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by
Tim Urban
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February 22 - March 22, 2023
The fundamentalists believe in a single narrative, and their movement is premised on shared certainty in that narrative. To be woke is to believe.
In religious or political groups bound by shared belief, belief itself is typically tied to social status. From medieval Christianity to modern North Korea to every hardline cult you can find, the coolest way to be cool is to talk about how great the leaders and their ideas are and how awful the out-group is, and the fastest way to get yourself in big trouble is to openly question those ideas. The specifics vary but the concept is the same: the social environment incentivizes ideological conformity.
“Stay in your lane” means: If you’re white, your words carry little authority on race issues. If you’re a man, you should refrain from weighing in about women’s movements like #metoo and the debates around rape culture on campuses. If you’re not Muslim, you should defer to those who are on the topic of Islam. If you’re a cisgender heterosexual, check your privilege before offering your two cents on LGBTQ issues.
to the liberal mindset, specific life experience is only one form of knowledge, alongside another: the universal experience of being human. When trying to understand another person’s point of view, a liberal thinker aims for the humility sweet spot that acknowledges both each person’s uniqueness and all people’s shared humanness.
if you are a member of a privileged group, any disagreement from you is invalid. At best, it’s ignorance. At worst, outright bigotry.
Stand point of the woke towards everyone else
One of the most common pleas from SJF activists is to “listen to people of color,” to “listen to women,” to “listen to LGBTQ people.” But when what these people say doesn’t jibe with the SJF narrative, SJF stops listening.
When standpoint theory butts heads with the SJF narrative, in the form of a member of an oppressed group challenging the narrative, the SJF narrative tends to prevail. Like the SJF rules about disparity implying injustice, Standpoint Theory seems to apply selectively.
Cultural intolerance can’t put people in jail, but it can ruin people’s lives. If 99% of a country’s citizens agree that you’re intolerable, you’ll be banished to the fringes of society as a pariah. A guy with a swastika tattooed on his forehead won’t be put in literal jail, but he’ll be banned from 99.9% of social circles, essentially sent to social jail.
Humans are hardwired to be hyper-sensitive to the concept of fair vs. unfair,45 so whatever a society’s or community’s specific rules around what’s tolerable or intolerable, it’s usually a good sign if the same rules apply to everyone.
One of the tenets of SJF is that racism = prejudice + power, and power only moves down the Intersectional Stack, not up it. Therefore, there’s no such thing as racism against white people, who reside at the top of the stack.
So in liberal societies, the accused are given the benefit of the doubt—they’re presumed innocent until proven guilty.
When thousands of women tell us that there is a problem with sexual aggression in our society, we should believe them. That broad truth, however, tells us nothing about the merits of any individual case. And as my colleague Megan Garber has written, “Believe women” has evolved into “Believe all women,” or “Automatically believe women.” This absolutism is wrong, unhelpful, and impossible to defend. The slogan should have been “Don’t dismiss women,” “Give women a fair hearing,” or even “Due process is great.”
While it’s certainly admirable to have been ahead of your time on a moral issue, punishing or disgracing someone for saying or doing something in the past that was prevalent at that time but considered taboo today makes little sense.
But when the past actions are by someone in a privileged group, the SJF mindset abandons “other times, other customs” in favor of “other times, judged by today’s customs”—a
The SJF narrative warrants being treated, at best, as a set of hypotheses. And if the narrative is questionable, then so is the justification for SJF’s wide array of moral double standards.
Bigotry never feels like bigotry to the person committing it. The left-wing brand of bigotry—the kind directed at people deemed to be powerful and privileged—is especially easy to justify, as it takes some deliberate thinking to remember that the targets can still be victims.
a person’s moral integrity is judged precisely by how well they apply their principles to the people they can’t stand.
Beneath all the SJF language about remedying past discrimination with present discrimination, there’s a spirit of revenge in the double standards. Privileged groups have had it too good, for too long, and they deserve to be knocked down a peg today.
Using different rules and lower standards for children makes sense. But when you apply different standards to different demographic groups in a society, you’re treating groups of adults like children. Which is awfully patronizing.
Author and Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz explains this side of things: The racism of low expectations: to lower those standards when looking at a brown person if a brown person happens to express a level of misogyny, chauvinism, bigotry, or anti-Semitism and yet hold other white people to universal liberal standards. The real victim[s] of that double standard are the minority communities themselves, because by doing so, we limit their horizons; we limit their own ceiling and expectations as to what they aspire to be; we’re judging them as somehow that their culture is less civilized; and of
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Messy liberal democracies will always be home to low-rung movements.
In a liberal country, any group can believe any damn thing they want and that’s okay… as long as they don’t force their views on anyone else. Any group can make rigid Echo Chamber rules about what can and cannot be said within their social community… as long as membership in that community is entirely voluntary.
Containing the expression of banned viewpoints to small groups prevents the viewpoints from traveling anywhere and gaining any momentum within the national giant’s big brain.
We think of censorship as control over what people can say. But the concept of emergence reminds us that human giants only “think” by way of conversation—which means that censorship is really control over what the giant can think. For a giant, censorship is mind control.
A phenomenon that psychologists call “pluralistic ignorance” begins to set in: when no one believes, but everyone thinks that everyone believes.
Controlling what people can say controls what the giant can think—which eventually leads to controlling what individuals think. Over time, a superintelligent genie turns into a mindless golem. This is the true power of censorship. And once a society succumbs to censorship, they can get stuck in it for a long time.
If you could write the narrative, the group became your marionette.
governments that enact censorship policies rarely call them “censorship” policies—they usually say they’re banning some form of vile or objectionable speech. And so often, what rule-makers happen to find objectionable is criticism of themselves and their policies. The ability to restrict blasphemy is the ability to censor.
Beyond protecting against tyranny, free speech laws open the gates to a dynamic free speech market—the marketplace of ideas.
People don’t like having their beliefs challenged or their favorite habits disparaged. Companies profiting from the status quo really don’t like alternative viewpoints.
free speech gives the powerless a voice—the ability to spark a mind-changing movement that gains so much momentum, it moves our beliefs and our cultural norms, which in turn moves the Overton window, which moves policy, and then law.
The science and business worlds can advance quickly because bad ideas fail quickly. Political Echo Chambers (aka political golems) allow bad ideas to live on for longer than they would in a more typical marketplace.
With so many voters locked into the major low-rung narratives, politicians have to spend a lot of their energy catering to those narratives. Political golems make the national brain less intelligent, less adaptable, less rational, and less wise.
while political golems can slow progress, free speech means t...
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No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people. ―William Howard Taft
Compared with previous generations, younger Millennials and especially members of iGen (born in and after 1995) have been deprived of unsupervised time for play and exploration. They have missed out on many of the challenges, negative experiences, and minor risks that help children develop into strong, competent, and independent adults.9
People faking illness is so common that there’s a term for it: Munchausen syndrome.
Victimhood culture encourages people to define themselves by their suffering, their trauma, their vulnerability.
Reacting to decreases in the prevalence of harms like racism, sexism, and homophobia by expanding the definition of those concepts can help activists address the nuanced ways oppression can persist long after the more blatant instances have been curtailed.
When concept creep gets out of control, it allows a far wider range of behaviors to qualify as bigotry, abuse, and trauma, which means a far wider range of people viewing themselves as victims of bigotry, abuse, and trauma. It also turns a far wider range of people into bigots, abusers, and traumatizers.
over the past decade, open disagreement with the SJF narrative has regularly been labeled as “violence.”
When King Mustache announced the new censorship laws, laying down what he insisted was an electric fence in his country’s marketplace of ideas—that was his attempt at idea supremacy. When the king ordered dissenters to be hanged, the country faced its moment of truth. When no one stood up for the dissenters, allowing their executions to take place, the king’s idea supremacy became real. It was not King Mustache’s orders but the failure of others to defend the country’s constitution that gave the fence its electricity.
Humans, individually, are often bad at truth. Even the most seasoned intellectuals can be biased, especially when it comes to theories they’ve spent their careers developing. But when a bunch of people get together and their ideas can clash freely in the ring, they form a genie and collectively can be pretty good at truth.
It’s hard to push back against your own political tribe—especially in a time of hypercharged political tribalism throughout the country.
Frederick Douglass once said, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
The real power of idea supremacy is that you only have to achieve a little of it through punishments and public shamings. In an environment soon infused with fear, self-censorship does most of the heavy lifting.
science isn’t concerned with feelings, it’s concerned with truth. The history of science is a history of upsetting people by overturning their existing beliefs. A scientific community not willing to do that would not have come very far.
Academic papers are supposed to be judged on rigor and accuracy. That’s what keeps research institutions pointed toward truth. When papers are instead filtered based on how well their conclusions align with a particular ideology, journals turn from truth-finding organs into political instruments.
Here’s how the dictionary defines “indoctrination”: the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically. Indoctrination is what idea supremacy looks like in a classroom. And it’s an apt description of what happens in many of today’s social justice classes.
There’s nothing wrong with schools requiring students to take classes in certain core academic areas—but SJF is a specific political ideology, not a core academic area.
