Why We Need to Shut Down Political Aggression

Aggression is basically bullying, and is simply incompatible with good order

One of the things that concern me most about our political landscape nowadays is that both the left and the right are increasingly embracing aggression as a political strategy. From what I have observed, right-wing influencers have more often openly celebrated, or called for, an 'aggressive' approach to shutting down and punishing their enemies. The New Right has clearly shown a willingness to embrace the arbitrary and unfair use of government power to hurt their perceived enemies. This represents a worrying new level of aggression not seen in the pre-2010s Right. On the other hand, the left's frequent denounciation of what they call 'tone policing' and 'respectability politics' is effectively a form of encouraging aggression, and the left's embrace of cancel culture and de-platforming is indeed a kind of aggression in and of itself. In the past decade or so, both sides have clearly gotten very aggressive.

Aggression is inherently incompatible with fairness, objectivity, rationality and good order. This is all because aggression is simply incompatible with having rational debates on a fair playing field. When people are allowed to be aggressive, there is no longer a fair playing field at all. Imagine a game of football or basketball, or any other sport, where there are no rules against violence towards other players. The game wouldn't be fair anymore. It would just be won by the team with the more violent players on it, regardless of actual merit in the sport itself. Similarly, when people are allowed to aggressively threaten others via political, economic, reputational or other means over differences of opinion, there is no longer a fair playing field in society's marketplace of ideas. When people can be intimidated into silence or insincere agreement, there is no longer any meaningful debate to be had. Might simply becomes right. As I've illustrated in previous episodes of this series, when there is no fairness in the marketplace of ideas, there is no ability to pursue the objective truth, there is no ability to act truly rationally or morally, and there will certainly not be good order in society.

Aggression is also incompatible with compassion, especially when it is associated with tribalism. By definition, if you are compassionate towards somebody, you don't act aggressive towards them. Moreover, when aggression is deployed in a tribalistic way, it essentially becomes bullying. This is why a society that allows aggression is essentially one that condones bullying. With the rise of aggression in the politics of both the left and the right, we've indeed seen much more political bullying across the Western political landscape in the past decade. This normalization of bullying, starting in politics, inevitably spreads to all areas of society, if left unchecked. A society that allows widespread bullying is, by definition, a society without any compassion whatsoever.

In conclusion, aggression is inherently incompatible with having rational debates on a fair playing field, and this means that aggression is inherently incompatible with good order. Moreover, aggression, especially when deployed in a tribalistic way, is inherently incompatible with any notion of compassion. Therefore, there are very good reasons why polite society used to shun aggression and aggressive people much more, and I think we should bring that back.

Why We Need to Call Out Free Speech Hypocrites

And why we need to bring back fairness, humility and compromise as core political values

Let's continue talking about laying the foundations for a culture and politics rooted in shared values. So far, we have covered compassion and respect for the objective truth. I think we need to talk about commitment to fairness and willingness to compromise next, because these are strongly related to both compassion and respect for the objective truth.

Today, both the left and the right clearly believe that politics is only about winning and 'owning' the other side. This has led to no respect for the notion of fairness across the board, both in terms of cultural and political debates, and in terms of how groups of people seen as associated with the 'opposite' tribe are treated in the real world. The problem with this is that, a society with no commitment to fairness can't have a marketplace of ideas with a fair playing field, by definition. This leads to an inability for the most sound ideas to prevail, and in turn, for a just order to arise as a result. Therefore, any order that results from an unfair playing field is necessarily going to be bad and oppressive in some way. Commitment to fairness is therefore necessary to produce good and just outcomes, and a sound order for society. This is how fairness is linked to respect for the objective truth, and ultimately to justice as well as the common good.

I would even go as far as to say that upholding fairness in the marketplace of ideas is a matter of morality. Morality thrives when people are able to pursue the truth, and to understand the truth, because we only know how to apply our conscience and our values to a situation when we know the complete and unbiased truth of a situation. When people don't fully understand the truth of a situation, they can easily come to the wrong conclusions, and support a wrong or even immoral answer to the problem. This is why, when people are pressured to bow to ideological untruths one way or another, to obey falsehoods imposed by political and/or economic threats, immorality and injustice will result one way or another. Sadly, this happens far to often in contemporary politics. Both the illiberal left's de-platforming and cancel culture, and the reactionary right's zealous use of state power to fight the culture wars, and to impose their agenda on the whole of society, are examples of using power to silence dissent or otherwise distort the marketplace of ideas, and hence suppress aspects of the objective truth that are inconvenient to their ideology or their agenda. This is the core reason why, as a Moral Libertarian, I have long held that I find both the illiberal left and the reactionary right to be morally repugnant.

Which brings me to my next point: people who are essentially for free speech for me (or my team) but not for thee (or the other team). Despite the theoretical increase in scrutiny and transparency in the online age, where everybody's record is open for all to examine, the number of 'free speech for me but not for thee' hypocrites are sadly at an all time high right now. Just look at what is happening out there: many of the self-identified 'free speech activists' who vigorously opposed left-wing cancel culture in the past decade are now silent about the Trump's administrations attacks on free speech, or worse, coming up with excuses to justify Trump's blatant authoritarianism. I'm frankly very angry at these people, some of whom I actually wrongly believed to be free speech allies at one point. On the other hand, I can't help but notice that some of the people who are rallying in support of the victims of Trump's crackdowns didn't have much to say about left-wing cancel culture, or worse, actively supported it. I'm saying this not to excuse the right's free speech hypocrisy, but to point out that the hypocrisy exists on both sides. Both of the aforementioned types of people clearly don't support free speech as a principle, they only support free speech for their own team. This kind of hypocrisy has sadly been made more acceptable by political polarization and tribalism, and even actively encouraged by online influencer culture.

I also want to talk about a closely related phenomenon: the increasing unwillingness to compromise across the political landscape. I believe the two phenomenon are ultimately linked by the common root cause of a lack of humility, encouraged by tribalism and the toxic online political culture. Unwillingness to compromise effectively leads to a 'winner takes all' mentality. Given that nobody alive in this world is perfect, or has perfect knowledge of everything, this logically has to lead to social outcomes that are oppressive in some situations and to some people. This, of course, is incompatible with a true commitment to compassion or justice. The reactionary populist right and its recklessly harmful policies are a good example of this. The Trump administration, feeling justified by the 'mandate' it won in last year's election, has set out to fulfill all of the wildest wishes of the toxic online right, not caring about how many people it is harming in the real world out there. This immoral course of action is, in turn, cheered on by that same toxic online right that demanded it in the first place, creating a dangerous feedback loop. Of course, this problem is not limited to the right either. The illiberal left's cancel culture activism is also actively encouraged by the online left, and it similarly cares only about 'winning' and 'owning', and not about actual people and their welfare. The common theme between the right and left versions of this phenomenon is the 'winner takes all' mentality, where people feel justified to openly oppress and harm those that they perceive to be on the other team, simply because they can. This is basically aggressive animal instinct that belongs in the jungle, not in any civilized society. If we let this continue, I fear civilization as we know it will come to an end sooner rather than later.

It is time to bring back the values of fairness, humility and compromise. As a society, we need to relearn to be fair towards those who disagree with us, to have humility in the face of disagreement, and to be willing to agree to disagree and to compromise. Important long-standing values like compassion, objectivity and justice can't survive without these values. More fundamentally, I fear that our civilization won't survive very long without these values.

Why the Far-Left's Model of Change is All Wrong

But that doesn't mean that all hope for progressive change is doomed

Recently, I have been talking a lot about promoting a 'progressive conservative' ideal. IF you want to know more about what 'progressive conservatism' entails, you can start by reading my 'Progressive Conservative Manifesto'. One of the biggest reasons why I'm talking about progressive conservatism now is because, in the face of the Trump-led reactionary right's assaults on long-standing civil rights, programs and conventions that are too liberal for their liking, I have come to the view that we must take a stand for what we believe, before it's too late. My other, more long-standing reason for talking about progressive conservatism is because, over the years, I've found that the left's model of change is actually a massive failure. Like I've said many times, it leads to the needless polarization of society, and the burnout of generations of young people, and also opens the door to dangerous waves of backlash. Indeed, these two things are clearly linked in the present moment: it is the backlash to the 2010s 'woke left' that has allowed the reactionary right to gain power, to be in the position they are in right now, to do the damage they are doing right now. My hope is that a program of progressive conservatism will solve both problems.

Before a progressive conservative program can actually move forward, it has to gain enough support. Some of the support is going to come from centrists, moderate libertarians, and genuine anti-woke liberals, all of whom were frustrated at the woke excesses of the 2010s, but even more worried about the reactionary right's authoritarian overreach under Trump. I count myself as firmly belonging to this category. However, we also need to pull people from the more progressive side of the political spectrum because, let's face it: right now, all the energy is with either those who identify as 'progressives', or the MAGA crowd, and any movement that can't accept MAGA-ism will have to find allies on the progressive side, if it is to grow. The reason why I am criticizing the left's model of change is because I want to convince progressives to come over to our side. I want to convince them to come over, because the far-left's model of change is flawed, and we have a better way to move forward, to achieve what they want. The rewards of having a better model of change will be, of course, in the form of actually successfully making things better, and also in the form of defeating the reactionary right.

I think the biggest problem with the far-left's model of change is that it wants to tear down the status quo entirely. This is counterproductive, because it is much harder to build something good from scratch. It also leads to massive backlash, because people don't like to see what they have always known get destroyed in the service of some arbitrary philosophical theory. What we should remember is that the backlash always falls most heavily on the disadvantaged minorities of society. This is why I actually believe that the continued pursuit of radical change using the far-left's model is actually immoral. Indeed, history doesn't contain a single example where this far-left model of change has successfully brought good outcomes, while it contains many cautionary tales as to the harms this flawed model could bring. That many progressives became sympathetic to this failed model in the past decade, despite its historical track record, was almost entirely because of the influence of postmodern critical theory, which itself is an objectively unsound worldview.

Rather than tearing everything down, I would argue that a better approach would be to make what we have better, by drawing on our long-standing values. Values like freedom, compassion, caring for each other, commitment to improving our understanding of the truth, meritocracy on a fair playing field, and so on, are all embedded within our collective conscience, but their application to the real world remains incomplete. The progressive conservative project seeks to more fully implement these values in all areas of our life. It therefore seeks to strengthen, rather than deconstruct, our traditional inheritance. Through this process, we can certainly advance civil rights, make society more inclusive of minorities and fairer for everyone, and so on. This is especially true, if we can argue against the politics of the reactionary right, on the grounds of these traditional values. This should be easy to do, given that the reactionary right clearly does not care about harming real life people, and does not care about science or truth either.

I believe the flagrant violation of our long-standing values by the reactionary right under Trump gives us a good opportunity to argue for a better world based on upholding these values. But we can only successfully do that if we truly leave the nihilistic ideologies of deconstructionist postmodernism and oppressor vs. oppressed identitarian critical theory behind. I think the choice is clear, as to which path we should take going forward.

Why Commitment to the Objective Truth is Important

Let's continue talking about laying the foundations for a culture and politics rooted in shared values. Last time, we talked about compassion. This time, I think we should talk about commitment to, and respect for, the objective truth. One reason why an extreme and toxic politics has proliferated on both the left and the right, is because of a lack of commitment to the objective truth across the board. Postmodernism, which has strongly influenced the Western left in recent times, openly rejects pursuing the objective truth, and sees speech, discourse and knowledge itself as fundamentally manifestations of oppressor vs oppressed power dynamics. There is clearly no room for respect of objective truth in this worldview. Meanwhile, the right is at least equally, if not even more, disrespectful of the objective truth, in its pursuit of power. In the past few years, the right has demonstrated a sickening level of 'will to power', never letting a crisis go wasted, trampling on both scientific and social truths in their attempt to create a politically advantageous narrative. Together, in slightly different but ultimately similar ways, the left and the right have buried our previously long-standing commitment to the objective truth, to the extent that people basically don't live in the same environment of objective facts anymore. This has made society and politics fundamentally dysfunctional, and is one of the biggest reasons for the polarization and tribalism we have right now.

Why is the objective truth important? It's because only when we know and acknowledge the objective truth can we begin to make fact-based decisions and take reality-based actions to improve things. Of course, knowing the objective truth is only the beginning. What decisions we make, and what actions we take, will also depend a lot on our values. Two people with different values can and will act differently even if they agree on the same set of objective facts. It is our values that make us want to rectify injustices where they exist, or resist tyranny in all its forms. If people with a different set of values were in charge during World War II, for example, they might not have had the will to stop fascism, even if they otherwise had the same facts available to them. They might have decided to make a peace deal with Hitler instead, not caring about how many people would suffer and die under his rule. Therefore, it is ultimately our values that determine our course of action. However, those values would only be able to be applied accurately if we know the objective truth, and know it accurately, in the first place. Knowledge of, and agreement with, the objective truth also forms a fair basis on which we might judge the ideas being sold to us in the marketplace of ideas. I think a major reason why some ideologies wantonly distort and obscure the objective truth is because they want to distort the marketplace of ideas. It's really about forcing their ideas down our throats, when a fair appraisal of such ideas would always lead to their rejection.

Postmodernism and New Left critical theory clearly have a problem with the objective truth. Their view that knowledge and discourse is fundamentally and inevitably shaped by power dynamics is incompatible with a commitment to freely pursue the objective truth, both in theory and in practice. In theory, such a worldview necessarily leads to the selective censorship of ideas, as argued by Herbert Marcuse in his Repressive Tolerance essay. In practice, this worldview has led to the phenomenon of cancel culture, and has clearly made many people afraid of speaking their mind. Some people have asked me, what if they acknowledge there is some truth in what postmodernism is saying, while not following it to its logical conclusion, is that OK? I think the important thing here is whether you are critiquing power dyanamics for distorting the marketplace of ideas, or dismissing the validity and necessity of the marketplace of ideas altogether. Far too often, the postmodern project is clearly of the latter worldview. It is clear that most adherents of postmodernism are not out to critique power dynamics so that the marketplace of ideas can be even freer. If that were the case, we wouldn't have cancel culture, so-called 'progressive stack' speaking systems, and the ostracization of people who don't toe the party line in many leftist spaces. The problem with the postmodernism-influenced left is that they don't trust the marketplace of ideas to arrive at the best understanding of the objective truth, and that the application of our long-standing values to the objective truth will result in fairer and more just outcomes in society. Old school liberals and progressives have long trusted this process, but postmodern critical theory ideology has destroyed that trust, to our collective detriment.

While members of the political right have enjoyed criticizing the left's lack of commitment to the objective truth and the scientific method, as if they hold the moral high ground here, there is actually a similar crisis happening on the right as well. For at least a generation now, the right has had a strong distrust of expert scientific opinion in many areas, simply because such opinion is usually not in line with the right's increasingly reactionary ideology. From the fact that LGBT people are 'born this way', to the rejection of 'intelligent design' in favor of evolution, to the strong evidence in favor of man-made climate change, scientific facts derived from empirical observation and the scientific method have been a thorn in the side of right-wing politics since at least a generation ago. Therefore, the right has indeed been anti-science for even longer than the left. This attitude informs the anti-academic stance of ideologies like neoreactionism, which has become more and more influential on the right in recent years, after fully breaking into the mainstream at the time of the pandemic. The post-pandemic right is essentially post-truth, and this is really not an exaggeration. Just look at how Trump and his allies have campaigned and governed. From spreading fake news about immigrant communities, to the drastic cuts to the funding of scientific research, the right is really waging war on science and truth right now.

Given that both the left and the right, as they exist right now in the 2020s Western political landscape, have substantial problems with respecting the objective truth, I believe that those of us who remain committed to the free and unbiased discovery of the objective truth must remain independent of the dominant political discourse of both the left-wing and right-wing echo chambers. In an age where partisan politics has been fundamentally corrupted by anti-truth forces, independent thinking is the key to restoring the truth.
 

Why We Need to Bring Back Love and Compassion

Today, I am going to start a new series, where I attempt to lay the foundations for a culture and politics rooted in some fundamental shared values. The value I am going to focus on today is compassion. Compassion, love for each other, following the 'golden rule', or whatever else you can call it, has long been a cornerstone of any successful society, and is a major driving force for society's improvement over time. I think a fundamental problem with today's Western political landscape is a lack of compassion, especially among the loudest voices on both the left and the right. This, in turn, is due to a combination of factors, including polarization and tribalism, obsession with ideology and philosophy, as well as the proliferation of dishonest influencers in the media. I will talk about how to tackle these problems, and bring back compassion.

The level of compassion in Western society has dropped rapidly in the past ten years or so. Many people might point the finger towards online political culture, especially of the right-leaning variety, which started the whole 'SJWs owned' thing. But although that culture is really toxic and is indeed part of the problem, what is often called the 'woke left' is equally responsible for trashing compassion, in my view. Let me explain.

Wokeness, the worldview and brand of activism heavily influenced by postmodern critical theory, likes to say that it is for social justice. However, it is not for the kind of social justice most of us knew before 2015 or so. The 'woke left' simply doesn't care much about justice at the practical, individual level. Instead, it cares about fulfilling its ideology, which is basically the dismantling of what it sees as interlocking systems of oppression. This ideology divides people into oppressor vs. oppressed groups, mostly based on their immutable characteristics like race and gender. And if you're somehow placed in an 'oppressor' group, they don't have much compassion for you. Even if you are in the 'oppressed' group, if you disagree with their worldview, they might try to label you as 'privileged' in another way, and by implication, less deserving of compassion. Therefore, under the postmodern critical theory identity politics model, there really is a lack of compassion towards many people, and in many contexts, especially when compared to the model of universal compassion old-school liberals used to argue for civil rights and gay marriage. Wokeness prioritizes its ideology of deconstruction over genuine, universal compassion, and its attempt to supplant old-school liberalism on the left in the 2010s led to a rapid loss of compassion on the left, and eventually across society more generally.

On the other hand, the New Right are clearly not into compassion either. During the 2010s, the angle they took was that so-called SJWs were too focused on compassion, to the exclusion of everything else. This implied that what was needed was less compassion. However, this is a dishonest way of framing the problem because, as previously discussed, the woke left suffers from a lack of compassion, rather than a surplus of it. By framing compassion as the problem rather than the solution, the New Right was able to mainstream their own extremely uncompassionate brand of politics. Instead of championing free speech on the ground that everyone deserves to be able to express their concerns, or that a free marketplace of ideas would allow us to get to the truth which is best for everyone, their 'free speech' is about nihilistically 'owning the libs', often by saying things that are deliberately bigoted towards minorities. This has allowed them to build a culture where deliberately antagonizing and hurting people for no benefit is not only tolerated, but actively celebrated. Today's online right, where being against interracial marriage and openly hating minorities is effectively normalized, is the end result. Thus the New Right effectively used the widespread frustration towards wokeness to dishonestly build an even more toxic movement.

To end all this, I think we need to start by simply demanding a return to compassion. We need to insist that compassion is universally applied to everyone, and that ideology and philosophy are never allowed to get in the way of this again. We need to insist that truly caring for everyone's wellbeing is a valid goal of politics, in and of itself. On one hand, the woke left should be called out for the harms that result from its ideology labeling certain people as oppressors based on their immutable characteristics. We should push this radically hateful way of thinking out of polite society, where it clearly doesn't belong. Indeed, we should teach our kids that it is always fundamentally wrong to think this way, so that this ideology doesn't find a way to spread to future generations. On the other hand, the New Right's toxic embrace of an anti-compassion culture that revolves around the nihilistic goal of 'owning the libs' should be firmly rejected too. Life is already difficult enough for most people as it is, if your mission in life is to make other people more miserable than they already are, there really should be a special place in hell for you. Again, polite society should be able to just say no to this cancer. If we can't even do this, there is no hope for the future of humanity.

Battle for the Soul of Libertarianism | Moral Libertarian Talk

Why we can't cede the libertarian movement to authoritarian pretenders

Today, I want to talk about why it is important that we, the people who actually believe in freedom, win the battle for the soul of libertarianism. After all, I've said repeatedly that labels don't matter all that much, that political philosophy is not the way to build a coalition to fight against extremism, that most ordinary middle class people probably don't care about political philosophy, and so on. Yet, I still believe that it is very important that true believers in freedom win the battle for the soul of libertarianism over so-called paleo-libertarians who pander to paleoconservatives, to the extent of sacrificing both civil liberties and free trade, 'beltway libertarians' who have no problem with neoconservative interventionism, neoreaction-adjacent pseudo-libertarian authoritarians who discredit us all, as well as AnCap-adjacent extremists.

The reason why we must win the battle for the soul of libertarianism is because it is simply the battle to define what freedom means, at least in the Western political context. Libertarianism is the only movement in the Western political landscape that consistently says it is for freedom first and foremost, and consistently speaks the language of freedom. If we cede the libertarian movement to people who don't actually put freedom first, or believe in freedom in a truly universal way, or else use libertarianism to justify their extreme agendas that have nothing to do with practical personal freedom, we will lose the language of freedom to people who don't actually believe in freedom, and will use it to justify its opposite. This will be a real tragedy, with serious implications across society, including implications on civil liberties, free speech and even world peace or lack thereof.

Another thing we need to recognize is that libertarianism has become the way it is because of deliberate actions by forces from certain factions of the ruling class, acting on the small movement in the form of big sums of money over various periods of history, in order to promote their broader agendas. This, in my opinion, is what has pulled libertarianism into an unjustifiably close association with the political right, to the extent that the movement is now in danger of being swallowed by right-wing populism. First, it was the 'taxation is theft' but civil liberties and wars don't matter people. Later, it was the Tea Party people. Lately, it has been people from the populist right looking for anti-establishment credentials. All these people are not true believers in freedom, and we must not let them define the libertarian agenda going forward. I think remaining committed to a meaning of freedom that makes sense for ordinary people is the key to seeing through these schemes.

To defend libertarianism from all the aforementioned forces, I believe we need to call out those who say they are freedom but are not really for freedom in any ordinarily meaningful sense of the word. We also need to continue to think about what freedom means, and the conditions under which it is achievable or not. I think that if we have a firm sense of this, we will not get tricked by the pretenders so easily.

We Need a Middle Class Revolution | The New Woke-Skeptic

The ruling class is behind the grandiose thinking that has caused division and polarization

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about why so-called 'woke thinking', i.e. critical theory-style thinking, has become so prevalent on both the left and the right, despite its demonstrated harms, and why our politics has become so polarized more broadly speaking. I have come to the conclusion that it is because the ruling class is basically in total control of the media (both the old and new media), and hence the cultural discourse. Members of the ruling class are prone to grandiose thoughts, and an impulse to want to remake everything, because they have too much time on their hands, and because they are indeed very out of touch with practical everyday life. Let me explain.

Let's face it: the ruling class are currently in control, not just of government and industry, but of our entire cultural discourse. Ordinary middle class people are only able to 'choose' from what the rival factions of the ruling class are championing. The odds of an idea created by ordinary middle class people breaking through are very, very low, in a media landscape where loads of money and connections are required to launch any influential campaign. By ruling class, I mean people with either a very substantial amount of intergenerational wealth, or a network of connections among influential circles of society, or both. To be in the first group you basically need to have very rich parents, and likely very rich grandparents too. To be in the second group you need to have at least attended an Ivy League school, and you likely need to have parents who have connections in influential circles, or at least know the right people. It is clear that not everyone can be like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg or Taylor Swift, or even an influential journalist working at the New York Times or Washington Post, and this is likely to already have been decided at birth for most people. Ordinary middle class people who make an ordinary amount of money, who went to an ordinary university and know only ordinary people, have no way to break through into the cultural world created by the ruling class. They can only passively consume the media funded and created by the ruling class, which means that they can only choose to side with one rival faction of the ruling class or the other, or else tune out altogether.

The problem with the ruling class's control of the cultural discourse is that they are much more likely to have grandiose thinking, and are much more likely to be out of touch with how practical everyday life works. Both these factors strongly predispose one to 'woke thinking', of either the 'woke left' or the 'woke right' variety. After all, when you have all that money and all that power, you inevitably slip into the 'hero' mindset, where it is easy to start dreaming of grand plans to remake everything. You also stop appreciating how practical, incremental change can improve the lives of many people, while ignoring the very real pain disruptive change can bring to people. Thus you end up dismissing the value of working within the society we've actually got to improve things. If regular middle class people drove the conversation instead, I think we would see a lot of these grand narratives about our culture being dominated by something like 'interlocking systems of oppression' or 'the cathedral' lose their hold on our imagination.

Using a 'shared values' approach, rather than a political philosophy-based approach, to combat woke thinking also fits into this vision of middle class revolution. The fact is, only a minority of ordinary middle class people care about political philosophy, or even understand political philosophy in the first place. Most simply don't have the time to care about this stuff. Don't get me wrong, I believe that the continued development of political philosophy is necessary, because it can give us important insights and arguments to use. However, a broad-based, middle class movement cannot be based on political philosophy, period. After all, fighting ideology with ideology is the ruling class way, because of the ruling class's grandiose thinking style, and this has given us the 'woke left' vs 'woke right' phenomenon. On the other hand, fighting bad ideology with our long-standing shared values like freedom, compassion and objectivity is the middle class way, and I believe the most effective way to win the battle of ideas in the public marketplace of ideas.

Finally, there still remains the question of, how do we get there? How do ordinary middle class people snatch back the cultural narrative? There is no easy answer here, but the first and most important step would be to consciously realize the situation we're in. We need to recognize the ruling class-backed narratives for what they are, and think critically about them. We need to stop listening to celebrities, mainstream media journalists, TV news talking heads, podcasters and other influencers telling us what to believe, because most of them are basically spokespeople for one of the rival factions of the ruling class. We need to realize that it's OK to pick neither side of the ruling class's culture wars, and it is actually more productive to come up with an independent view yourself. We need to resist the peer pressure to conform to ruling class narratives, and find creative ways to break the 'coalitions' the rival factions want to create in their war against each other. If we do all this, we will have progressed a long way, and the next step will likely become apparent when we get there.

There Really is a Woke Right, and it is a Grave Threat to Freedom

The evidence is solid, despite the loud and desperate denials

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about whether there is a 'woke right'. Some moderates have long used the the term 'woke right' to describe reactionary right-wing culture warriors who engage in cancel culture and other forms of free speech denial, but this term was only embraced by a small minority, until James Lindsay and several other key influencers on the right began promoting it in recent months. As you might expect, some on the right have been quite defensive, and dismissive of the idea that the right can be 'woke' too, going so far as to accuse Lindsay and others of promoting left-wing ideas (this clearly has the same energy as far-left activists trying to paint Barack Obama and Joe Biden as right-wing). It is in this context, particularly the right's defensive, tribalist and almost anti-intellectual response, that I began thinking about whether a 'woke right' might indeed exist.

When a few people began talking about the 'woke right' two or three years ago, my initial attitude was skeptical. After all, wokeness arose from postmodernism and critical theory, philosophies which are firmly rooted in the left, and have only been (openly) embraced by left-wing people and movements. Just because something looks similar to woke doesn't make it woke. I mean, Christian and Islamic fundamentalism are authoritarian and anti-LGBT, and so is fascism, but religious fundamentalism and fascism are clearly two different things.

However, over time, I have observed that the similarities between the woke left and the new movement of culture warriors on the right are simply too many to ignore. Both despise free speech, and distrust the marketplace of ideas to the point that they believe they have to actively shut down speech and ideas they disagree with, often using unscrupulous means. This, ultimately, stems from a belief on both sides that society and culture are controlled by an all-pervasive power structure, that would not allow the truth to emerge simply from free speech and free debate. There's a clear oppressor vs oppressed worldview at work here on both sides, although there is clearly disagreement on which groups are the oppressor and which groups are the oppressed. There's also a 'let's turn the tables of oppression', revenge on the oppressors is legitimate feeling on both sides, and the 'oppressors' are seen as one indistinguishable bloc, so it would be okay to hurt all of them without considering individual guilt or lack thereof. Above all, for both sides, the biggest goal of politics is to dismantle the power structure and disarm those who are propping up the power structure, and this has to be done at all costs, including costs to individual liberty, as well as actual harms to actual people. The last point is important, because not many ideologies in the modern West would condone this 'whatever it takes', 'the ends justify the means' attitude, for good reason.

It is clear from the above analysis that the woke left and the New Right culture warriors share not only superficial similarities or even just tactics, but rather, they ultimately share the same kind of worldview about culture, human nature and the general epistemology of society. Given this, I think we are talking less about two things that are only superficially similar like fascism vs religious authoritarianism here, but rather two things that actually share the same core nature, like Italian fascism and German Nazism. Just like we can put both Italian fascism and German Nazism under the same general umbrella called 'fascism', I think we can justifiably put both the 'woke left' and the 'woke right' under the same general umbrella called 'wokeism'. Indeed, failing to do so would severely limit, and even distort, our view of reality.

Building the New Woke-Critical Movement | The New Woke-Skeptic

A shared values approach is what we need going forward

In my recent article titled 'There Really is a Woke Right, and it is a Grave Threat to Freedom', I analyzed how the current batch of culture warriors on the right actually embody the essence of critical theory-style thinking, and are hence actually a 'woke right'. The 'woke right' sees a liberal 'cathedral' centered in academia, dating back to the Whigs in Britain several centuries ago, as the oppressor of what they see as 'true conservatives', and they believe the overturn of liberal values, at all costs, must be pursued. This is why they are a grave threat to freedom. With this in mind, the fight against wokeness has become at least a 'war on two fronts', broadly speaking. Moreover, besides the 'woke left' and the 'woke right', there could also be more niche versions of woke thinking that don't fit into either the left or the right as they currently exist. An example of this is extreme gender critical feminism. 'Woke TERFs' think of gender issues in a way consistent with the critical theory model, with all biological males as oppressors and all biological females as the oppressed. Their resentment of trans women stems from this ideology, and is not amenable to reasonable compromise. I think all this means that, going forward, the woke-critical or woke-skeptical movement will need to be able to consistently point out the flaws of all branches of woke thinking, in order for it to be an intellectually honest, sustainable and fruitful movement.

I believe the best way to combat woke thinking is simply to point out the flaws with thinking that way, and the associated real world harms. Critical theory-style thinking is bad because it removes the role of personal agency and personal responsibility in the determination of social outcomes, and by extension, removes the justification for virtue, morality, independent thinking, and ultimately freedom itself. Instead, it sees everything as a 'system', with individuals being no more than pieces in the system. Furthermore, give that the goal is always to take down the system as a whole, it doesn't care about harming the individuals within the system, or otherwise treating them unfairly. This, I believe, makes it a very dangerous mode of thinking. Extremists on the 'woke left' believe that all men are responsible for 'patriarchy', all white people are responsible for 'white supremacy' and so on, thus justifying their 'turn the tables of oppression' style of reverse sexism and racism. This attitude is not only divisive, it has also caused real world harms like the neglect of men's issues and needs on the left. On the other hand, extremists on the 'woke right' believe that all establishment experts are bad, thus justifying a completely anti-science attitude towards everything from environmental science to public health. Moreover, they also believe that LGBT people are products of liberal ideology, thus justifying their support of policies that are harmful and unfair to LGBT individuals. Both the 'woke left' and the 'woke right' are clear examples of why this mode of thinking needs to be thoroughly challenged, and ultimately defeated. It is for the good of humanity's future that we must win this battle of ideas decisively.

I used to mainly combat woke thinking with classical liberal values and philosophy. I actually don't think that is the best approach anymore. Don't get me wrong: classical liberal values and philosophy are indeed a good antidote to woke thinking, they are effective against both the 'woke left' and the 'woke right', and we should continue to develop those arguments. However, what we need to recognize is that political philosophy is like religion. We all have our own beliefs, some of us have stronger beliefs than others, but at the end of the day, we have to acknowledge that, in a free society, not everyone is going to share our beliefs. It is sometimes said that, in a democracy, religious people can hold views that are influenced by their religion, but they still have to make their case in terms of secular, common values in the marketplace of ideas, if they want to build support for the change they want to see. I think it's a similar deal when it comes to political philosophy. Classical liberal philosophy can inspire us to take certain positions, but we still need to build a coalition to achieve what we want, and that would have to include people who aren't true believers in classical liberalism, and people who might not even be into thinking about political philosophy at all. This is where the 'shared values' approach to combating woke thinking is clearly superior.

The 'shared values' approach to combating woke thinking lies in simply promoting and emphasizing some of society's long-standing shared values, that provide a check on the flaws and ill effects of critical theory-style thinking. For example, universal compassion would prevent people from thinking of some individuals as belonging to or associated with 'oppressor' groups based on their immutable characteristics, and treat them unfairly because of this. Objectivity would provide a check on philosophical theories that paint a picture of an 'oppressive system' based on limited anecdotal evidence, and also prevent a blanket anti-expert anti-science attitude from developing. Intellectual seriousness would prevent broad brush thinking in general, and encourage us to look into the details of each issue before coming to a judgement as to what the correct answers are. Anti-tribalism would prevent us from lazily agreeing with the people on our own side, even if their ideas are not sound. And so on. And then, there is also an additional overall effect of focusing on applying these values in our lives, in that it prevents us from succumbing to grand theories of oppressor vs oppressed thinking, or similar conspiratorial-style thinking in general. When you are dedicated to treating everyone with the same compassion, and understanding the nuanced truth of every issue, your brain gets used to thinking about issues multifactorially. You become much less susceptible to grand theories about how society works based on false simplicity.

In conclusion, critical theory-style thinking, what is often called 'woke' nowadays, is prevalent among both left-wing and right-wing culture warriors alike. This kind of thinking paints a picture of structural oppression that is simply not there empirically, and justifies illiberal means of 'tearing down the system' that inevitably harms many people along the way. Moreover, when groups of people have been assigned to be part of the oppressive power structure, harming them becomes well-justified, even if they do not personally deserve it themselves. Overall, this is clearly a dangerous mode of thinking, and one that is incompatible with the long-standing values of our society. While liberal philosophy has provided effective arguments against this mode of thinking, we need to understand that not everyone is into political philosophy, or believes in classical liberalism. If we are to win this battle of ideas, we would need as many people as possible to be allies. Which is why a 'shared values' approach, where we emphasize the role of values like compassion, objectivity, intellectual seriousness and anti-tribalism, is superior, and should be pursued going forward.