Saying Radical Things is Not Doing Things

And reality is not a story.

(Audio version here)

It has become very clear to me that there are a significant number of people, mostly on the postmodern ‘woke’ left and post-truth populist right who mistake radical talk for action and reforming action for talk. These are the people who like to assert that they are ‘in the trenches’ and ‘of the street’ and that their “lived experience” gives them access to incontrovertible (and unfalsifiable) truth. The ‘privileged’ or ‘elites’ who try to address the same problems - like racism or wokeness - are dismissed as blind to this truth because they’re supposedly stuck in an ivory tower, thinking abstractly about what the evidence shows and what fits the principles of a liberal democracy. The privileged/elites may mean well, they may concede, but their methods ultimately just preserve the status quo - whether racist or woke - because they are not radical enough. They are just talking about things and getting in the way of the radicals actually doing things.

Generally, however, when somebody makes this case to me, they cannot demonstrate that they are actually doing anything and they tend to be dismissive of my attempts to show them policies that organisations I have worked with have developed that effectively protect large numbers of employees from both racist discrimination and from being forced to affirm the tenets of wokeness. There appears to be a factual confusion between radical talk and action and between reforming action and words. This confusion, I’d suggest, is fueled by a postmodern/post-truth, narrative mindset in which people prefer a heroic story over engaging effectively with reality.

Being a rather literal person, the cause and even the nature of this confusion between “talking about” and '“acting upon” had been baffling me for some time. Surely, the difference between theory and practice is generally quite clear? When I am writing a piece arguing for how I think liberals should understand and respond to a particular event based on what is true and what is liberal, I am talking (or typing). When I am helping an organisation address an authoritarian Critical Social Justice problem within it to protect employees from having to affirm things they don’t believe or face disciplinary action, I am acting. The former is an attempt to influence how people think about situations, speak about them and act upon them in their own lives. The latter is a step taken to directly protect people’s freedom of belief and livelihoods.

I’ve often wondered if these critics simply believe that those of us effecting positive change within previously captured institutions are not doing enough, or not doing the right things. But whenever I press for specifics about what they'd like us to do instead, the answers tend to collapse into vague slogans about radical change rather than practical steps.

One particularly persistent detractor with a large Twitter following once labelled me a “squishy liberal” who did nothing, but when I asked him to explain what he himself was doing, it seemed to be just more shouting about all the things that should be done. No policies, no legal actions, no tangible help for anyone. At a UK event for my last book, a woman asked why she should bother with the unglamorous, principled work that many Counterweight clients have used successfully - writing knowledgeable, persistent objections, forming collectives to oppose training initiatives, joining the DEI board - when she was far more excited by Donald Trump and Elon Musk. I pointed out that not a single employee would have been protected by merely feeling excited about a billionaire’s tweets while those dull strategies had actually saved people’s jobs and freedoms.

Of course, the same dynamic continues to come up repeatedly from the woke left too. Following my publishing a piece on the rise of the illiberal 'anti-woke' in which I argued for the need to recognise a parallel authoritarianism with that we had criticised on the left gaining dominance on the right and push back at it, I heard from a number of people taking this stance. One critic told me to stop offering “tea and biscuits” and talking about the problem and help him to actually do something about it. He found it very difficult to tell me what it was he was doing that I could help with. Ultimately, we established that he too was saying things in writing for people to read online but those things were doubling down on woke slogans and accusing everybody even vaguely right of centre of being a fascist. This seemed to me to be quite clearly the opposite of helpful and likely only to fuel the anti-woke narrative that wokeness was not declining at all and intensify their radical rhetoric. He certainly felt that he was doing something, though, and that I was not. In this case, we were both trying to influence minds and I think mine was the better psychology.

It has gradually become clear to me that, in our increasingly postmodern/post-truth narrative-driven world in which we tend to watch current events and internet dramas unfold on a screen, many people are having genuine difficulty distinguishing between stories and action. Steady, effective practical reforms on the part of people actually working within captured fields don’t feel radical so they don’t feel like action. Meanwhile, saying radical things feels actiony even when nothing changes for a single human being.

Central to this, I believe, is the significance that ‘lived experience’ has taken on as a way of determining what is true. While humans have always had a tendency to believe their own perceptions and their own stories over measurable reality, this epistemology has (wrongly) gained credibility and social prestige, at least in part, due to the Critical Social Justice (woke) movement. We have been being asked for at least a decade to recognise the lived experience of those members of minority groups who agree with the movement as the authoritative truth that is ‘not up for debate’. Anybody disagreeing with this and suggesting that ‘correspondence with reality’ is a better model of truth has been told they need to decolonise their thinking. While surely a relatively small proportion of the population has found this convincing, it does seem to have contributed to normalising the idea that a truth claim is valid if one feels it strongly enough.

It is commonly accepted that conspiracy theories are a problem of the political right and, to some extent, this is true. The vast majority of people who believe the Earth is flat, that 9/11 was an inside job, that Covid was either a bioweapon introduced to justify state control or never happened at all, or that “the Jews control the world” tend to be on the conspiratorial right. However, if we expand the idea of a conspiracy theory to include the belief that we live in a white supremacist, cis/heteronormative, imperialist, patriarchal rape culture perpetuated by internalised power dynamics and the language we use as a result of this, it becomes clear this is not exclusively a right-wing phenomenon.

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that conspiratorial thinkers on the right tend to believe that shadowy “elites” are knowingly controlling what we accept as true, while the conspiratorial left sees these power systems as operating unconsciously through all of us, serving the interests of the “privileged”. Either way, the result is the same: reality is not seen as readily accessible to the average person, so the solution becomes a radical scepticism of anything mainstream society holds as true and a reliance on one’s own (politically shaped) intuitions and (group-based) lived experiences instead.

This is deeply troubling. As one research paper looking at how epistemic beliefs relate to misperceptions and conspiracist ideation found:

Individuals who view reality as a political construct are significantly more likely to embrace falsehoods, whereas those who believe that their conclusions must hew to available evidence tend to hold more accurate beliefs. Confidence in the ability to intuitively recognize truth is a uniquely important predictor of conspiracist ideation. Results suggest that efforts to counter misperceptions may be helped by promoting epistemic beliefs emphasizing the importance of evidence, cautious use of feelings, and trust that rigorous assessment by knowledgeable specialists is an effective guard against political manipulation.

This seems to boil down to the tautological point that people who recognise that reality is real tend to recognise reality. Yet in the current political climate, it does need repeating: the stories we tell ourselves to fit our ideological narratives are not the same thing as reality. If we want to solve real problems, we must first understand and engage with the world as it actually is. That means promoting evidence-based epistemology, being more cautious about trusting our feelings as truth-detectors, and insisting that political claims be backed up by rigorous empirical research.

This is likely to go down badly with both the postmodern left and the post-truth right. Establishing social norms and expectations that truth claims should be evidenced, arguments reasoned, and debate civil was an Enlightenment innovation and something of an anomaly in human history. Counter-Enlightenment forces have been trying to chip away at it ever since. There is something undeniably exciting and liberating about living inside stories of good and evil that we create for ourselves. By contrast, trying to work with observable reality - to measure it, understand how it works, reform systems to improve it, and resolve conflicts within it - is far more complicated and much harder work. Pushing back against woke authoritarianism by painstakingly digging it out of knowledge-producing institutions, workplaces, schools, and government without replacing it with any other form of authoritarianism feels like a damp squib compared to the fantasy of revolution. Evidence-based reform is always disappointing to those who crave a satisfying story with a grand showdown, where good triumphs over evil, the villains are thoroughly defeated and disgraced and the heroes live happily ever after, covered in glory. They'd rather have that story and keep telling it in impassioned slogans than do something that works to bring about the change they want.

This is, I believe, why my critic at the event complained that The Counterweight Handbook’s “principled strategies” simply weren’t as exciting as the tweets of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. I concede that point. They aren’t. However, I have yet to hear from anyone actually working inside a captured field or organisation who wants an exciting story over practical, specific plans to fix the problem. People who operate within real institutions understand how complex their systems are and they know what’s at stake. They don’t think radical slogans or dramatic firings will magically put things right. Instead, they ask me things like: “How do I get my emergency service to focus on practical training that keeps us alive, rather than unconscious bias sessions that fracture team cohesion?” Or: “How do I persuade my therapeutic profession’s governing body that treating every black client’s problems as rooted solely in racism fails them as complex human beings?” Or: “How do I get my media company to drop this policy forcing everyone to pretend to have a gender identity?”

Nor would the people who have worked hard to resolve Critical Social Justice problems within their own organisations or fields think it fair to be told they’ve “done nothing” simply because what they did wouldn’t make an exciting action movie. This year alone, people dedicated to their professions and institutions, whom I have been honoured to work with, have achieved real, tangible changes: they reversed a policy that would have taught small children that their success depends on their sex and skin colour; they blocked a mandate that would have forced medical practitioners to justify their practice according to ideological tests instead of patient outcomes; they brought about a leadership change that freed a charity from ideological paralysis and restored vital services to lonely disabled people; and they vetoed an initiative that would have made it impossible for engineers of racial minority to demonstrate they had succeeded on their own merits. None of this was glamorous - it mostly involved a lot of carefully worded emails and some well-rehearsed meetings - but it worked. It is not nothing.

None of this means anyone should stop being idealistic or trying to inspire large-scale cultural change. I certainly have no intention of doing so. I plan to have “She just wanted you to value evidence-based epistemology and consistently liberal principles” on my gravestone (yes, literally). There is nothing wrong - quite the opposite - with thinking big and encouraging others to do the same. But once you start to resemble the “champagne socialist” who rants about overthrowing capitalism and seizing the means of production from his iPhone in an expensive restaurant while sneering at people running food banks or fighting for living wages, you’ve lost the plot.

It is essential that we do not continue down this path of mistaking radical talk for action and reforming action for talk. Resist the draw of losing yourself in a heroic narrative that feels actiony while disparaging people doing reforming things to fix their professions and organisations. Yes, radical stories of good triumphing over evil can feel exciting and liberating, but we have to remain in the real world to actually achieve anything. Reality is not a political construct. Those of us on the political left need to intervene upon the postmodern elements among us who wish to socially re-engineer society as though it is. Those of us on the right must do the same with the post-truth right who have become so radically sceptical they now only trust stories they made up themselves. Have less confidence in your ability to intuitively recognise truth using your feelings and lived experience (perceptions) and instead recognise truth as something that corresponds with reality and can best be understood using evidence. Demand that your own political parties and political movements demonstrate that they also recognise truth in this way. Don’t just point out when the other side fails at this. This is the only way to move us out of this cycle of radical scepticism and the creation of multiple fractured realities, none of which are actually real. Make reality real again.