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Paul Graham is out today with an essay about the origins of woke. There's nothing in the essay that's particularly new. Did he know about Richard Hanania's book? Did Hanania know that perhaps his book would be better as an essay?
In any case, I think the better topic would be this:
How did wokeness die?
Of course, wokeness isn't dead. Far from it. But the vibe shift is real, and I think it's pretty fair to say that wokeness did peak in 2020/21 and is in serious retreat now. Paul Graham kinda glosses over the reason for its decline, saying:
But I'm not sure this really explains it. As the social movement known as wokeness gained power, it was able to get more and more people placed into high-ranking positions. Governments, universities, and big corporations all have what are essentially commissars who are given high-paying jobs to enforce orthodoxy. At first, wokeness was just true believers. But pretty soon it gained adherents who did it for practical reasons – they put their pronouns in their bios because their jobs literally depended on it. It seems like a self-reinforcing cycle. Once woke people get more power, they make demands which include hiring even more woke people, giving them more power, etc... Anyone who speaks out is banished from the organization.
There's no limiting principle here. Other social movements, like Christianity, grew and grew until they took over essentially all institutions. Why couldn't wokeness do the same?
Here's my attempt at an explanation.
Wokeness is ultimately like cancer. It grows but it can not thrive because it destroys the institutions it corrupts. Scott talked about how whales should in theory get cancer more readily than smaller animals. A blue whale has 3,000 times as many cells as a human. Each one could theoretically become cancerous. So why aren't blue whales riddled with cancer at a rate 3,000 times that of humans?
Scott's theory: cancer cells are unstable, and the cancer cells themselves get cancer, preventing the malignancy from growing. It's a rare cancer that grows quickly but is stable enough to not implode.
I can't comment on the accuracy of this biological model, but as an analogy for social movements it works well. Early Christianity grew without limit because it was fruitful. Wokeness died because it was toxic. Today, the left is famous for its circular firing squads in which people are excommunicated for the smallest breaches of orthodoxy. Ultimately, this was its fatal flaw. It couldn't coordinate action against its enemies because it was so obsessed with killing its own.
Wokeness was a particular expression of the politics of the Coalition of the Ascendant logic.
I first remember encountering this logic from Michael Moore in his abysmal Dude Where's my Country? circa 2004:
This was the core Democratic logic from the Obama era to today. The POC coalition concept, that everyone other than White Men naturally had similar interests. That White Men held such a large proportion of the pie that splitting up those spoils, once captured, among blacks/women/gays/jews?/hispanics would be so profitable as to mask any conflicts between those groups.
This logic mostly held through the second Obama term, and the wars of the first Trump term were about trying to preserve and expand it.
The Biden era saw the coalition fracture.
Israel did a lot of work. Biden's vast incompetence did a lot. The pursuit of ever more baroque goals did a lot.
But largely, the logic of the coalition just ran out, in that their ability to expand the power of all coalition members by seizing power from white men ran out. Choices started to need to be made, between blacks and asians, between gays and women, between immigrants and the native born underclass. This always existed at some level, the famous anecdote about Shulamith Firestone:
But they've come to a head in recent years. Consider racial conflicts on campuses. When 90% of students at elite colleges were white, and the leaders all male, it made more sense for ascendant Asians and Blacks to try to expand their numbers and power from that reservoir of whites than it did to fight each other. Now that whites are down to 34% of Harvard students, and many of those are some form of Jewish or gay or other semi-protected status anyway, minorities have to fight each other for influence and power.
This is a great insight.
I'd just like to comment about incredibly WEIRD white people are.
Moore, a fat stupid white guy, thinks that the problem with the world is that there are too many fat, stupid white guys in charge.
Pretty much no other cultural group other than northern Europeans think like this. The pro-outgroup bias is insane.
This is such an odd meme online. The world is full of people who have a pro-outgroup bias, and probably always has been. In-group, out-group, far-group dynamics are not exclusive to Europeans. Asians who prefer whites, Africans and Arabs who prefer European institutions, so on and so forth. I recall seeing a nice little chart passed around from a study "Proving" that liberal whites are unique compared to other ethnic groups in America...without even trying to break down those ethnic groups by politics.
Moore is just another Charlie Manson type racist, who assumes that he is different from everyone else and special and will be spared in Helter Skelter. He can't defeat the Republicans he hates himself, but he can enlist the blacks and the women to do it for him, and at the end of the process the grateful blacks and women will turn to Moore for leadership.
I think most of these either aren't about the same subgroups of each category (some Africans prefer European institutions, others want to kill the Boer) or they're about the fargroup part, not about the ingroup part.
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Christopher Hitchens on Michael Moore:
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