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I live in an area where most social spaces are dominated by woke ideology. People who don’t agree either pretend to go along, or have abandoned the shared social spaces. I feel that there is an unspoken shared social norm in most spaces around me that you must agree whenever someone implies/states that straight white men are problematic/oppressors. I feel like whatever is going on with this social norm is somehow tied to status games and tribalism. I feel that it is morally and epistemologically wrong to blame such a broad group for so many of the problems in society. It is wrong to over simplify societal problems to such a simple ideology. Ultimately, I believe every person deserves to be treated as a unique individual. It is fine to point out specific instances of a straight/white/male doing a problematic thing, but it wrong to assume that everyone in that group is bad and/or benefits from the problematic thing.
I believe it is ethically wrong for me to pretend to go along with problematizing any group of people just because that is social expectation to fit in with the group. Consequently, I mostly avoid social spaces because I don’t feel comfortable with the social norms that I’m expected to conform to.
There is a part of me that thinks the people in these social groups are otherwise reasonable, but they are also caught up in the social mania of modern times. I would like to be more social and make more friends, but the social norms of the spaces around me make me uncomfortable and closed-off to people. There don’t appear to be spaces near me without the straight white men are problematic norm for the areas I’m interested in (such as book clubs or running clubs).
Has anyone discovered a way to let it be openly known that you don’t agree with the group problematizing social norm, while still being accepted into the group? Like steering the group to a pluralistic acceptance of people with different values because those values don’t impact the stated purpose of the group (i.e. social norms about political ideology shouldn’t matter if you just want to go running with some people).
No stop this. This all reads like a cope for rationalising low-openness. As a person who exists in the world and interacts with other persons, I can tell you that 99.9% of any interactions you will have with others won’t involve any theoretical discussions of tenets of cultural Marxism. And the remaining is easy to avoid or deflect.
I’m actually pretty high in openness. I’m into things like nootropics, psychedelics, woo/spiritual/religious ideas, questioning the system, etc. Being open to weird ideas comes with the framing that we probably aren’t going to reach the exact same conclusions and it is ok to have unresolvable differences. The thing that agitates me is when people I disagree with use social shaming/pressure me into agreeing with their preferred social norm that appears to have logical flaws on the object level.
I think you are getting at something deeper though. I would say I’m very low-trust and suspicious of people. When people resort to peer pressure/shaming to enforce social norms that can’t withstand some light questioning then I feel that I can’t trust their thinking at all. I conclude that there is no reason to associate with them because how they act on the social norms issue will impact their other behavior and they are an unreliable ally.
I perceive that almost all social interactions will eventually test for tribal loyalty at some point (maybe this is just me being suspicious and picking up on something that isn’t actually there). In my model of the world you need to know if other people would make good allies/mates. The way you do that is by testing their reaction to political topics (Examples: Complaining about political policies, implying people that vote a certain way are morally bad). You always need to know if people share your values and then you need to sort yourself into groups that share your values by enforcing social norms. This is how you build trust.
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