I'm very tired, but I think it's finally time to talk about this. So excuse the awkward prose, and focus on the ideas.
I've spent a lot of time in leftist circles, via social media (up until a year ago, when I quit cold turkey after a particularly unpleasant couple weeks) and in person. I've begun seeing a pattern in the thoughts and actions of leftists that sincerely and deeply disturbs me. It's not just in other leftists, either, but in myself as well, that I see this pattern of actions and thoughts have taken hold, effecting my instincts and viewpoints in a way that I believe is deeply counterproductive. I haven't written about it anywhere before – just spoken about it in private with my friends (all other trans leftists, who share the same experiences and misgivings) – simply because it's a problem that, at least in part, conservatives have identified first, and given the nature of the problem itself, that's not likely to make me any friends. But no one I don't trust reads this blog anyway, so I think it's worth trying to get my thoughts out on this.
The symptoms of this problem include, but are not limited to:
- An unwillingness to engage with, and consider the possible nuggets of insight or good analysis that might be found in, ideas, art, or even people, one might disagree with somewhat, or even disagree with overall – unless, of course, the way in which they disagree is that they're "more radical" in a direction you already like. So for instance, deeply considering the work of someone who says insane things in the general vector of what you agree with is fine, but deeply considering the work of someone who might offer a sincere challenge to your premises is not. This creates a dogmatic, intellectually cloistered environment where only pre-approved ideas, nothing challenging, new, or uncomfortable, can be introduced.
- A use of the source of an idea or a piece of art as a cheap and easy thought-stopping cliche to dismiss it, without grappling with what it is actually saying or what might be worthwhile about it (see point 1). So if something is Western it's automatically imperialist and can be ignored; if it comes from a white straight man, it's "mansplaining" and can likewise be ignored, etc. This stems out of the slow conversion of the geneological method as found among postmodern philosophers – where the origins and development of a work or idea is used to interpret it and its possible influences, successes, and failures – into a mere genetic fallacy. This creates an environment of shallow refusal to engage with ideas, and silencing of individuals for their inherent qualities.
- A pervasive application of guilt by association. Combined with the previous points, this is a powerful problem: this creates a culture of surveillance and paranoia even for members of the in-group. Worse, it generates a constant policing of the ideological purity of any group or community that has fallen victim to these symptoms, creating a group that is fundamentally insular and exclusive: if you can only associate with people who completely agree with you on every subject that you think matters, then you can't gather a wide, diverse, cross-cutting group of people around some common single goal in order to achieve it (which will automatically garner good will and support from that wide group for your other tasks and possibly eventually woo them to your side). You have to create a small clique of ideologically "correct" people and somehow achieve everything with that small number – this converts no one, or very few people, to your side, and is also deeply ineffective usually, not to mention usually creating unaccountable in-groups that claim to be representatives of much broader communities when nobody elected them or even really agrees with their ideology.
-
A delight in applying what can only be termed as the logic of the pillory: responding to (percieved, or actual) misdeeds by drumming up as large a crowd as possible for a public humiliation of the wrongdoer, with no clear way to atone for the wrongdoing, or appease the crowd, except either perpetual (demanded at random intervals) self-debasement for their pleasure, or disappearance from public life. This creates a situation where:
- There's no productive path for genuinely rehabilitating and reintegrating someone who's done wrong into their community, so there's no healthy healing process, nothing productive to be had, only eternal vitriol. The mob is simply too decentralized for any concrete "end" to the public humiliation and punishment, and even if there were a possibility of such, it wouldn't happen, because they were unified only around the logic of the pillory – that's the only means of "righting" wrongs they actually know or care about.
- Those who are accused of wrongdoing will mostly double down, since there's no way out of the perpetual humiliation and ejection from public life anyway, so why also admit you're wrong on top of it; and those who don't are completely broken people by the end of the ordeal, when the mob loses interest.
- The actual victims of any harm, if they exist, are either further traumatized by the harms inflicted upon them being dragged into the public eye and endlessly discussed and litigated and hurled around, or even discouraged from coming out with their concerns in the first place, because maybe they don't want to see the person who may have harmed them attacked this way. Feelings can be complex.
- Victims are totally ignored – both in how they want any harm to be settled, and in helping them meet their needs and heal – because all the focus is on attacking and humiliating "the enemy."
- Lives are permanently destroyed, even if the wrongdoer deserves a second chance, not just because there is no path to forgiveness and reintegration, but because this kind of public humiliation can utterly destroy a person physically and mentally, and also because a common component of the public humiliation is getting them fired from their jobs and cast out of all other communities they may have been a part of, even if they harmed no one else there.
- No real effort is put in to determine whether the wrongdoer is actually responsible for what they were accused of, simply because it is impossible for a decentralized mob to do such a thing – some may do it, but they won't be able convince the others of whatever conclusion they come to, because once again, the mob was generated and unified around the collective effervescence of attacking a worthy target in unison.
- The worst aspects of humanity come to the fore: what a "wrongdoer" presents is a "justified" "acceptable" target for all the hate, violence, and meanness lurking in the hearts of people who otherwise must pretend at all times to be "nice."
- Worst of all, those who are most deserving of this kind of attack, insofar as anyone can be said to be – the powerful, the wealthy, the unempathetic, the abusers, the extremely bigoted, they'll all be able to shrug off all these attacks with ease. They'll ignore the public humiliation or enjoy doubling down or trolling, because they already don't care what the people who call them out think, they already don't care who they hurt, and they already have the power/privilege to survive any impact on their jobs or the rest of their life. Whereas those who are often least deserving – the hyper-marginalized, the ones that actually agree with the values of the mob attacking them deeply – will be the ones most utterly destroyed.
- A priggish focus on enforcing obscure and constantly-changing linguistic rules, under threat of either pure dismissal (points 1, 2) or pillorying (point 4), as opposed to a sincere analysis of what's in the heart of a person – consequently making it very difficult for those of older generations, or who are simply not as "in the know," or who have slightly different beliefs about certain words, to interact or be heard or feel welcome in their spaces even when their hearts are in the right place. Also refocusing the discussion from matters of serious import to matters of mere linguistic rearrangement.
- A perpectual race on the euphamism treadmill, concomittant to the previous point.
- A desire to chase out of existence completely words that are necessary to describe things we experience in our everyday lives – such as the word "stupid."
- Very relevant to this topic, an immediate and knee-jerk dismissal of any point made which is similar to a point made by someone who is considered an enemy or a heretic, even if that point is made from a different standpoint, or with a different intention or direction, or just happens to be correct despite originating from an evil man or a heretic.
- The very possibility of someone who has not had personal experience with something having a useful opinion on it is totally dismissed – a sort of vulgar standpoint epistemology. There is some kernel of truth to this – those with personal experiences have a lot more data to work with – but also much falsehood, as it is possible, by carefully listening to many people with differing opinions on an experence, and studying it empiricially, to arrive at a workable knowledge of it, and one's ground-level personal experiences with something can be wildly distorted and selective. Checking your privilege has been transformed from a way to ground yourself in humility and open curiosity, and remind yourself you don't know everything, to a way to humiliate and silence people, to shut them up.
- A sort of hierarchy of victimization, whereby only the suffering and problems of those who experience the most victimization matter at all. If you experience less – god forbid if you experience the least – victimization as a result of your innate characteristics, your problems simply don't matter; in fact, you'll be mocked for them. As if caring about problems is a zero sum game, or as if dealing with the problems even more privileged people face won't help all of us, because we all live in the same society. So for instance, the problems a cis white straight man might face, or even sometimes a white trans woman if we're not obsequious enough, since we're really seen men (having male privilege, male socialization), will be mocked and dismissed, and things that hurt people only matter if they happen to hurt a marginalized group (so for instance, misandry has to be phrased as hurting trans women or trans men in order to get anybody to listen.)
- A focus on using guilt as a weapon to get people to support the cause, instead of actually talking about what the cause has to offer each person. This of course never convinces anyone who doesn't already share your values.
In essence, what I'm talking about is "the woke mind virus."
The crucial difference between my analysis and the analysis of reactionaries regarding it is that I'm able to separate the fundamental projects of social justice from the harmful sort of secular religion which has grown up around those fundamental projects and critiques, and I'm only rejecting the latter, not the former. Another difference is that I don't see this as inherent or unique to the left, or the project of social justice, or liberals, or progressives, or anything like that. This is very much in effect across every part of the political spectrum and has been a thing which exists throughout all of history. The final difference is that I'm not arguing for the platforming of deeply harmful ideas – the way the New York Times has platformed transphobic (and totally unevidenced) narratives in their opinion pics – just the ability to seriously consider ideas we may disagree with (including whether they are actually harmful or not) ourselves, through things like reading articles already written.
The difference between my analysis of this issue and some of the nascent analyses from other leftists on this issue is primarily that I don't think this is a problem that remotely only exists with the "online" left. This is a problem I and my friends have seen plenty in person too. This isn't surprising, either – the people that post online also exist in the real world, too, and it's awfully convenient to assume that such people would take no part in real world leftist communities and activism.
My point with this post is that this is a problem, and that we need to stop denying it, and deal with it instead. Part of this problem is that it renders woke leftists intellectually barren, narrow-minded, and dogmatic as well as hopelessly paralyzed in every-tightening circles of internal purity policing. Part of the problem is that this renders the woke left largely utterly useless for achieving anything practical, for really trying to help anyone in their broader community, because they can't engage with and work together with anyone different from them. But the biggest part of the problem is what has been demonstrated by the recent 2024 election of Donald Trump for his second term: the fact that this woke mentality has totally alienated broad swathes of the population. If you're a cis straight white man who's on the fence politically, which ideological movement will you join, the one that seems constantly occupied with internally policing itself for ideological and terminological purity according to rules you can't even begin to comprehend or keep up with, and who will dismiss, silence, and usually revile you unless you roll over and show your belly at every opportunity just due to the very fact of your immutable characteristics, and which seems totally uninterested in actually dealing with any of the problems you have, or will you join the ideological movement that woos you with promises of supremacy and a return to glory days, and which claims to love you for exactly what you are?