Great analysis. May I humbly add the following nuance that I may be in a unique position to add, in support of your argument ( and challenging Andrews further). The Soviet Union , famously, liberated women and brought them into employment en masse resulting in demographic feminisation of certain professions previously considered masculine ( without , I must add, taking away the prestige associated with those professions). Example? Medicine. Not nursing. Medicine. It became dominated by women, with female/male ratios being 60: 40 , perhaps even 70:30 in places. That did not result in wokism or anything of this kind.
As an aside, but an important one, the Soviet Union never developed a notion of innate equality with respect to abilities. Rather it insisted on equality of opportunity and severed the strong correlation between ability and reward (a sort of non- meritocratic culture). A popular expression that summarised it was the famous: ' From everyone- according to their ability, to everyone- according to their need'.
Excellent piece. It speaks to several of my frustrations with the discourse on the Right in recent years. The Right is still much closer to the truth on these issues than the mainstream, but there's still much room for improvement.
On wokeism not being new, I think there can be a tendency in our spaces to assume that wokeism, or liberalism, or leftism sprung up of the ground at a specific point: 1945, or the 1960s, or the 2010s, depending on who you ask for "when things went wrong". There's a deeper issue we need to seriously grapple with: liberalism (in a broad sense) is what's brought us the material prosperity and freedom of the modern world, but its egalitarian and atomising impulses seem to contain the seeds of its own demise.
I'd even go further back than the early liberal philosophers starting in the 1600s, proto-leftism has happened before. You can find echoes of leftist ideas and values in classical texts from the periods of Greece and Rome's declines. Even further back, it seems to be the case that most ancestral human societies were envious of the successful and engaged in egalitarian levelling (Jeremy Kaufmann on X has discussed this before). Respect for excellence seems to be a rarity among human societies, and in the West we may currently be reverting to the human norm.
Andrew’s argument only makes sense if you ignore the vast majority of history. Typically, women have been either more conservative or roughly the same in ideology as men.
Neither women nor groups of women are inevitably Woke. And the vast majority of the purveyors of Critical theory have been male.
Young women have much higher levels of Neuroticism and Agreeableness, so in our social media world are especially susceptible to Woke ideology, but it is more about following the crowd. They are the victims, not the purveyors.
I also agree with you that Wokeness is the “logical” outcome of the equality thesis, but I think it important to differentiate between the equality thesis and Woke ideology. Claiming that John Locke and Civil War Republicans were Woke just trivializes the term. It is much like the current fashion of labeling thinkers as “Woke Right.”
"Locke didn’t seriously think through the moral implications of racial blank slatism, so he himself never became woke. But the ingredients of wokism were there in 1690."
OK, fair enough, but you also said “ Wokism in the United States reached its first crescendo in the 1860s.”
You also have a header entitled “ Wokism Is More than 100 Years Old.” And you discussed Locke within that section.
And if it is true that “ the ingredients of wokism were there in 1690” but no one was actually Woke at the time, perhaps then the ingredients were not actually there.
For the vast majority of history, women were economically & emotionally bound to their husbands and children by a variety of other laws and customs and by the non-existence of the pill and difficulties/risks of abortion. (Married women, to this day, still broadly vote in the same direction as their husbands.) We've never had a previous period of history where most women had the option of making independent decisions for their own benefit.
I'd actually make the argument that major political concessions to feminism greatly predate major political concessions to blank-slatism, and as such the great feminisation predates wokeness. (Looking at a tiny handful of liberal philosophers is overselling the point, I think- as I understand it Rousseau was never in favour of women's lib.)
I'm also not sure what practical difference this makes with respect to modern-day political activism or strategy? It's obvious that any program of persuasion is going to be far too slow to make progress and if the major institutions are purged of leftists then feminists will be numerically the most affected. If no-one is held accountable for poor decision-making, then poor decision-making will continue, and we can't put Locke in the brig.
>Over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries, wokesters made increasingly desperate attempts to fix the environment and bring about equality of outcome among groups.
Something else I realized recently; this exacerbates the problem. Of the environmental interventions we make that actually *can* make a difference—and there aren't many, but they exist, such as instilling literacy and numeracy—in raising general intelligence, they largely *exacerbate* inequalities of outcome. And given some of the positions these lunatics champion, such as the idea that "worship of the written word" is white supremacy, I honestly wonder if at least subconsciously, they activist contingent is aware that the prime legacy of their prior and predecessoral work has been the very increase of the gap they're fighting so hard against.
Yet another reason these people must be crushed and defeated rather than negotiated with. They're increasingly aware raising people up only works against their goals. Now, they're only interested in tearing down. They must no longer be allowed opportunity for such.
You've said many times that lots of people agree with you in private, but they still throw you under the bus in public. Does this not indicate that "changing their minds" isn't the problem. It's getting them to act with courage, a manly virtue.
---
A man hands out printouts on Red Square. He's then arrested. Once at the police station, the officers realize that his leaflets were empty. He says "Everyone knows what the problem is, so why bother writing it down?"
---
Feminization is a problem because women are less brave and less motivated by truth for truths sake. They also dislike objective risk/reward systems which give "skin in the game" that rewards more accurate worldviews. If you want to beat woke convincing people to make personal sacrifices to oppose it is a way bigger lift then convincing them of facts that already act on as facts in their personal lives 99% of the time.
Gee, wonder why older male academics might be attracted to a woke ideology that allows them to surround themselves with more young women while freezing out younger men? Maybe evolutionary psychology would shed some light on this? Just asking questions here!
This doesn't explain why it helps to surround themselves with non-white male academics. Besides, surrounding oneself with females doesn't guarantee any reproductive success if one is in the 70s. Unless one is Charlie Chaplin or Pablo Picasso.
It doesn't but it's not the older white men who are obsessed with skin color, it's the women they hired. First wave wokeness was feminism. And the 70 year old profs today weren't stuffing the academies with women last week, they were doing it decades ago.
Thank you for writing this. When I first heard of Helen Andrews' latest, I thought, "There's nothing new about this. Anthropologist Lionel Tiger wrote "The Decline of Males" in the year 2000.
But you pointed out the deeper layer, which is that what we call "woke" started out in "Yankeedom," as described by Colin Woodard in AMERICAN NATIONS.
This was a phenomenal write up. I think you nailed it when referencing the influence of Christianity on the desireability of the equality thesis. This is a significant factor that could be further investigated. Why do people want it to be true that all people are fundamentally equal? Where did this wish originate? It's extremely obvious that people are unequal in nature. People denie what they see with their naked eyes because they feel compelled to. The corruption and decline of Christianity may have something to do with the development of this extremely dedicated focus on creating a perfectly egalitarian world. I don't think that explains all of it though. The fact that communism has had such wide appeal all over the world seems to indicate equality has cross cultural appeal.
The egalitarian impulse actually goes back hundreds of thousands of years. I talk about it a little here in the section “From Commies to Neoliberals”: https://ncofnas.com/p/beating-woke-with-facts-and-logic Christopher Boehm has an excellent book with anthropological evidence called Hierarchy in the Forest.
I think Tom Holland explores this relationship between Christianity and woke in his book Dominion. He ultimately approves but seeks primarily to explain not argue
Excellent analysis. Many progressive left types are not stringent believers and wanters of equality / equity. Instead they just want to make the "better" choice that improves the world and their place in it. Thus the solution is not just disproving the equality thesis but more so providing better choices for people to make (and as is my puritian-wokish temperament: punishing and feeling superior to people making worse choices)
Andrew's intuition is imperfect, but practically, it's a step in the right direction. Defeminization of institutions would actually help. You cannot spread the uncomfortable truth of hereditarianism with female overrepresentation in those institutions. Baby steps back toward meritocracy, even if argued imperfectly, are good. And it would open the avenue for other kinds of de-diversification.
More generally, while I agree with much of your analysis, you have to be practical to effect change. Hereditarianism is true. And it's been losing hard for the last 80+ years. Why? Because its case hasn't even been given a proper hearing. To give it a proper hearing, you may first need to win politically and give it a platform. Elon Musk didn't first win the battle of ideas. He made a power move by buying Twitter, set it free, and thus did arguably more for spreading the truth of hereditarianism than anyone else in recent history. That's also why I don't get your quibbling with Rufo. Your approaches are obviously complementary.
Purging women from institutions will not lead to greater meritocracy. My guess is that it will only intensify the concerns over the proper gender/race representation in institutions.
Meritocracy in hiring/firing/promotion/training and competition between organizations for scarce resources alone works just fine.
Nor should we make decisions based on whether it forwards the idea of heridaritarianism.
Meritocracy in hiring is very difficult to implement, even for jobs where success is objective like programming. Source: I've built objective, merit-based hiring processes for tech firms and hired hundreds of people.
1. Obviously, woke people reject the premise. Because merit-based hiring leads to unequal outcomes, they assume the process cannot be meritocratic and constantly campaign against it / undermine it.
2. Measuring merit is itself a skill that requires practice to get good at, but most companies don't do enough hiring to give their staff enough practice. So hiring processes at most departments at most companies are shoddy and incompetent, e.g. interviewers run out of time, ask bad questions, or don't know what skills they actually need. This causes meritocracy to get a bad reputation because companies look like they're implementing it but do it badly. One consequence: the rare exceptions like early 2000s Google that are good at hiring yield lots of cargo-cult procedure cloning.
3. Because unskilled people stay in the candidate pool whilst the skilled get hired and stop applying, the moment you require even very basic job standards almost all candidates start failing. Hiring rates of 1-2% aren't uncommon in tech. This makes hiring a grueling task consuming large amounts of time and money, which people-oriented managers who have never done merit based hiring struggle to understand. Why can't you just make an offer, they ask? "We never needed this and it was fine" is a very common sentiment from people whose hiring processes were previously oriented around personal contacts and intuition.
4. The desire for fairness and consistency drives standardization, but that creates its own problems, e.g. recruiters may cheat and brief candidates on the questions they'll be asked.
5. Many jobs don't lend themselves to work sample creation in an office/interview room.
Western organizations have used something approximating meritocracy for generations. The difficulties you mention do not make an approximation of meritocracy very difficult at all.
The primary barrier is DEI policies in hiring, firing, promotion, and training.
1. Who talked about "purges", Michael? It's the other way around: greater meritocracy => end of the racist and sexist DEI regime => natural decline of women's representation. I agree concerns over proper gender/race representation in institutions should be discussed. Hereditarianism wins that discussion because truth wins that discussion. That's why that discussion was banned.
2. I agree. We should reinstate it. Unfortunately, meritocracy has been illegal in America for decades.
3. We should make decisions based on true models of the world. Hereditarianism is a true model.
I think you're right that the Great Feminization is not sufficient to explain the Great Awokening, but I think we would not have had the Great Awokening without it.
The seed of wokeness, extreme egalitarianism, doesn't explain why there was a flourishing specifically in the last ~20 years in the US. It doesn't explain why the Cancel Culture specific to that ~20 years came about. Also, a major facet of this Cancel Culture was that the red lines shifted so suddenly that normal opinions **on the Left** in say 2008 became cancelable in 2015.
Going back to Puritan Harvard just shows how much modern wokeness and cancel culture rhyme with the past and religious fervor, but this time being driven in no small part by secular feminization.
You compare female censoriousness on left and right, but do you ever mention it is the left that is overwhelmingly more dominated by women? Do you cover that women generally favor helping the disadvantaged more than men?
Whatever women are, it's not "conservative," unless you merely mean "risk averse." You might be right that femininity is not intrinsically woke, but also it seems pretty clear it was a significant, if contingent, factor in the Great Awokening.
I think this is basically the same case for the weaponization of the law. You're right it's not the seed, but it was a tool.
With all due respect, this is a compleletly fucking stupid argument, akin to saying bolshevism did not exist as its own phenomena/ideology because it contained priors from Marx's work in the prior century.
The issue is the specific current use of the underlying metaphysics of liberalism.
> Incidentally, this survey failed to replicate in a follow-up by the Knight Foundation and Ipsos in 2022
The 2024 survey went back to showing big gender differences in free speech attitudes. For example, there's a ten percentage point gender gap for the question "Should hate speech be legally protected". Although it's believable that "female students are more likely than male students to say that free speech rights are extremely important", all it takes to get that is for women to be more over-excitable on average - when you add extremely/very together in that year, there's no real difference.
More importantly, students and women might say free speech rights are important because they know that's the morally expected answer in America, but they're clearly just lying or confused. When asked to rank free speech against other priorities, their confusion is revealed. For example, a majority of college students both say that free speech rights are very/extremely important and also that hate speech isn't free speech.
Your thesis about the relative intelligence of left vs right is (as per usual) not well evidenced. In your twitter thread last year about witches and peasants, "George" said:
> The left has absolutely no problem with the most deranged beliefs of their stupidest members. They often encourage them.
and you replied
> Leftists wouldn't allow a Maoist or a Nation of Islam lunatic to be the editor of the New Yorker.
But 18 months later they voted a communist to be the Mayor of New York, so yes, they absolutely would do that. The question is why didn't you realize this would happen.
I think this kind of failed prediction happens because your theory isn't correct. It just doesn't properly predict what the woke do. If wokeness were really just taking the equality theory seriously then they would be equally concerned when the fortunes of straight white men fall behind other groups, but they never are. The woke never look at a C-suite or school consisting only of white women and say "oh my god, that's sexism". They never look at a sports team consisting primarily of black men and say, "oh my god, that's racism". Your theory says they would, but they don't.
No. Wokeness is much better predicted by a much simpler model: it's just unrestrained 10,000 BC era tribalism. To the woke, women+"minorities" are their tribe. "White" men + anyone who isn't on the left are another tribe. Everything beyond that is just them using fancy words to justify their tribal instincts.
The advantage of viewing them this way is that it's easy to make accurate predictions. Tribalism predicts that leftists cry sexism when there are lots of men around, because they view men as in the other tribe and want to pillage their stuff. Crying sexism is a war tactic. When those men are replaced by women and lose all their land, the left discard the tactic because the battle was won already. They never believed any of it, it's all just words on a battlefield to them. The Somali fraud, the way they attack ICE, all of it is predictable if you just treat them as if they were primitive tribe members on an African savannah a few millennia ago.
Medieval witch hunts are almost entirely a myth. Most which huntings was in early modern period and even that wasn't very common. Witch hunts are actually a good example that passage of time doesn't guarantee progress.
I think social media was a huge factor in enhancing cancel culture. In 1700s rules were strict, but there was more discression. Adultery was a sin but in practice you could have a wife and a mistress as long as two women never meet. Social media destroyed discression and tore down walls between the public and private. Thus unrestricted cancel culture.
I enjoy Substack for long form articles on topics. But I also frequently come across analyses by writers who seemingly never come out into the real world. I'm in the Bay Area and the great feminization, or whatever you want to call it, is front and center lead by women IRL. And how can you ignore what's happening with universities and media? The NYT, New Yorker, current book releases, and have a morning listen to NPR?
Great analysis. May I humbly add the following nuance that I may be in a unique position to add, in support of your argument ( and challenging Andrews further). The Soviet Union , famously, liberated women and brought them into employment en masse resulting in demographic feminisation of certain professions previously considered masculine ( without , I must add, taking away the prestige associated with those professions). Example? Medicine. Not nursing. Medicine. It became dominated by women, with female/male ratios being 60: 40 , perhaps even 70:30 in places. That did not result in wokism or anything of this kind.
As an aside, but an important one, the Soviet Union never developed a notion of innate equality with respect to abilities. Rather it insisted on equality of opportunity and severed the strong correlation between ability and reward (a sort of non- meritocratic culture). A popular expression that summarised it was the famous: ' From everyone- according to their ability, to everyone- according to their need'.
"Society Union never developed a notion of innate equality with respect to abilities" lmao you can't be serious
Excellent piece. It speaks to several of my frustrations with the discourse on the Right in recent years. The Right is still much closer to the truth on these issues than the mainstream, but there's still much room for improvement.
On wokeism not being new, I think there can be a tendency in our spaces to assume that wokeism, or liberalism, or leftism sprung up of the ground at a specific point: 1945, or the 1960s, or the 2010s, depending on who you ask for "when things went wrong". There's a deeper issue we need to seriously grapple with: liberalism (in a broad sense) is what's brought us the material prosperity and freedom of the modern world, but its egalitarian and atomising impulses seem to contain the seeds of its own demise.
I'd even go further back than the early liberal philosophers starting in the 1600s, proto-leftism has happened before. You can find echoes of leftist ideas and values in classical texts from the periods of Greece and Rome's declines. Even further back, it seems to be the case that most ancestral human societies were envious of the successful and engaged in egalitarian levelling (Jeremy Kaufmann on X has discussed this before). Respect for excellence seems to be a rarity among human societies, and in the West we may currently be reverting to the human norm.
Yes, I agree with this.
Andrew’s argument only makes sense if you ignore the vast majority of history. Typically, women have been either more conservative or roughly the same in ideology as men.
Neither women nor groups of women are inevitably Woke. And the vast majority of the purveyors of Critical theory have been male.
Young women have much higher levels of Neuroticism and Agreeableness, so in our social media world are especially susceptible to Woke ideology, but it is more about following the crowd. They are the victims, not the purveyors.
I also agree with you that Wokeness is the “logical” outcome of the equality thesis, but I think it important to differentiate between the equality thesis and Woke ideology. Claiming that John Locke and Civil War Republicans were Woke just trivializes the term. It is much like the current fashion of labeling thinkers as “Woke Right.”
"Locke didn’t seriously think through the moral implications of racial blank slatism, so he himself never became woke. But the ingredients of wokism were there in 1690."
OK, fair enough, but you also said “ Wokism in the United States reached its first crescendo in the 1860s.”
You also have a header entitled “ Wokism Is More than 100 Years Old.” And you discussed Locke within that section.
And if it is true that “ the ingredients of wokism were there in 1690” but no one was actually Woke at the time, perhaps then the ingredients were not actually there.
For the vast majority of history, women were economically & emotionally bound to their husbands and children by a variety of other laws and customs and by the non-existence of the pill and difficulties/risks of abortion. (Married women, to this day, still broadly vote in the same direction as their husbands.) We've never had a previous period of history where most women had the option of making independent decisions for their own benefit.
I'd actually make the argument that major political concessions to feminism greatly predate major political concessions to blank-slatism, and as such the great feminisation predates wokeness. (Looking at a tiny handful of liberal philosophers is overselling the point, I think- as I understand it Rousseau was never in favour of women's lib.)
I'm also not sure what practical difference this makes with respect to modern-day political activism or strategy? It's obvious that any program of persuasion is going to be far too slow to make progress and if the major institutions are purged of leftists then feminists will be numerically the most affected. If no-one is held accountable for poor decision-making, then poor decision-making will continue, and we can't put Locke in the brig.
>Over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries, wokesters made increasingly desperate attempts to fix the environment and bring about equality of outcome among groups.
Something else I realized recently; this exacerbates the problem. Of the environmental interventions we make that actually *can* make a difference—and there aren't many, but they exist, such as instilling literacy and numeracy—in raising general intelligence, they largely *exacerbate* inequalities of outcome. And given some of the positions these lunatics champion, such as the idea that "worship of the written word" is white supremacy, I honestly wonder if at least subconsciously, they activist contingent is aware that the prime legacy of their prior and predecessoral work has been the very increase of the gap they're fighting so hard against.
Yet another reason these people must be crushed and defeated rather than negotiated with. They're increasingly aware raising people up only works against their goals. Now, they're only interested in tearing down. They must no longer be allowed opportunity for such.
Nathan,
You've said many times that lots of people agree with you in private, but they still throw you under the bus in public. Does this not indicate that "changing their minds" isn't the problem. It's getting them to act with courage, a manly virtue.
---
A man hands out printouts on Red Square. He's then arrested. Once at the police station, the officers realize that his leaflets were empty. He says "Everyone knows what the problem is, so why bother writing it down?"
---
Feminization is a problem because women are less brave and less motivated by truth for truths sake. They also dislike objective risk/reward systems which give "skin in the game" that rewards more accurate worldviews. If you want to beat woke convincing people to make personal sacrifices to oppose it is a way bigger lift then convincing them of facts that already act on as facts in their personal lives 99% of the time.
Agreed.
Gee, wonder why older male academics might be attracted to a woke ideology that allows them to surround themselves with more young women while freezing out younger men? Maybe evolutionary psychology would shed some light on this? Just asking questions here!
This doesn't explain why it helps to surround themselves with non-white male academics. Besides, surrounding oneself with females doesn't guarantee any reproductive success if one is in the 70s. Unless one is Charlie Chaplin or Pablo Picasso.
It doesn't but it's not the older white men who are obsessed with skin color, it's the women they hired. First wave wokeness was feminism. And the 70 year old profs today weren't stuffing the academies with women last week, they were doing it decades ago.
Thank you for writing this. When I first heard of Helen Andrews' latest, I thought, "There's nothing new about this. Anthropologist Lionel Tiger wrote "The Decline of Males" in the year 2000.
But you pointed out the deeper layer, which is that what we call "woke" started out in "Yankeedom," as described by Colin Woodard in AMERICAN NATIONS.
This was a phenomenal write up. I think you nailed it when referencing the influence of Christianity on the desireability of the equality thesis. This is a significant factor that could be further investigated. Why do people want it to be true that all people are fundamentally equal? Where did this wish originate? It's extremely obvious that people are unequal in nature. People denie what they see with their naked eyes because they feel compelled to. The corruption and decline of Christianity may have something to do with the development of this extremely dedicated focus on creating a perfectly egalitarian world. I don't think that explains all of it though. The fact that communism has had such wide appeal all over the world seems to indicate equality has cross cultural appeal.
The egalitarian impulse actually goes back hundreds of thousands of years. I talk about it a little here in the section “From Commies to Neoliberals”: https://ncofnas.com/p/beating-woke-with-facts-and-logic Christopher Boehm has an excellent book with anthropological evidence called Hierarchy in the Forest.
I think Tom Holland explores this relationship between Christianity and woke in his book Dominion. He ultimately approves but seeks primarily to explain not argue
Excellent analysis. Many progressive left types are not stringent believers and wanters of equality / equity. Instead they just want to make the "better" choice that improves the world and their place in it. Thus the solution is not just disproving the equality thesis but more so providing better choices for people to make (and as is my puritian-wokish temperament: punishing and feeling superior to people making worse choices)
Andrew's intuition is imperfect, but practically, it's a step in the right direction. Defeminization of institutions would actually help. You cannot spread the uncomfortable truth of hereditarianism with female overrepresentation in those institutions. Baby steps back toward meritocracy, even if argued imperfectly, are good. And it would open the avenue for other kinds of de-diversification.
More generally, while I agree with much of your analysis, you have to be practical to effect change. Hereditarianism is true. And it's been losing hard for the last 80+ years. Why? Because its case hasn't even been given a proper hearing. To give it a proper hearing, you may first need to win politically and give it a platform. Elon Musk didn't first win the battle of ideas. He made a power move by buying Twitter, set it free, and thus did arguably more for spreading the truth of hereditarianism than anyone else in recent history. That's also why I don't get your quibbling with Rufo. Your approaches are obviously complementary.
Purging women from institutions will not lead to greater meritocracy. My guess is that it will only intensify the concerns over the proper gender/race representation in institutions.
Meritocracy in hiring/firing/promotion/training and competition between organizations for scarce resources alone works just fine.
Nor should we make decisions based on whether it forwards the idea of heridaritarianism.
Meritocracy in hiring is very difficult to implement, even for jobs where success is objective like programming. Source: I've built objective, merit-based hiring processes for tech firms and hired hundreds of people.
1. Obviously, woke people reject the premise. Because merit-based hiring leads to unequal outcomes, they assume the process cannot be meritocratic and constantly campaign against it / undermine it.
2. Measuring merit is itself a skill that requires practice to get good at, but most companies don't do enough hiring to give their staff enough practice. So hiring processes at most departments at most companies are shoddy and incompetent, e.g. interviewers run out of time, ask bad questions, or don't know what skills they actually need. This causes meritocracy to get a bad reputation because companies look like they're implementing it but do it badly. One consequence: the rare exceptions like early 2000s Google that are good at hiring yield lots of cargo-cult procedure cloning.
3. Because unskilled people stay in the candidate pool whilst the skilled get hired and stop applying, the moment you require even very basic job standards almost all candidates start failing. Hiring rates of 1-2% aren't uncommon in tech. This makes hiring a grueling task consuming large amounts of time and money, which people-oriented managers who have never done merit based hiring struggle to understand. Why can't you just make an offer, they ask? "We never needed this and it was fine" is a very common sentiment from people whose hiring processes were previously oriented around personal contacts and intuition.
4. The desire for fairness and consistency drives standardization, but that creates its own problems, e.g. recruiters may cheat and brief candidates on the questions they'll be asked.
5. Many jobs don't lend themselves to work sample creation in an office/interview room.
Have you ever been a hiring manager? It is not that difficult at all.
I disagree.
Western organizations have used something approximating meritocracy for generations. The difficulties you mention do not make an approximation of meritocracy very difficult at all.
The primary barrier is DEI policies in hiring, firing, promotion, and training.
1. Who talked about "purges", Michael? It's the other way around: greater meritocracy => end of the racist and sexist DEI regime => natural decline of women's representation. I agree concerns over proper gender/race representation in institutions should be discussed. Hereditarianism wins that discussion because truth wins that discussion. That's why that discussion was banned.
2. I agree. We should reinstate it. Unfortunately, meritocracy has been illegal in America for decades.
3. We should make decisions based on true models of the world. Hereditarianism is a true model.
I am not claiming that you believe in "purges," but I have seen many references to the necessity of doing so in the last few weeks.
Meritocracy is a far better and more achievable goal than zero women in organizations.
Musk spreads the truth of human biodiversity? I thought he was giving voice to Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes - who aren't exactly pro HBD types.
'Andrew's intuition is imperfect'
Doesn't an, 'In my opinion' belong there? Even Nathan doesn't claim to have proven her wrong.
I think you're right that the Great Feminization is not sufficient to explain the Great Awokening, but I think we would not have had the Great Awokening without it.
The seed of wokeness, extreme egalitarianism, doesn't explain why there was a flourishing specifically in the last ~20 years in the US. It doesn't explain why the Cancel Culture specific to that ~20 years came about. Also, a major facet of this Cancel Culture was that the red lines shifted so suddenly that normal opinions **on the Left** in say 2008 became cancelable in 2015.
Going back to Puritan Harvard just shows how much modern wokeness and cancel culture rhyme with the past and religious fervor, but this time being driven in no small part by secular feminization.
You compare female censoriousness on left and right, but do you ever mention it is the left that is overwhelmingly more dominated by women? Do you cover that women generally favor helping the disadvantaged more than men?
Whatever women are, it's not "conservative," unless you merely mean "risk averse." You might be right that femininity is not intrinsically woke, but also it seems pretty clear it was a significant, if contingent, factor in the Great Awokening.
I think this is basically the same case for the weaponization of the law. You're right it's not the seed, but it was a tool.
There are alternative explanations for why 2012:
https://penbroke.substack.com/p/wall-theory
In most European countries women are actually more conservative then the men. Women utilize cancel culture to preserve the conservative status quo.
Oh please. I spend every summer in Paris and this is flat out wrong.
With all due respect, this is a compleletly fucking stupid argument, akin to saying bolshevism did not exist as its own phenomena/ideology because it contained priors from Marx's work in the prior century.
The issue is the specific current use of the underlying metaphysics of liberalism.
Generally persuasive, although:
> Incidentally, this survey failed to replicate in a follow-up by the Knight Foundation and Ipsos in 2022
The 2024 survey went back to showing big gender differences in free speech attitudes. For example, there's a ten percentage point gender gap for the question "Should hate speech be legally protected". Although it's believable that "female students are more likely than male students to say that free speech rights are extremely important", all it takes to get that is for women to be more over-excitable on average - when you add extremely/very together in that year, there's no real difference.
More importantly, students and women might say free speech rights are important because they know that's the morally expected answer in America, but they're clearly just lying or confused. When asked to rank free speech against other priorities, their confusion is revealed. For example, a majority of college students both say that free speech rights are very/extremely important and also that hate speech isn't free speech.
Your thesis about the relative intelligence of left vs right is (as per usual) not well evidenced. In your twitter thread last year about witches and peasants, "George" said:
> The left has absolutely no problem with the most deranged beliefs of their stupidest members. They often encourage them.
and you replied
> Leftists wouldn't allow a Maoist or a Nation of Islam lunatic to be the editor of the New Yorker.
But 18 months later they voted a communist to be the Mayor of New York, so yes, they absolutely would do that. The question is why didn't you realize this would happen.
I think this kind of failed prediction happens because your theory isn't correct. It just doesn't properly predict what the woke do. If wokeness were really just taking the equality theory seriously then they would be equally concerned when the fortunes of straight white men fall behind other groups, but they never are. The woke never look at a C-suite or school consisting only of white women and say "oh my god, that's sexism". They never look at a sports team consisting primarily of black men and say, "oh my god, that's racism". Your theory says they would, but they don't.
No. Wokeness is much better predicted by a much simpler model: it's just unrestrained 10,000 BC era tribalism. To the woke, women+"minorities" are their tribe. "White" men + anyone who isn't on the left are another tribe. Everything beyond that is just them using fancy words to justify their tribal instincts.
The advantage of viewing them this way is that it's easy to make accurate predictions. Tribalism predicts that leftists cry sexism when there are lots of men around, because they view men as in the other tribe and want to pillage their stuff. Crying sexism is a war tactic. When those men are replaced by women and lose all their land, the left discard the tactic because the battle was won already. They never believed any of it, it's all just words on a battlefield to them. The Somali fraud, the way they attack ICE, all of it is predictable if you just treat them as if they were primitive tribe members on an African savannah a few millennia ago.
Two things:
Medieval witch hunts are almost entirely a myth. Most which huntings was in early modern period and even that wasn't very common. Witch hunts are actually a good example that passage of time doesn't guarantee progress.
I think social media was a huge factor in enhancing cancel culture. In 1700s rules were strict, but there was more discression. Adultery was a sin but in practice you could have a wife and a mistress as long as two women never meet. Social media destroyed discression and tore down walls between the public and private. Thus unrestricted cancel culture.
I enjoy Substack for long form articles on topics. But I also frequently come across analyses by writers who seemingly never come out into the real world. I'm in the Bay Area and the great feminization, or whatever you want to call it, is front and center lead by women IRL. And how can you ignore what's happening with universities and media? The NYT, New Yorker, current book releases, and have a morning listen to NPR?