself toward meaning even in the midst of absurdity.

Conclusion: A More Human Restoration

The culture of digital lynching bears characteristics of what Frankl described as conformism (blindly following the majority) and internalized totalitarianism (ceding and adopting ethical responsibility to and from the mass, and its authority as natural) as attempts to escape existential emptiness. These behaviors are collective neuroses, where the fear of meaninglessness drives people to seek false certainties. But such certainties are achieved at the cost of dehumanizing the individual and fail to bring about restoration.

There will be no authentic restoration without empathy. And true empathy does not arise from the need to “be good” or to demonstrate moral superiority. It arises from inhabited pain, from the integrated shadow, from having traversed one’s own inner night. Only the one who has suffered his own pain—and found meaning in it, because he has chosen to seek it in the first place—can look at the other without judgment, with the dignity of one who needs neither to shout, exhibit, nor punish.

People engaged in the daily exercise of full enjoyment of life and in a permanent search for meaning in moments, days, stages, and existence, rarely participate in collective neurotic behaviors. That is to say, people who do not actively seek to escape their existential requirements naturally find no value in these collectivisms. It is necessary to reflect on where we participate from and for what purpose when we fall into these behaviors.

I believe that to restore the human in ourselves and in the one we wish to censor or lynch implies the capacity to see, to recognize the other, to stop ourselves before throwing the first digital stone. To act with existential courage, even in silence. To choose not to join the crowd. To choose understanding over judgment. Not because the other deserves it or is not mistaken, but because we are called to answer life’s questions through our own values, individually, with the binomial of freedom and responsibility—not lost in neurotic collectivism.