Masculinity is defined as "a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with men and boys". As I said before, Wikipedia's editor demographics are ~85-90% male. By the definition of "masculine", editing Wikipedia is a masculine activity.
Most male Wikipedia editors also don't consider themselves to be feminine. There are transwomen editors, but they don't make up more than a few percentage points of the editor demographics.
Anyway, no, I am not kidding from what I have seen. I've seen many effeminate and queer editors, but it would be a huge mistake to characterize all or most of them that way. We're talking about a group of at least few dozen thousand people, although some have obviously contributed more than others. It depends on who you're talking about and on what topics. For example, I certainly wouldn't expect editors who prefer to edit articles about geography or literature to display the same characteristics as editors who mainly edit about STEM subjects.
You can read my user page to get a sense of who I am: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Zero_Contradictions. I definitely don't consider myself to be "feminine". As a matter of fact, I'm going to go lift some weights right now.
Going to the gym has nothing to do with masculinity. We have tracing woodgrains providing indepth analysis on the type of people holding influence in wikipedia and its very obviously effeminate men who are almost entirely of the leftist social constructionists persuasion. Most are like this.
That's ludicrous. Weight lifting is absolutely a masculine activity, rather than a feminine one.
Do you care to link what you're talking about? I've already read his post on David Gerard. If that's what you're referencing, then he's certainly not representative of all Wikipedians. Gerard is also not a Wikipedia admin anymore, as he gave up adminship some months ago. Gerard is more representative of the kind of people that you'd find on RatWiki, who are definitely more effeminate than Wikipedia.
You also still didn't identify which documentary you're talking about.
And unless you have good *data* to support what you're claiming, my observational insights are better than yours since I'm actually part of the Wikipedia community and have seen far more of it than you'll probably ever will. My edit count and contributions dwarfs anything that TracingWoodgrains has done on Wikipedia. It also seems that you basically believe left-leaning = feminine.
Here are two if you’re interested. These aren’t hard to find, so if you “can’t think of one,” it’s probably because you’ve never bothered to check your priors.
The ADL IS an unreliable source. And no sorry I don't trust a Jewish academic in Canada in the Journal of Holocaust Research (lol) to tell us what is or isn't the authoritative version of history. Can't tell if you're extremely naive or part of the problem. But if you consider doubting the ADL's credibility "hostile to Jews," I guess yeah okay. But I would note that that's been true since about 2020, and no earlier. I will point out that Cofnas himself has consistently mocked the ADL’s credibility.
Just preposterous to imagine that “a dedicated group of Polish influencers” (lol) have more impact on Wikipedia than oh I don’t know Unit 8200. But I’m sure that’s “just propaganda” for you. Hasbara initiatives themselves — all just Western goy propaganda. Read about the covert editing group called CAMERA too. But again: fake, I’m sure.
It really depends on the editor. I don't disagree that there are way too many editors who contribute to the strong leftist bias on the site.
However, perpetuating leftist bias is far from the only thing that Wikipedia editors do. Although political and ideological content are among the most read content on the site, they only encompass a fraction of all the site's content. Most of us edit Wikipedia because we want to spread knowledge and we enjoy it.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
Egalitarianism was not the problem. It was the lack of it. You cannot claim colorblindness is dangerous while also claiming egalitarianism.
It seems to me, from reading this post, that egalitarianism was fundamentally misunderstood by a lot of people. It only ever meant that two different humans have the same worth before God -- regardless of any other traits.
Here is the theological basis for Egalitarianism
> Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christianity more broadly, teach a fundamentally egalitarian moral framework: that all people are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). God does not show favoritism (Romans 2:11). Indeed, Jesus broke social norms to speak with women and sinners (John 4:27). Likewise, Peter and Paul describe Christians as a distinct people, transcending ethnic and national divisions (1 Peter 2:9; Galatians 3:28). Christianity is therefore fundamentally egalitarian even where theological traditions debate roles or complementarity.
As such, it seems that egalitarianism was misunderstood when it was removed from its narrative framework.
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.
Andrews noted that journalists, medical schools, college instructors, and the college educated workforce all became majority female by 2023. She also noted that law schools and managers are in danger of becoming majority female in the near future as well.
But why didn't Andrews mention that K-12 have been majority female in America ever since the late 1800s? In 1900, ~70% of American teachers were women. In 2020, ~77% of American K-12 teachers were women.
According to Andrews, the female majority of institutions is theorized to be important for spreading wokism. Teachers obviously play a strong important role in shaping what children tend to believe in when they become adult adults. So why didn't America reach peak wokeness decades earlier in the mid-to-late 1900s, when K-12 teachers have always been majority female ever since the late 1800s?
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
I actually haven't read Helen Andrew's essay yet, although it has been on my reading list for a while. Regardless, I independently came to most of the same conclusions as you did, so I naturally agree with everything that you wrote here. Women were/are not responsible for wokism any more than men were/are. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/wokism#women-and-wokism
There's at least one detail that this post left out. Until the 1980s, the average woman was actually less woke than the average man in the West. I talk about this in the link above. I think it's pretty difficult for anyone to construe women as being the main cause of Great Awokening upon recognizing this.
I also appreciate the information that you included about cancel culture. I'm still busy writing my analysis of cancel culture (https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/activism#cancel-culture). One of the basic theses of my analysis is that cancel culture is simply a consequence of freedom of association. Eventually, I hope to edit Wikipedia's page on cancel culture to include a section that cites other authors who came to the same conclusion.
I don't know why I wasn't subscribed to you before this post, but I am now.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Paris is overwhelmingly left wing. But are the men more conservative? My point is that compared to men the women generally are less radical/communist/anarchist. At least this is true in Italy.
Another thing: Wikipedia's editors are ~85-90% male, and yet Wikipedia is heavily left-wing, even before the Great Awokening happened.
Clearly, a "Great Feminization" could never explain why Wikipedia is as woke as it is.
You can be a feminine man.
Masculinity is defined as "a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with men and boys". As I said before, Wikipedia's editor demographics are ~85-90% male. By the definition of "masculine", editing Wikipedia is a masculine activity.
Most male Wikipedia editors also don't consider themselves to be feminine. There are transwomen editors, but they don't make up more than a few percentage points of the editor demographics.
Are you kidding have you seen the documentary about these people. They are by every definition effeminate.
What documentary are you talking about? There's multiple documentaries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_Wikipedia.
Anyway, no, I am not kidding from what I have seen. I've seen many effeminate and queer editors, but it would be a huge mistake to characterize all or most of them that way. We're talking about a group of at least few dozen thousand people, although some have obviously contributed more than others. It depends on who you're talking about and on what topics. For example, I certainly wouldn't expect editors who prefer to edit articles about geography or literature to display the same characteristics as editors who mainly edit about STEM subjects.
You can read my user page to get a sense of who I am: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Zero_Contradictions. I definitely don't consider myself to be "feminine". As a matter of fact, I'm going to go lift some weights right now.
Going to the gym has nothing to do with masculinity. We have tracing woodgrains providing indepth analysis on the type of people holding influence in wikipedia and its very obviously effeminate men who are almost entirely of the leftist social constructionists persuasion. Most are like this.
That's ludicrous. Weight lifting is absolutely a masculine activity, rather than a feminine one.
Do you care to link what you're talking about? I've already read his post on David Gerard. If that's what you're referencing, then he's certainly not representative of all Wikipedians. Gerard is also not a Wikipedia admin anymore, as he gave up adminship some months ago. Gerard is more representative of the kind of people that you'd find on RatWiki, who are definitely more effeminate than Wikipedia.
You also still didn't identify which documentary you're talking about.
And unless you have good *data* to support what you're claiming, my observational insights are better than yours since I'm actually part of the Wikipedia community and have seen far more of it than you'll probably ever will. My edit count and contributions dwarfs anything that TracingWoodgrains has done on Wikipedia. It also seems that you basically believe left-leaning = feminine.
Because they’re 60-80% Jewish
Wikipedia is notoriously hostile to Jews lmao.
Insane perspective - can’t even think of one single examine of hostility towards Jews on Wikipedia.
Here are two if you’re interested. These aren’t hard to find, so if you “can’t think of one,” it’s probably because you’ve never bothered to check your priors.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/19/media/wikipedia-adl
https://news.chapman.edu/2023/02/09/research-reveals-wikipedias-intentional-distortion-of-the-history-of-the-holocaust/
The ADL IS an unreliable source. And no sorry I don't trust a Jewish academic in Canada in the Journal of Holocaust Research (lol) to tell us what is or isn't the authoritative version of history. Can't tell if you're extremely naive or part of the problem. But if you consider doubting the ADL's credibility "hostile to Jews," I guess yeah okay. But I would note that that's been true since about 2020, and no earlier. I will point out that Cofnas himself has consistently mocked the ADL’s credibility.
Just preposterous to imagine that “a dedicated group of Polish influencers” (lol) have more impact on Wikipedia than oh I don’t know Unit 8200. But I’m sure that’s “just propaganda” for you. Hasbara initiatives themselves — all just Western goy propaganda. Read about the covert editing group called CAMERA too. But again: fake, I’m sure.
Glad you agree with me that Wikipedia is hostile to Jews, you just think it’s justified.
Have a nice day.
Wikipedia editors are a tiny subset of men who are compulsive about enforcing leftist dogma. They are extremely low testosterone bitchy little men.
It really depends on the editor. I don't disagree that there are way too many editors who contribute to the strong leftist bias on the site.
However, perpetuating leftist bias is far from the only thing that Wikipedia editors do. Although political and ideological content are among the most read content on the site, they only encompass a fraction of all the site's content. Most of us edit Wikipedia because we want to spread knowledge and we enjoy it.
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
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.
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.
I thought about this recently. There are a lot of benefits to expressing heresy. However, it seems that the main problem for most heretical people is that the consequences of facing defamation for expressing heresy are too great. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/activism#defamation-vs-owning-heresy
Agreed.
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.
Egalitarianism was not the problem. It was the lack of it. You cannot claim colorblindness is dangerous while also claiming egalitarianism.
It seems to me, from reading this post, that egalitarianism was fundamentally misunderstood by a lot of people. It only ever meant that two different humans have the same worth before God -- regardless of any other traits.
Here is the theological basis for Egalitarianism
> Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christianity more broadly, teach a fundamentally egalitarian moral framework: that all people are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). God does not show favoritism (Romans 2:11). Indeed, Jesus broke social norms to speak with women and sinners (John 4:27). Likewise, Peter and Paul describe Christians as a distinct people, transcending ethnic and national divisions (1 Peter 2:9; Galatians 3:28). Christianity is therefore fundamentally egalitarian even where theological traditions debate roles or complementarity.
As such, it seems that egalitarianism was misunderstood when it was removed from its narrative framework.
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.
Women are not the victims of intersectional feminism -- unless you're willing to admit that they were also the purveyors.
Wokeness has nothing to do with egalitarianism, and everything to do with intersectionality which asserts a hierarchy.
>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.
Andrews noted that journalists, medical schools, college instructors, and the college educated workforce all became majority female by 2023. She also noted that law schools and managers are in danger of becoming majority female in the near future as well.
But why didn't Andrews mention that K-12 have been majority female in America ever since the late 1800s? In 1900, ~70% of American teachers were women. In 2020, ~77% of American K-12 teachers were women.
According to Andrews, the female majority of institutions is theorized to be important for spreading wokism. Teachers obviously play a strong important role in shaping what children tend to believe in when they become adult adults. So why didn't America reach peak wokeness decades earlier in the mid-to-late 1900s, when K-12 teachers have always been majority female ever since the late 1800s?
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
I actually haven't read Helen Andrew's essay yet, although it has been on my reading list for a while. Regardless, I independently came to most of the same conclusions as you did, so I naturally agree with everything that you wrote here. Women were/are not responsible for wokism any more than men were/are. https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/wokism#women-and-wokism
There's at least one detail that this post left out. Until the 1980s, the average woman was actually less woke than the average man in the West. I talk about this in the link above. I think it's pretty difficult for anyone to construe women as being the main cause of Great Awokening upon recognizing this.
I also appreciate the information that you included about cancel culture. I'm still busy writing my analysis of cancel culture (https://zerocontradictions.net/civilization/activism#cancel-culture). One of the basic theses of my analysis is that cancel culture is simply a consequence of freedom of association. Eventually, I hope to edit Wikipedia's page on cancel culture to include a section that cites other authors who came to the same conclusion.
I don't know why I wasn't subscribed to you before this post, but I am now.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Paris is overwhelmingly left wing. But are the men more conservative? My point is that compared to men the women generally are less radical/communist/anarchist. At least this is true in Italy.