A Robin Hanson Perspective on the Origin of Woke
A humble offering at the altar of Wokeness Studies.
[epistemic status: mid]
TLDR/On one foot: Like the theory of evolution randomly appearing in an appendix of a pre-Darwinian book on naval architecture, Robin Hanson figured out what woke is in a chapter of The Elephant in the Brain about the sociology of religion: an (accurate!) form of virtue signaling powered by Robert Trivers-style self-deception. If this “signaling model of woke” is valid, you aren’t going to kill woke with reason, or by making the government support it less.
For a young, right-wing world of ideas arriviste, writing about the origin of woke is like what the Upright Citizens Brigade was for comedians in the 2010s. This topic made future phenoms Richard Hanania and Chris Rufo famous, and it was on this topic that Bronze Age Pervert recently published his first-ever Substack article. The subject so saturated the online right it spilled over onto the mainstream, with Scott Alexander weighing in. Aaron Sibarium is probably right that there is much more alpha in right-wing journalism than right-wing theorizing, but if you're going to theorize, the origin of woke is an advisable area to work on.
I suspect Nathan Cofnas, a sharp Cambridge1 postdoc convincingly making a name for himself in online right-wing politics, agrees with my assessment of this issue. I’d encourage you to read his hit articles on the subject—the lovely twin debutantes of his media res Substack—because they are genuinely great. But I will let Scott Alexander summarize the Cofnas Theory of Woke as follows. Since libs and conservatives agree disparities are environmental in origin and thus basically contingent:
Conservatives, ever biased toward explanations that don’t blame whites and indifferent to the coherence of their beliefs, hold to the "Black Culture Bad" model—or ignore the issue altogether. The intelligent find both responses less coherent than the progressive position of rectifying imbalances. Woke is left with an insurmountable marketplace-of-ideas advantage.
Thus, to fight wokeness, Cofnas advocates shattering the “taboo” against discussing group differences which sits at the beginning of his chain of causal reasoning. Thunderously publicizing the behavioral genetics work that proves group differences exist, Cofnas argues, will “[destroy] the intellectual basis of wokism”; and spur an empirically backed “revaluation of values” that consigns Western egalitarianism to the fate of Wotan and Jove.
A nerdy, Jewish new kid on the block straight out of the play 13, Cofnas unsurprisingly frames his model against those of the more established Rufo and Hanania:
To be honest, the online right could do worse than having Nathan Cofnas Thought as its “standard model” of woke. We’ve all read some absolutely terrible shit on this topic. At least the Cofnas model holds up even if you’ve heard the phrase “coordination problem” before and explains why smart people—who have measurably more consistent beliefs2 and must square the equality thesis and the existence of racial gaps—are crazier on the issue rather gracefully. I’m encouraged Cofnas’s work has generated as much discussion as it has.
Still, I think we can do better. As Hanania himself hinted at in this pilfered bit of his paywalled podcast with Cofnas (edited for clarity Hanania’s endearing but Turing test-failing cadence preserved out of respect for his noble affliction):
But maybe it's just like, yeah, it's not just they're not following the logic. You know, it's not, I just don't get the intuition that they're following the logic.3
The word “adaptive” is doing a lot of work here, but he’s on the right track. Hanania recognizes that it’s implausible that the logic of the systemic racism thesis proves ideologically decisive even for committed egalitarians—not (just) because the thesis itself is implausible, but also because that isn’t really how or why people form their political opinions. With this essay, I will explore further in this fruitful direction and spell out Hanania's instinctive intellectual discomfort into a full-fledged model of how woke works.
The Robin Hanson Pill
As a proud person of TESCREAL, I couldn’t help but notice Cofnas’s model conflicts with one of the stylized facts of our traditional ways of sociology: that people generally form their beliefs not from an analytical weighing of relevant issues but based on what will help them as social creatures. I won't defend this with serious social science here because, one, I am a high theorist and it wouldn't help me as a social creature, and two, Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler do that in their magisterial 2017 classic, The Elephant in the Brain.
Following the traditional formula of the George Mason School, The Elephant in the Brain takes a well-established mainstream concept—in this case Robert Trivers-style self-deception—and takes it to its radical but patently correct conclusions. In many ways the most ambitious of the Masonian canon, The Elephant in the Brain has such radical implications for so many areas of human life that, in less scattered times, one could imagine it spawning an era-defining psychology metanarrative like The Interpretation of Dreams or at least Thinking, Fast and Slow. The last few chapters probe self-deception’s implications for sociology, and I’d aspirationally frame this essay as a coda to those, which extends the framework to the phenomenon of wokeness.
Cofnas suggests that wokeists sort through explanations for disparities between groups, weigh them on their merits, and then unwisely discard the most obvious one because of an exogenous “taboo.” Alas, Nathan, in the cognitive world of the median ideologue, things aren't so simple.
Many beliefs are adaptive because they help us model the world accurately, but, as Hanson and Simler note in Elephant in the Brain, “The value of holding certain beliefs comes not from acting on them, but from convincing others that you believe them.” This is especially true when it comes to ideology. Simler lays out the case authoritatively in his short essay “Crony Beliefs”:
You can also find this in Bryan Caplan. In a market setting, if someone holds implausible beliefs (like belief in alchemy or Beff Jezos) and acts economically based on those beliefs, they tend to lose their money.
Multidisciplinary conversations involving economics nigh-inevitably devolve into a debate about the “rationality assumption,” which modern left-wingers—notably in the asylum where I was raised—allege is arbitrary. It really isn’t. The tangible threat of losing money directly as a result of “irrational” behavior provides a meaningful check against wacky economic activity.
Things are different in politics. For a political actor, the cost of acting on beliefs that incorrectly model the world is very low; after all, the probability that one voter or activist will decide an election or decisively shape policy is vanishingly small. But your choice of what political team to support still has an impact: an impact on you! As Steven Pinker notes, “People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true.” Lacking a feedback loop to punish us if our model of reality turns out wrong, on rarefied ideological and moral issues we unrestrainedly psyop ourselves into believing socially advantageous things. Quoth Hanson and Simler:
Consider the belief in an all-powerful moralizing deity—an authoritarian god, perhaps cast as a stern father, who promises to reward us for good behavior and punish us for bad behavior. An analysis of this kind of belief should proceed in three steps. (1) People who believe they risk punishment for disobeying God are more likely to behave well, relative to nonbelievers. (2) It’s therefore in everyone’s interests to convince others that they believe in God and in the dangers of disobedience. (3) Finally, as we saw in Chapter 5, one of the best ways to convince others of one’s belief is to actually believe it. This is how it ends up being in our best interests to believe in a god that we may not have good evidence for. [emphasis mine]
Thus stands the Hanson-Simler Model of Religion. Look upon its logic, its elegance, its psychological realism, and despair!
It’s a beautiful synthesis of what trad Marxists would call materialism and idealism. In Hanson’s graceful narrative, ideas do influence the course of history, but you can directly understand how they propagate in “materialist,” econ-informed—dare I even say rigorous—ways. Ideas are not mere appendages of material conditions. They can have their own agenda, a “direction” they push society in independent of whatever influence material conditions may exert.
It’s also a kind of synthesis of what rationalists would call “mistake theories” and “conflict theories.” You can trace ideological differences back to large groups of people having earnestly different and often unfounded interpretations of issues as in mistake theories. But they are mistaken systematically; their incorrect ideas serve their interests—perhaps not their straightforward, material interests as conflict theorists often allege, but generally their interests as social creatures.
The Microfoundations of Woke
I agree with Hanania that people who compare religion and wokeness usually do a bad job. But understanding the status econ commonalities between religion and wokeness is essential for understanding wokeness as a phenomenon—indeed, it is much more important than understanding civil rights law.
Firstly, the elephant in the Brai—sorry, room: wokeness signals that you are high status (more on that later). But even if wokeness weren’t high status, it wouldn’t be crazy to signal that you believe in the (Cofnas’ term) equality thesis. The equality thesis might not be as generalizably prosocial as belief in a God who damns wrongdoers who commit sins out of view of others, but it’s prosocial nonetheless.
Why? People who take egalitarianism seriously are more likely to behave well toward everyone, relative to nonbelievers. It’s therefore in everyone’s interests to convince others that they believe in the equality thesis. One of the best ways to convince others of one’s belief is to actually believe it.
And wokeness isn't just about signaling generalized niceness. As the online right loves to note, ethnic tension is a veritable human universal that often manifests in costly ways. There are flashy, obvious cases like civil war and genocide, but plain old discrimination is bad for you and your firm, too. This would be the case even if civil rights law didn't make it illegal—just ask Gary Becker (it's not for nothing he made Tyler Cowen's GOAT shortlist). In an unprecedentedly multiracial, multiethnic, and gender-egalitarian society like ours, the ability to treat people well despite idpol-relevant differences is prosocial enough. It makes you a "better"—certainly less invidious—employee, customer, neighbor, and citizen.
How much of wokeness's prosociality comes from signaling your "niceness g-factor" and how much comes from signaling you can avoid offending idpol-relevant demographics (more crystalized) is hard to disentangle and probably contextually dependent. In any case, you don't signal you think everyone has equal potential by being nice to your ingroup—everyone does that all the time. To signal that you think everyone has equal potential, you should be nice to your outgroup out of commitment to your ideals. This sets you apart.
By making a land acknowledgment or posting a black square, I show I'm so moral that I'm willing to take the side of the outgroup over that of the ingroup. I take ostentatious, stylized care to promote the interests of the people who are most different from me. Because I just care that much.
The worse the outgroup behaves, the stronger the signal that my morality is that much more closely held, and I’m that much more discerning, intelligent, and committed to notice their hidden worth. This is what Larry Auster meant when he noted that “the worse a group behaves, the more the left likes it.”
In the transition from “micro” to “macro,” the prosocial memetic kernel of wokeness gives rise to more complex processes (which I’m getting to), as well as rituals and behaviors, many of which are not prosocial at all. But this isn’t a unique problem. Belief in the Abrahamic God motivated lots of people to refrain from murder and theft—but it also inspired hundreds of thousands of Russian Skoptsy to mass castration.
Similarly, taking egalitarianism seriously motivates much of the American professional class to assiduously avoid alienating the idpol-relevant groups; groups that—let’s be honest—often have a hard enough time in modernity as it is. But it also motivated the most prestigious political science journal to select an editorial staff that’s entirely female, for JHU to proudly admit a 2022 Freshman class that’s 17% white, and for state officials to plan to distribute COVID vaccines by race until Matt Yglesias told them off.
Macrosocial Behavior: What Makes Wokeness Such a Good Signal
We TESCREALists believe in Yarvin’s memetic evolution, and that wokeness has picked up nifty mind-virus (if that isn’t too negatively connotated) adaptations that make it especially communicable. The most significant of these is that wokeness is high status.
Signaling high status is a good niche for a memeplex—the universal human desire to acquire and project the greatest measure of status might as well be the foundational “law” of status econ. But status is a fickle mistress. For a meme to signal high status, it can’t be too successful. There must always be a significant and low status group that fails to espouse the meme for the savvy to distance themselves from. What's more, these divides between the high status and the low status don’t just appear. Since everyone is always trying so hard to signal status, any segregation must be enforced by significant barriers; status signals, in Hanson’s quotable terms, must be differentially expensive—“more difficult to fake than to produce by honest means.”
In the case of clothing, for example, trendy styles change often, which gives the high status (who tend to have high-status friends) a leg up, as the literal information about what the high status are wearing filters through their networks faster. Though there are isolated elements of this in wokeness, too, the main barrier to practicing wokeism is less subtle: how much it fucks with American plebs.
Non-elites are always in the market for ideas that rationalize their hostility (read: jealousy) to elites, and the (in a certain, social evolutionary sense purposefully) flashy, bizarre set of norms and practices promoted by wokeness attract their ire like a Chinese fisherman netting squirming mackerel under a strobe light. This is the answer to the question, “If wokeness signals high status, why don’t the proles just adopt it so they look high status too?” The proles don’t become woke because wokeness continuously evolves to alienate them—that is what makes the status signal accurate in the first place.
Some of the ways woke alienates non-elite whites go against universal human nature. Denigrating your racial and sexual ingroup and praising the outgroups (especially not obviously praiseworthy ones) is a strong signal you’re an egalitarian, but that’s only because it swims so plainly against the current of human impulse. Elites are better placed to swallow this aversion because they are smart and sophisticated enough to intuit wokeness is high status to people who matter. Gary Becker would also probably note that non-elites aren’t as ambitious, and consequently care less about seeming high status in the first place; and that non-elite whites’ cultural, economic, and social spaces simply aren’t as racially and sexually mixed as the hangouts of their elite cousins (media, academia, law, medicine), so they have less incentive to show they don’t alienate the idpol-relevant.
Still, as Hanania understands, much of the emphasis of modern wokeness is just totally culturally contingent; i.e. as the plebs shift their sensibilities, wokeists land upon new ways to provoke them. There isn’t much hard social science in Hanania’s article, but as members of a woke society, we can recognize this dynamic:
Anti-wokes often bemoan how wokeness divides people into “oppressors,” “oppressed,” and “allies,” but they don’t notice just how important that is for wokeness’ memetic contagiousness. Wokeness not only divides people into friends and enemies—it also motivates actions that épater les bourgeois enough that they’re willing to make conflict—which then reinforces itself as conflict pushes the ideological enemies apart and ideological friends closer together. Divisive ideological Schelling Points like this are how social coalitions are formed.
In a society increasingly dominated by wokeness, we see an escalating “arms race” of signifiers designed to distance oneself from those of lower status. It’s a race without a finish line; as status is relative and not absolute, each victory leads only to the next flashpoint. If you're looking for a sociological recipe for everyone to be obsessed with wokeness all the time, lo. Says Hanania:
What Anti-Wokeness Actually Signals
What does anti-wokeness actually signal? For all anti-wokes’ pretensions about the logical unassailability of hereditarianism, most people who subscribe to it are just stupid and racist. As Cofnas noted:
And while there are smart, high SES racists like Cofnas, Hanania, and you, dear reader, their attachment to this belief is a perfectly accurate signal of antisocial things: They are either terrible at self-deception (the self-deception most every smart person you know does) or they don’t care enough about signaling identification with the high status ingroup (the Blue Tribe).4
Over the last couple years, I’ve been to lots of right-wing parties and conferences, and I’ve noticed with amusement that a psychologist would generally have a pretty easy time explaining the personality and/or neurodevelopmental disorders that cause someone to end up there. The men often have Asperger’s or narcissism, frequently accompanied by inflated, caustic resentment against groups like blacks and Jews. The handful of women are even more consistently unusual.
Nick Bostrom infamously touched on this topic a couple of decades ago, though he didn’t seem to understand it well enough to avoid the issue.
Q. Why do these sentences seem synonymous? And why did the world chimp out at this mild-mannered Swedish philosopher—winner of the Professorial Distinction Award from the University of Oxford, member of Prospect's Top World Thinker list, and popularizer of the famous and trendy simulation hypothesis—for saying he agrees with a claim of unchallenged factual basis?—remember, all Bostrom is noting is the very existence of the black-white IQ gap, not commenting on its causal mechanism.
A. Because in the world we live in, ‘“noticing”’ a group of people is dumb is a powerful signal that you dislike them and will mistreat them, just as assuming they have equal intellectual potential is a powerful signal that you like them and will treat them well. No wonder it's, in Cofnas' terms, "taboo" to bring up The Fundamental Constant of Sociology: The people who do so tend to be maladjusted, hateful, and crazy!
Early Great Awokening and the Hansonian Model
Thus far I’ve tried to present a newish theory of what woke is. Interestingly enough, this is not the chief question of Wokeness Studies as it currently exists. Capturing more interest is the historical, chronological question: Why did wokeness so quickly become dominant among Western elites when it did, namely in the 1960s? The two most influential works in this little field trace, and implicate, two fairly distinct 60s-originating trends: Hanania’s Civil Rights legislation, and Rufo’s the Frankfurt School-influenced American New Left. The title of Hanania’s Origins of Woke itself implies this historical, even chronological problem; not what woke is, but why woke then.
These narratives, you see, are constructed atop the assumption that woke—whatever it is—isn’t older than sixty-four. Yarvin, along with such boffins as Eric Weinstein, have increasingly challenged and litigated this assumption.5
Aspirationally, I’ll caucus with Yarvin and this ad hoc “Early Great Awokening” bloc: There is striking ideological continuity between the woke New Left and the Marxist Old Left. What’s more, for someone who’s read The Red Decade, it’s far from clear that the early 2020s are the global maximum in the influence of the radical left in American politics. And though Weinstein discarded this piece of Early Great Awokening thought like some poisonous gizzard of a puffer fish, there have been elites with proto-woke ideas for at least “two hundred years… and probably more like five.” The case is made clearest in this paragraph of 2013 Yarvin:
So this phenomenon plainly predates the 1960s, and a 60s-focused account of its progress is necessarily incomplete, what is left to explain the real history?
Anchored in universal relationships between signaling, incentives, and status instead of shoehorned historical trends, the Hansonian Model of Woke opens the door to an Early Great Awokening, just as an Early Great Awokening opens the door to the 60s-unbounded Hansonian Model of Woke. Why? The continuity that Yarvin spotlights between the Marxist Old Left and woke New Left extends to their psychological microfoundations.6 The Hansonian model, with minor tweaks, works for the characters of Romance of American Communism: Caring and knowing a lot about Marx shows you’re an egalitarian (a prudent person to cooperate with for reasons described previously).
Why was the Old Left about workers, while the New Left is about BIPOCs? Elementary. Minority issues weren’t as big of a deal when the US was 80% white. As the places American elites hang out became the most racially, ethnically, and sexually mixed social groups in human history, the returns to signaling you’re good at avoiding intergroup tension increased. Since demand curves are downward sloping (i.e., people respond to incentives)—all things equal—one would expect the contemporary 18% white JHU to have more “look how not racist I am” signaling than 1950’s 100% white JHU.
This shift opened the door to profound memetic change. The medium of literature is so significant in world history largely because it’s so apt as the coordinating basis of ideological movements. What separates Marxists from non-Marxists is that Marxists have read Marx and agree with him, whereas non-Marxists have not. You could say similar things about Protestants or Rationalists. This gives these massive, variegated groups of people a coordinating coherence. Says Scott Alexander:
As demographics changed, racial issues increasingly replaced class issues as the main arenas for signaling competition—and the documents that had tied this movement together, screeds and battle plans, as they were, for class warfare, were increasingly irrelevant. Wokes lost the narrative consensus that served Marxism so well. Rufo missed this in America’s Cultural Revolution: the “Cultural Marxism” project was essentially a failure. Marxists can be expected to be familiar with the arguments of Kapital. Wokes can not be expected to have heard of Marcuse, Adorno, or even Angela Davis.
This relative ideological incoherence hinders the possibility of a scary, final boss Woke vision manifest in policy. A woke rendition of the USSR, created to reflect the vision of… Derrick Bell(?) is not really imaginable. Compared to Marxism, woke is a lower variance menace.
But perhaps more importantly, the shift away from Marx fundamentally altered the status economics of leftism: Whereas wokeism mantains social closure and thus stays high status by being some combination of obnoxious, gross and scary, communism mantains social closure with tomes of wordcel bullshit.
Being really into Marx isn’t just (in a certain sense—bear with me) morally impressive. It’s intellectually impressive. A Marxist knows enough about the dense social theory of a 19th-century German econ crank to identify with it. And identify they do! They’re obsessed with this lore—does any other ideology compare? In this respect, Marxism is more akin to Sikhism than fascism. If liberals read and conservatives watch TV, what do communists do? Paath? Literate culture-wise, Marxism is to modern liberalism as modern liberalism is to modern conservatism.
Ditching Marxism’s lore—and thus the intelligence signal—may have led to woke’s relative confusion, but it allowed woke to become a truly mass ideology. It’s easy to forget that Marxists have never won a majority in a democratic Western election. In the US, communist electoral performance is even more unimpressive. Said Yarvin, according to my handy internal transcript of his debate with Hanania (video to be released soon!):
one of the ways that you can see the strength of American communism in the 30s through the 50s is… [that] you can look at the number of votes that Henry Wallace got in 1948, which was about 1.2 million, and basically be like, that's how many communists you have in America at this time.
Numerically, wokeness is unequivocally more successful than Marxism ever was in the US. It’s harder to find anything that neat to estimate the number of wokes, but I’d reckon it’s somewhere between the 1.6 million who bought White Fragility and the 28% of US adults who support reparations for slavery. Jettisoning the lore made woke’s incarnation of the egalitarianism signaling memeplex less coherent (and smart) than its ancestral, Marxist strain, but it accommodated an unprecedented accessibility.
Why It Matters
In summary, wokeness is a very contagious, sticky memeplex. Espousing egalitarianism is a reliable signal that you are righteous and unlikely to provoke costly inter-group conflict. The offputting weirdness of the practices associated with wokeness means it filters out the racist and unsophisticated who are not only more likely to hate outgroups but also aren’t as savvy about what’s high status. Finally, as mainstream social science tells us, people are great at convincing themselves to maintain socially advantageous beliefs. Rufo, Hanania, and Cofnas are missing the true strength of woke religious practice: that it’s an accurate signal of, dare I say, virtue.
This model may as well be “standing Cofnas on his head.” Cofnas thinks that “wokeness is what you get from taking the equality thesis seriously.” I disagree: People “take the equality thesis seriously” so that they have a justification to perform the behaviors associated with wokeness. Cofnas thinks smart people are more woke because they “are more likely to correctly determine that, given equality, wokism follows.” I disagree: Smart people are more woke because they are better at noticing the behaviors that signal virtue.
Though Cofnas’ articles are but a few months old as of writing, his drive and that of others prove the reality of racial differences animates the projects of Aporia and their sort, who have made it their chimeric empirical quest to demonstrate the genetic provenance of The Fundamental Constant of Sociology to an jury that would sooner reject science itself. I wish them luck, but I doubt that, on the margin, writing another killer paper that moves the—regrettably—hypothetical race and IQ controversy Rootclaim a fraction of a percent closer to one hundred will have an impact on the broader culture on any reasonable time scale. Showing the Kendian “founding equations” of wokeness to be unsound won’t directly make wokeness stop being high status or an accurate signal of virtue.
My disagreements with Hanania are more limited but still important. It is obviously true that policy has stacked the deck against non-woke views, but that’s not what makes wokeness so sticky and ubiquitous. What makes wokeness so sticky and ubiquitous is that it is a generally accurate signal that you are going to treat people well, and thus are worth cooperating with.
I read Hanania’s The Origins Of Woke as the apotheosis of the libertarian online publication tradition, and—if Kendian Wokism has “founding equations” that all disparities are caused by discrimination—libertarian column-ism might as well have an axiom, too: that “all problems are either, one, caused by the government or, two, not actually problems at all.” (I’ll still read that garbage. They’re usually right.)
Hanania’s loyalty to the libertarian internet article medium meant overstating his case—he shows Civil Rights Law is odious and socially corrosive, but he can’t prove it’s originating the problem. Says Scott Alexander:
This has important implications, as if woke was created by government fiat, it follows it could be unmade the same way. Quoth Hanania:
I think we’d be justified in concluding Hanania’s steelman case for woke standing the test of time is valid. The world provides too limited a dataset to rely on for questions like “Is wokeness a paper tiger that can’t survive without tons of state support?” But we can just see that wokeness “taps into something deep in human nature” (our compulsion to prove ourselves high status and worth cooperating with) and long predates civil rights law. Dismantling civil rights law wouldn’t be a silver bullet. It would make anti-wokeness less costly, but wokeness would remain high status and demonstrative of virtue.
That’s enough for me to sit squarely in the long-term “rising” couple of quadrants of a Bryan Caplan poll. The arc of history is long, but it bends toward everyone acting more like Western elites; their virtue and status-signaling norms are no exception. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a gay businessman in Manila acknowledging the indignity of the Negritos—forever.
I think the right’s understanding of this issue has generally gotten worse over time. Peter Thiel can tell a lot about a company from its name, and subjecting our terminology to the same sort of analysis is telling. The term “virtue signaling” was deadly serious sociologically—have you seen the term “signaling” used outside of LessWrong in any other context? (If you’re sure you have, you're more sure than me.) “Political Correctness” was certainly less descriptive, but as Curtis Yarvin would love to tell you, it wasn’t that long ago that influential Americans unironically and supportively used it to refer to the phenomenon.
The terms in use now are way higher on the Flesch–Kincaid. “Woke” is straight AAVE. And—believe it or not—the phrase “Cancel Culture” (or at least the term “canceled”) is gay AAVE: originating in “queer communities of color” on social media, generally in the context of the scandals of black celebrities.
As has generally been the trend in American right discourse (and everywhere else for that matter), simpler, flashier, and more monocausal memes have won out: Cofnas-Rufo style idealism and Hanania’s popularization of the orthodox libertarian take have replaced the implicit model suggested by the term “virtue signaling.” In a contemporary world of ideas increasingly dominated by Steve Sailer’s “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys,” this etiology of wokeness suffers from an excess of moving parts and nuance—an antimeme, not a meme, unflattering to wokes, who believe nonsense, and even less flattering to anti-wokes, who are too dumb and/or antisocial to believe nonsense.
On the margin, say “wokeness” less and “virtue signaling” more.
A lot of people don’t realize despite recent events, he still teaches classes at Cambridge.
I.e. are more politically polarized.
I’ll plug friends of the blog at Aqua Voice if your cadence is anything like this; expect consumer surplus.
Not only truth-seeking and meta-contrarianism, but very often also a twinge of the same nasty animus that animates dumb anti-wokes.
This is Lindy. The dating of historical processes is a worthy theater for competition between factions in a politicized field. In economic history, for example, the California School, of Kenneth Pomeranz fame, argues for a 19th century date for the “Great Divergence” in wealth and power between the “West” and the “rest”, while “Eurocentrics” support a far earlier one. Why? The “true meaning” subtext is that left-coded California School wants the Great Divergence to be as incidental as possible (ie, not suggesting anything good about Europe), whereas the right-coded Eurocentrics want it to be the result of a persistent cultural superiority. Is it that surprising that Yarvin (who wants a totally new government) thinks the American elite was always essentially leftist, whereas Hanania and normiecons (who want to RETVRN to an earlier save file of American democracy) think it wasn’t?
Excellent start to the blog. Look forward to reading more.
If wokeness has profilerated because it is a socially adaptive form of virtue signaling, the only way it can be slowed is via a socially deleterious linked trait.
Wokeness must be made cringe.