I once sort of unknowingly signed off on a “job lot” of opinions and positions.. I was in an intentional group that evolved/devolved in a direction that I realized (sort of out from under me so to speak) wasn’t about individual liberty and freedom, and revealed itself to be quite a load of group think and authoritarian in nature. I was the only one that left that group and to this day they maintain the position that I have to embrace certain beliefs in order to be “part of the community”…(I moved away).
Learning how to maintain my personal liberal values AND find belonging has proven elusive for me given my personal experience.
Helen, thank you for this!! I read the book you worked on with Lindsey and Bogosian years ago and it gave me the understanding and tools to walk many of my friends off the woke plank. In the past couple of years I’ve come to find the anti-woke movement moving further and further right. Under the new administration and emboldened by the far and Christian right, the movement is becoming not only unrecognizable, it’s becoming everything I found concerning about woke in the first place!! It’s wild to me that I used to stand against anti-racism only to be called a racist and now that I stand against banning everything that concerns me I’m being called a communist.
It's maddening to me how few people seem to realize that this is what democracy and freedom are supposed to look like. How can we have freedom to believe, think and speak for ourselves if we don't ally with people we disagree with to fight for our common right to disagree? I think similarly when I see people mock Republican infighting, when that infighting is precisely the hallmark of how a robust democracy is _supposed_ to work. That is healthy. A party where everyone marches in lockstep is not.
Finding common cause with people who find you condemnable and/or whom you find condemnable isn't something that needs apology or justification; it's literally the goal. At a deep philosophical level, it's how we discover our common humanity. But even at a strictly practical level, it's a basic ingredient of living peaceably despite massive disagreement. If you're not able to make such alliances, you're missing the point entirely!
The author doesn't provide any examples to substantiate her claim of a meaningful/significant authoritarian segment within the broader "anti-woke" category.
Also, as is typical of "liberal" persons (such as the author describes herself to be), she doesn't see the connection between certain false ideiological axioms/premises she subscribes to and the very "woke" ideology she opposes. The "woke" worldview, in many ways, is almost an inevitable logical and logistical endgame flowing from modern "liberal" persons.
I have had a few clashes with the anti-woke right recently, but they were just on issues of objective fact. I usually ignore the frequent anti-Semitic stuff unless it directly involves Jews that I know and is based on falsehoods or obvious bigotry.
I'm more tolerant of religious fundamentalists than Helen because I think atheism is scientifically incorrect. Religion is an evolved survival mechanism (see Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke).
Most of what is wrong with "woke" is that it is a cult (an irregular spiritual force based on pathological psycholoyg) that fills the vacuum of religiosity in postmodern, secular culture.
More importantly idealists (usually) don't make good soldiers. This is a war against neo-communism. Tragic casualties are inevitable.
Wokeism is a socially gangrenous cancer that can't be cured with being nice and invoking Constitutional order, the rule of law, and all the other "classical liberal" stuff that Helen correctly reveres.
Reverence for tolerance, fair play and the rule of law comes into play AFTER a war against evil and sin is won, not during.
Those that hold to such classically liberals values have to recalibrate what they want to accomplish, which I think Helen and Iona are trying to do, but from an idealistic position.
Idealism is severely limited in war. Brutality isn't. To win a war, brutality is usually needed. Anything less WILL BE SEEN by the woke raving lunatics (sadists, sociopaths, Cluster B/Dark Triad types) as nothing more than weakness to be exploited.
Also, the unique nature of this conflict is that "woke" is like a social parasite that feeds off postmodern and techno-economic disruption and the resulting disintegration of liberal institutions.
Woke parasitism is like a gangrenous cancer that has to be hacked off the social body before it kills the patient. The procedure is inherently brutal, ugly and "not nice".
Without "soldiers" willing to do brutal, ugly things to hack off the woke parasites/gangrene, there won't be a patient still alive to reform liberalism* (by making it anti-fragile to disruption) and uphold Helen's revered, idealistic values.
A really good idea would be to come to agreement on what exactly "wokeism" is and what is the correct label for it - ie Critical Social Justice vs Cultural Marxism or Successor Ideology. There is a lot of disagreement about this, and that disagreement likely follows the same divergences as exist between anti-woke groups.
I'd say the main fracture lies between "good faith" and "bad faith" anti-wokeness where the latter are essentially alt-right people hoping to use the rollback of wokeness to roll things way-back to a pre-liberal state.
Woke = RACE GRIFTING (or "social justice" grifting in general)
Woke = Evil and Sin
-----
See the below link for one of the best deep dives into woke mental dysfunction and how it (woke, elite-leftism) correlates to Nazi propaganda I’ve read.
open. substack. com /pub/helendale/p/social-justice-word-magic-i-the-gleichschaltung
excerpt:
Selection for emotional dysfunction
There is a long-term pattern of the sickly (e.g. Antonio Gramsci), physically unfortunate (e.g. Rosa Luxembourg), sexually perverse (e.g. Michel Foucault), gender alienated (e.g. Judith Butler), and downwardly socially mobile (e.g. Karl Marx) being drawn into the politics of the transformational future, a politics that most profoundly categorises existing society as the problem. Such people are burdened by aggravating, painful, or frustrating constraints—so drawn to politics defining constraint as oppression and that promise a future liberated from such constraints.
Those who most beat their breasts about compassion and inclusion tend to be the most viciously judgemental, as they rage against constraints they find so burdensome and demand everyone else support their liberation. Sorting people by their opinions is a natural part of this moral project: both emotionally satisfying and, by generating a cohesive moralised in-group, operationally effective.
Of course, being able to indulge one’s emotions is part of the attraction in the first place. The sort of stoic emotional self-discipline that makes for effective social cooperation and coordination is—at least in peaceful, prosperous societies—eschewed in favour of (often weaponised) dis-regulated emotional displays that degrade the performance of people and institutions.
...
Our institutions are dominated by university graduates, and these same status-and-social-leverage games play into bureaucratic pathologies of hoarding authority, restricting or delegitimising alternative sources of information, spending resources on themselves, frustrating accountability, and protecting themselves from the complexities of competence. Declaring the mass university model to be a toxic failure—and engaging in a
[----->>>] thorough purge
of all forms of activist scholarship—is necessary to preserve our societies as functioning, free, democratic, technologically-capable societies.
Woke people are the school bullies, jocks, and preppy kids of the past. Back then they were mostly right-wing. As leftism got more mainstream, being a school bully, jock or preppy got frowned upon. So while they rejected those labels, they still felt the need to bully people, so they decided to become bullies for “good causes” like social justice. South Park made fun of this phenomenon with the character “PC Principal”.
Remember, Hitler was correct about cigarettes (unhealthy, should be discouraged or even prohibited in public spaces), but I don't think either of us would have wanted to join an anti-tobacco movement with the other.
"The second issue is that there really is an illiberal anti-woke backlash going on"
Authors and intellectuals are frequently tempted to be edgy and ahead of the curve, which is what Pluckrose is doing here. I really do admire her and the other two heroes of Sokal Squared (Lindsay and Boghossian), but what she is doing here is complaining that eggs are being rationed while fighting the dangerous barbarian hordes at the gates. Despite the wonderful pushback happening in the US, the woke left are far too dangerous still in the UK, Canada, ... to declare victory and a return to calm normalcy.
The projection that type X are (seeking to be edgy) (are narcissists because they are type X) (or something) when this X could be applied to anybody/everybody regardless of their perceived type, is a red flag of the likelihood of drinking the kool aid: i.e. self-fulfilling paranoia. You are egging on those who divide us.
Are we surprised? Of course there are a subset of people who only had principles when it was convenient for them. The same dynamic happened on the mainstream liberal left in the first place.
I must confess that I hadn’t encountered the term “Critical Social Justice” until I read this and its companion piece. I have now learned of course that CSJ is a “bad thing” (as the author’s of 1066 and All That would put it), although absent the capitalisation critical (good?) social justice (good!) sounds like a… good thing. But then again, until I started researching gender absolutism and joined Substack I’d thought that “woke” was supposed to be “good thing” (insofar as it was a thing at all). Indeed, I was quite disappointed to have to announce to my children that respecting my views on gender identity I was not “woke”. As it turned out, although they are conversant with pronoun talk and dead-naming they had never heard the term “woke” before and for that at least I'm grateful for I’d always thought it was an ugly neologism and had hoped that it’d never catch on this side of the Atlantic. And I likewise hope that the term CSJ (not quite as ugly, but not very useful) won’t catch on. Use of these labels is not only unnecessary but counterproductive. After only a few months on this platform I'm already blocking as many hate-filled ranter and reactionary "anti-woke" folk as I was people posting fake AI pictures on Facebook! The focus should be on specific issues, analysed in depth, not on striving to capture the “Zeitgeist” (another unhelpful term) or become the “bell-wether of the mob”.
I once sort of unknowingly signed off on a “job lot” of opinions and positions.. I was in an intentional group that evolved/devolved in a direction that I realized (sort of out from under me so to speak) wasn’t about individual liberty and freedom, and revealed itself to be quite a load of group think and authoritarian in nature. I was the only one that left that group and to this day they maintain the position that I have to embrace certain beliefs in order to be “part of the community”…(I moved away).
Learning how to maintain my personal liberal values AND find belonging has proven elusive for me given my personal experience.
Helen, thank you for this!! I read the book you worked on with Lindsey and Bogosian years ago and it gave me the understanding and tools to walk many of my friends off the woke plank. In the past couple of years I’ve come to find the anti-woke movement moving further and further right. Under the new administration and emboldened by the far and Christian right, the movement is becoming not only unrecognizable, it’s becoming everything I found concerning about woke in the first place!! It’s wild to me that I used to stand against anti-racism only to be called a racist and now that I stand against banning everything that concerns me I’m being called a communist.
Keep going with this approach. Just restacked it.
Glad to see so many people against extremism in all forms.
Thank-you. I never liked being labelled. Like many people I’m all over the place in what I can accept and live with, and what is a personal hard no.
Just subscribed and I am exploring your substack. Thoughtful stuff.
Welcome, Tom!
It's maddening to me how few people seem to realize that this is what democracy and freedom are supposed to look like. How can we have freedom to believe, think and speak for ourselves if we don't ally with people we disagree with to fight for our common right to disagree? I think similarly when I see people mock Republican infighting, when that infighting is precisely the hallmark of how a robust democracy is _supposed_ to work. That is healthy. A party where everyone marches in lockstep is not.
Finding common cause with people who find you condemnable and/or whom you find condemnable isn't something that needs apology or justification; it's literally the goal. At a deep philosophical level, it's how we discover our common humanity. But even at a strictly practical level, it's a basic ingredient of living peaceably despite massive disagreement. If you're not able to make such alliances, you're missing the point entirely!
The author doesn't provide any examples to substantiate her claim of a meaningful/significant authoritarian segment within the broader "anti-woke" category.
Also, as is typical of "liberal" persons (such as the author describes herself to be), she doesn't see the connection between certain false ideiological axioms/premises she subscribes to and the very "woke" ideology she opposes. The "woke" worldview, in many ways, is almost an inevitable logical and logistical endgame flowing from modern "liberal" persons.
lol you know Helen helped write the book that launched the war against woke right?
I have had a few clashes with the anti-woke right recently, but they were just on issues of objective fact. I usually ignore the frequent anti-Semitic stuff unless it directly involves Jews that I know and is based on falsehoods or obvious bigotry.
I'm more tolerant of religious fundamentalists than Helen because I think atheism is scientifically incorrect. Religion is an evolved survival mechanism (see Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke).
Most of what is wrong with "woke" is that it is a cult (an irregular spiritual force based on pathological psycholoyg) that fills the vacuum of religiosity in postmodern, secular culture.
More importantly idealists (usually) don't make good soldiers. This is a war against neo-communism. Tragic casualties are inevitable.
Wokeism is a socially gangrenous cancer that can't be cured with being nice and invoking Constitutional order, the rule of law, and all the other "classical liberal" stuff that Helen correctly reveres.
Reverence for tolerance, fair play and the rule of law comes into play AFTER a war against evil and sin is won, not during.
Those that hold to such classically liberals values have to recalibrate what they want to accomplish, which I think Helen and Iona are trying to do, but from an idealistic position.
Idealism is severely limited in war. Brutality isn't. To win a war, brutality is usually needed. Anything less WILL BE SEEN by the woke raving lunatics (sadists, sociopaths, Cluster B/Dark Triad types) as nothing more than weakness to be exploited.
Also, the unique nature of this conflict is that "woke" is like a social parasite that feeds off postmodern and techno-economic disruption and the resulting disintegration of liberal institutions.
Woke parasitism is like a gangrenous cancer that has to be hacked off the social body before it kills the patient. The procedure is inherently brutal, ugly and "not nice".
Without "soldiers" willing to do brutal, ugly things to hack off the woke parasites/gangrene, there won't be a patient still alive to reform liberalism* (by making it anti-fragile to disruption) and uphold Helen's revered, idealistic values.
* https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
Wow great comment
A really good idea would be to come to agreement on what exactly "wokeism" is and what is the correct label for it - ie Critical Social Justice vs Cultural Marxism or Successor Ideology. There is a lot of disagreement about this, and that disagreement likely follows the same divergences as exist between anti-woke groups.
I'd say the main fracture lies between "good faith" and "bad faith" anti-wokeness where the latter are essentially alt-right people hoping to use the rollback of wokeness to roll things way-back to a pre-liberal state.
Woke = ILLIBERAL, postmodern, neo-communist totalitarianism.
Woke = RACE GRIFTING (or "social justice" grifting in general)
Woke = Evil and Sin
-----
See the below link for one of the best deep dives into woke mental dysfunction and how it (woke, elite-leftism) correlates to Nazi propaganda I’ve read.
https://open.substack.com/pub/helendale/p/social-justice-word-magic-i-the-gleichschaltung
open. substack. com /pub/helendale/p/social-justice-word-magic-i-the-gleichschaltung
excerpt:
Selection for emotional dysfunction
There is a long-term pattern of the sickly (e.g. Antonio Gramsci), physically unfortunate (e.g. Rosa Luxembourg), sexually perverse (e.g. Michel Foucault), gender alienated (e.g. Judith Butler), and downwardly socially mobile (e.g. Karl Marx) being drawn into the politics of the transformational future, a politics that most profoundly categorises existing society as the problem. Such people are burdened by aggravating, painful, or frustrating constraints—so drawn to politics defining constraint as oppression and that promise a future liberated from such constraints.
Those who most beat their breasts about compassion and inclusion tend to be the most viciously judgemental, as they rage against constraints they find so burdensome and demand everyone else support their liberation. Sorting people by their opinions is a natural part of this moral project: both emotionally satisfying and, by generating a cohesive moralised in-group, operationally effective.
Of course, being able to indulge one’s emotions is part of the attraction in the first place. The sort of stoic emotional self-discipline that makes for effective social cooperation and coordination is—at least in peaceful, prosperous societies—eschewed in favour of (often weaponised) dis-regulated emotional displays that degrade the performance of people and institutions.
...
Our institutions are dominated by university graduates, and these same status-and-social-leverage games play into bureaucratic pathologies of hoarding authority, restricting or delegitimising alternative sources of information, spending resources on themselves, frustrating accountability, and protecting themselves from the complexities of competence. Declaring the mass university model to be a toxic failure—and engaging in a
[----->>>] thorough purge
of all forms of activist scholarship—is necessary to preserve our societies as functioning, free, democratic, technologically-capable societies.
...
WOKE COMMUNO-FASCISM
clarification:
Woke = ILLIBERAL, postmodern, neo-communist/neo-fascist totalitarianism, merged with the corporate-state.
Gordon Hahn explains how neo-communism and neo-fascism are aligned under the postmodern corporate-state:
https://gordonhahn.com/2021/04/29/the-new-american-communo-fascism-and-its-postmodernist-roots/
gordonhahn. com /2021/04/29/the-new-american-communo-fascism-and-its-postmodernist-roots/
Woke people are the school bullies, jocks, and preppy kids of the past. Back then they were mostly right-wing. As leftism got more mainstream, being a school bully, jock or preppy got frowned upon. So while they rejected those labels, they still felt the need to bully people, so they decided to become bullies for “good causes” like social justice. South Park made fun of this phenomenon with the character “PC Principal”.
I agree, I tend to think it’s too late now to bridge this gap but spot on.
Remember, Hitler was correct about cigarettes (unhealthy, should be discouraged or even prohibited in public spaces), but I don't think either of us would have wanted to join an anti-tobacco movement with the other.
It's because 'woke' is too broad a term. There are elements of 'woke' that are positive.
Not really.
"The second issue is that there really is an illiberal anti-woke backlash going on"
Authors and intellectuals are frequently tempted to be edgy and ahead of the curve, which is what Pluckrose is doing here. I really do admire her and the other two heroes of Sokal Squared (Lindsay and Boghossian), but what she is doing here is complaining that eggs are being rationed while fighting the dangerous barbarian hordes at the gates. Despite the wonderful pushback happening in the US, the woke left are far too dangerous still in the UK, Canada, ... to declare victory and a return to calm normalcy.
Woke in Australian was imported just like political correctness by Murdoch's goons for target practice. It sounds like you've drunk the Kool aid.
You are the kool aid.
No, I have some reflexivity about my biases.
https://whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com/reading-mary-douglas-linkpost/
Or I take the advice about suspending judgment of Pyrrho of Elias with some thoughtful care.
https://ataraxiaorbust.substack.com/about
The projection that type X are (seeking to be edgy) (are narcissists because they are type X) (or something) when this X could be applied to anybody/everybody regardless of their perceived type, is a red flag of the likelihood of drinking the kool aid: i.e. self-fulfilling paranoia. You are egging on those who divide us.
Wrong.
what's my kool aid then (you read as fast as AI)
Claiming woke is not real, for starters.
Are we surprised? Of course there are a subset of people who only had principles when it was convenient for them. The same dynamic happened on the mainstream liberal left in the first place.
“…The big divides right now are among those care about what is true and those who prefer emotionally resonant narratives that suit their agenda”
Brilliantly summarised.
Rough time to be a liberal. Vengeance is enticing; but that sweet, sweet haterade is also pure poison.
I must confess that I hadn’t encountered the term “Critical Social Justice” until I read this and its companion piece. I have now learned of course that CSJ is a “bad thing” (as the author’s of 1066 and All That would put it), although absent the capitalisation critical (good?) social justice (good!) sounds like a… good thing. But then again, until I started researching gender absolutism and joined Substack I’d thought that “woke” was supposed to be “good thing” (insofar as it was a thing at all). Indeed, I was quite disappointed to have to announce to my children that respecting my views on gender identity I was not “woke”. As it turned out, although they are conversant with pronoun talk and dead-naming they had never heard the term “woke” before and for that at least I'm grateful for I’d always thought it was an ugly neologism and had hoped that it’d never catch on this side of the Atlantic. And I likewise hope that the term CSJ (not quite as ugly, but not very useful) won’t catch on. Use of these labels is not only unnecessary but counterproductive. After only a few months on this platform I'm already blocking as many hate-filled ranter and reactionary "anti-woke" folk as I was people posting fake AI pictures on Facebook! The focus should be on specific issues, analysed in depth, not on striving to capture the “Zeitgeist” (another unhelpful term) or become the “bell-wether of the mob”.