Wokeness Is Real and a Significant Problem, Not Just Something That People With Too Much Time on Their Hands Are Concerned About

Sophisticated centrists who claim that wokeness is just overhyped internet bullshit are wrong

Introduction

“Too many people are sleeping on the issue of wokeness.”

My mother is a Democrat. She’s the type of Obama and Clinton loving Democrat who has never voted for a Republican, is above 50 and thus does not spend time on social media, gets her news from NPR, and has sort of mainstream, middle-of-the-road views on various political issues. She’s the type of Democrat who likes Biden and thinks that people who are concerned about wokeness and cancel culture generally have too much time on their hands—that it’s a problem mostly fabricated and sensationalized by right-wing media that is not a real issue. This is easier to think if one doesn’t spend much time on the internet reading heterodox blogs and is above 50.

I think that this is a common sentiment. People think that there are just some boisterous young people who have gone too far with political correctness, but nonetheless it’s not much of a problem.

I think this is dead wrong.

Wokeness, while not the biggest threat in the world by a long shot, is actually quite a significant problem, and is not overblown across the board. Of course, there are various people who do overrate the threat—James Lindsay, for example, is a man whose brain has been turned to mush to the point that he voted for Trump because he thought Biden would enable woke radical extremists¹. You can, of course, lose your mind complaining about the excesses of left-wing and woke insanity. There are certainly some people who overstate the extent of the problem, but I think it’s one of those problems sort of like political polarization that is hard to quantify, but that causes lots of significant harms. In this essay, I will explain why I think that. Wokeness is not merely a fictitious monster under the bed—it is a real issue that affects lots of people.

Let me begin by defining (or not quite defining, for reasons I’ll explain) wokeness. It is (roughly) an excessive focus on issues of race and gender, that often involves punitive measures in response to intransigence on issues of race and gender. For a more thorough definition, see here. It’s associated with far-left views generally, but not the Chomsky type of far-left views that are just non-interventionist and against capitalism—they’re focused on various identity categories to an excessive degree. This definition isn’t too precise, as is true of most words; thus, cheap gotchas that ask people to define specific words are not, in fact, decisive rebuttals (e.g. what is a woman). Philosophers long ago discovered that any complex word is quite difficult to define—philosophers can’t even agree on what knowledge is. The best way to clarify what a word means—to give people the general gist—is to give a series of examples. In this vein, I will give a lot of examples of things pushed by the woke.

1. DEI trainings.

2. Attempts to get people fired for mainstream political speech (E.g. David Shor.) There is a separate phenomenon of trying to get people fired for having left-wing views which is very bad too, but is not wokeness, given that wokeness is associated with the far left.

3. Pushing of very far-left policies such as abolishing the police in a not well-thought-through manner.

4. Claims that an increasingly diverse range of small misdemeanors are equivalent to violence.

5. Claims that America is a horrible institutionally racist country where black people rationally ought to live in constant fear of being killed by police.

This is, of course, a non-exhaustive list. The point is just to distill the general gestalt. If you don’t think this is what wokeness means, that’s fine. My claim is merely that the thing that I and many others mean by wokeness is a problem. Similarly, I do not care about how the term wokeness acquired its meaning. I care about the concept picked out by the current word and whether that is a problem.

Another relevant point: wokeness is a vague term and some use it to include various good things like legalization of gay marriage, treating transgender people well, and action on climate change. If you think wokeness includes these things, then I’m happy to grant there are various good things about wokeness—my claim is merely that it has very significant downsides that are worth discussing. It may very well have significant upsides too—depending on the definition.

Okay, now that we have that throat clearing out of the way, let’s describe why wokeness is such a problem.

DEI Trainings

Diversity, equity, and inclusion trainings, also known as DEI trainings (for some bizarre and inscrutable reason, Grammarly suggests changing this to DEI pieces of training?!) train people how to be more racially sensitive. They are supposed to combat racial bias as well as various other biases and to make people more inclusive. The global DEI industry is worth about 7.5 billion dollars, and it is projected to grow to significantly more, reaching over 17 billion dollars by 2027. The U.S. DEI industry is worth about 3.4 billion dollars.

This is a lot of money.

But more significant than that, just in terms of the cost, is the probably millions or billions of hours spent on DEI trainings—hours wasted that could be spent more productively. I couldn’t find good data on this, but if we guess conservatively that there are 340 million hours spent on DEI trainings—which would mean 10 dollars is spend for every hour employees spend on DEI trainings—and these people work the average number of hours and get the average pay, and assume that the amount they are contributing to the economy is equal to their pay (all conservative assumptions)—we get the result that each hour spend on DEI training takes about 30 dollars away from the economy, meaning the U.S. DEI industry costs about an extra 12 billion dollars away from the economy. Also, this wastes potentially 340 million hours of time! Anything that wastes 340 million hours of people’s time is very bad! And these are conservative estimates.

So we’re spending billions of dollars and lots of time on DEI trainings. But do they work? The short answer is probably not, and the longer answer is, on average, we should expect them to be harmful. As one thorough report notes

Nearly all Fortune 500 companies do training, and two-thirds of colleges and universities have training for faculty according to our 2016 survey of 670 schools. Most also put freshmen through some sort of diversity session as part of orientation. Yet hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace

I think I had to do a DEI training at the start of the year. It wasn’t a huge deal, but it was a bit annoying. I can’t remember in any detail though, because I was paying no attention to it as I did other things, as I did with the other mandatory trainings about, for example, asking for consent before having sex and not using drugs excessively. As one can no doubt tell, these did not leave a significant mark on me, nor did they make me a more sensitive and tolerant individual.

There are plausible mechanistic accounts of why DEI trainings fail and are counterproductive—and these accounts indict wokeness more broadly which teaches us to hyper-fixate on race and equity. It turns out (shocker!) that hyper-fixating on race makes people more racist.

Imagine that there were extensive DEI trainings about not mistreating left-handed people. Every time a person interacted with a left-handed person, they’d be more likely to think about them being left-handed—hyper-worried that they’d do something offensive. This would make them more likely to be stiff and mechanical with left-handed people—less likely to see them as people and more likely to see them as potential DEI investigations. This would cause there to be way more prejudice around left-handed people.

In a similar way, hyper-fixation on race causes people to be more aware of race and more likely to be racist. This explains the otherwise puzzling phenomena of white liberals talking down to black people, while white conservatives don’t do that.

And the data bears out that excessive focus on race makes people more racist. As Scott Alexander says

Fighting Stereotypes Makes People More Prejudiced

The largest-ever study on diversity training, following 830 large companies over 31 years, found:

A comprehensive review of 31 years of data from 830 mid-size to large U.S. workplaces found that the kind of diversity training exercises offered at most firms were followed by a 7.5 percent drop in the number of women in management. The number of black, female managers fell by 10 percent, and the number of black men in top positions fell by 12 percent. Similar effects were seen for Latinos and Asians.

Similarly, all studies on sensitivity training find that trainees express more awareness of sexual harassment than non-employees, but a study that went further and examined results found that trainees are “less likely to perceive coercive sexual harassment, less willing to report sexual harassment, and more likely to blame the victim”.

This is not particularly unexpected: we know for example that nearly every study on DARE programs has found that they increase drug use, sometimes as much as 30%.

Why should this be? Three reasons come to mind. The first is a boomerang effect from the programs themselves. Diversity training, sensitivity training, and DARE are all things busy people are required to attend where they (essentially) are forced listen to people behave condescendingly to them. This makes them dislike the training, their instructors, and, by association, the opinions they are trying to get trained into them.

A second reason is more fundamental. The backfire effect is when people challenged with information that disproves a cherished political belief of theirs react by becoming even more certain of the belief. The link will fill you in on potential explanations.

And the third reason is what the Harvard Business Review Blog, in its discussion of the diversity training study above, described as “when people divide into categories to illustrate the idea of diversity, it reinforces the idea of the categories.”

I’ll admit I had a sheltered upbringing and may be atypical, but I would estimate about 90% of the racist stereotypes I have ever heard were part of efforts to fight racism. No one just comes up to you and says “Hey, you know black people? Pretty unintelligent, huh?” (at least not to me). But social justice people will repeat the stereotype about black people not being intelligent again, and again, and again, to anyone who is anywhere near them, in the guise of fighting it.

I can’t find the link for this, but negatively phrased information can sometimes reinforce the positive version of that information. For example, if you tell people “President Obama is not a Muslim”, then a year later, all someone will remember is “blah Obama blah blah blah Muslim”, and eventually “Ohmigod, President Obama is a Muslim!”, even if they didn’t believe that before they heard that fact “corrected”.

Imagine I told you “People from Comoros are not all homosexual! This is a damn lie, and anyone who says people from Comoros are homosexual is an insensitive jerk. Please join me in fighting the popular perception that everyone from Comoros is a flaming gay.

Go ahead, try to think of Comoros in any context other than an archipelago full of gay people now. I’ll wait. Take a whole lifetime, if you want. It won’t help. Ten years after this blog is deleted and this post is inaccessible except through archive.org, there will still be a couple dozen people who are convinced that everyone from Comoros is gay, because they “heard it somewhere”. At the very least, the idea of Comoros = homosexuality is now firmly implanted in your mind, and it will be impossible to meet a Comorosian without secretly evaluating her sexual orientation and then trying to stop yourself from doing it.

Now imagine instead of hearing this once, you heard it every day of your life.

If you think racism is a super significant problem, then you should be concerned about wokeness resulting in a hyper fixation on race. Wokeness does this broadly, not just through DEI trainings. Thus, wokeness seems to be the cause of lots of racial animus, which is bad! When a problem is the cause of a significant amount of racial animus, it’s high time we treat it as significant, even if the defenders of it screech shrilly that they’re just defending anti-racism.

As the economist notes, even as racism declines, we’ve become more divided on racism. More racial animus makes people more prejudiced and decreases the speed of progress on racism. If we want to, in 100 years, see race the way we currently see eye color—a totally irrelevant characteristic that people used to use to divide people sometimes—the way to do this is not to shout from the rooftops about race; it’s to focus on it as little as possible. Obviously racism should be addressed, but beyond that, we should try to move towards a maximally color-blind society. But weirdly, when people propose not fixating on race, wokesters write a billion articles about why colorblindness is bad.

One other pernicious element of a lot of these DEI trainings is that they very often involve claiming that lots of people have implicit bias. But it turns out that saying everyone is a bit racist makes people more racist. As Alexander once again notes

Calling People Racist Makes Them More Racist

Foster & Misra (2013) is a jewel of a paper I stumbled across totally by chance.

They got a bunch of undergraduate students in romantic relationships and gave them a test that asked them some questions about infidelity – things like “is it unfaithful to fantasize about another girl/boy when you’re in a relationship?”. They pretended to grade the test, but in fact they ignored the test and gave fake feedback.

The control group was told that they had some of the highest faithfulness scores of anyone in the experiment, they must be really faithful, good job. The experimental group was told they had some of the lowest faithfulness scores of anyone in the experiment and that the test had pegged them as having an unfaithful personality type. Once again, all this feedback was fake and both groups got around the same average score.

Then they measured what they called “trivialization” in both groups – that is, they asked them questions about how important faithfulness was to them. Consistent with their theory, the people who were told they were faithful said faithfulness was extremely important, but the people who were told they were unfaithful “trivialized” the behavior – who cares about fidelity anyway, infidelity is maybe a minor mistake but it doesn’t really hurt anyone, people should really stop whining about infidelity all the time. To give you a feeling for the size of this effect, on a scale of one to seven, the faithful group rated the importance of being faithful at 5.4/7, and the unfaithful group rate the importance of being faithful at 2.9/7. In other words, by accusing them of being unfaithful, the experimenters had successfully gotten the participants to “trivialize” faithfulness.

The researchers theorized that this was the process called “cognitive dissonance”. Most people like themselves and want to continue to like themselves. If they are told that they, or their group, has a particular flaw, then instead of ceasing to like themselves it may be easier to just decide that flaw is not a big deal and they can have it while continuing to be the awesome people they secretly know they are.

Now not only do the experimental subjects here stop caring about being faithful, but everyone pushing a pro-fidelity line is a threat to their new identity. And the subjects weren’t even really unfaithful to begin with!

Modern political discourse tends to do a lot of things like say “All white people are racist” or all men are naturally prone to violence and potential rapists. Or it may take little things normal people do and tell them they are racist or creepy or rape-y or something because of it.

What this does is drive people into identifying with these negative labels. And instead of making them want to change their behavior to stop identifying with these labels, it may just make them think “Well, if I do it, then I guess it can’t be so bad.”

So wokeness is responsible for countless hours being wasted on DEI trainings and billions of dollars lost—though plausibly orders of magnitude more. It also makes people more racist and hinders the fight for racial equality. Now, of course, you can say that we should tell people that everyone’s a bit racist, even if that’s counterproductive. But this is idiotic. Even if you know that telling kids that they’re bad at reading and if they were an adult everyone would think they were a total immature idiot is true, you shouldn’t tell them that. This isn’t an example of covering up harmful truths—it’s an example of not forcing everyone to endure boring meetings where you shout from the rooftop something that is technically true but only so because you and your buddies have redefined words so that a statement that sounds obviously wrong ends up being technically true, assuming we trust the deeply dubious result of implicit bias tests.

Making people sad

People are sad when they think things are bad. They are happy when they think things are good. This is not always true—there might be cases where people think the world is good but they’re still miserable, but it’s a decent predictor. As Jill Filipovic writes

I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or event violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. That isn’t to say that people who experience victimization or trauma should just muscle through it, or that any individual can bootstraps their way into wellbeing. It is to say, though, that in some circumstances, it is a choice to process feelings of discomfort or even offense through the language of deep emotional, spiritual, or even physical wound, and choosing to do so may make you worse off. Leaning into the language of “harm” creates and reinforces feelings of harm, and while using that language may give a person some short-term power in progressive spaces, it’s pretty bad for most people’s long-term ability to regulate their emotions, to manage inevitable adversity, and to navigate a complicated world.

Jonathan Haidt has a long article arguing that this is the cause of a significant part of the rising rates of depression among particularly teen girls. Focus on the problems of the world as unchangeable things to be worried about demonstrably makes people far more miserable. That’s why cognitive behavioral therapy advises people to take exactly the opposite approach.

Wokeness results in a very significant fixation on small features of interactions—for example, excessive fixation on microaggressions. But we know from psychology that, if you want people to not be miserable, focusing on the minute ways in which they are supposedly harmed by various innocuous social interactions is a bad way of doing that. It may sometimes be a bit hurtful for people to ask where one is from when they have an accent, but far worse is the phenomena of people walking on eggshells whenever they talk to a black person because they’re petrified that they’ll commit a microaggression. So it’s plausible that wokeness is responsible for making people feel like they’re constantly the victims of various forms of grievous harm (for a relatively unserious but particularly hilarious example, see this twitter thread in which lots of white people described being horrifically traumatized by a book review of a children’s book). And not only do some people feel like they’re harmed all the time, others are constantly worried that they’re being harmful.

As David Brooks notes, wokeness encourages people to take problems seriously. Downplaying a problem is a serious offense, but overselling the extent of it is seen as perfectly unobjectionable.

But wokeness jams together the perceiving and the proposing. In fact, wokeness puts more emphasis on how you perceive a situation — how woke you are to what is wrong — than what exactly you plan to do about it. To be woke is to understand the full injustice.

Wokeness is literally about being woken up to the injustice of the world. But this is a bad thing—learning about every bad thing that happens the world over, often portrayed as frequent by the media despite it being rare in reality, makes people more miserable. I think it’s plausible that this is responsible for a small but non-trivial percentage of the rise in depression rates among teens. But this is alarmingly serious. Even if it only causes 1% of teens to be seriously depressed, holy f&#k, that’s a lot of teens being seriously depressed. Generally, if an issue causes 1% of teens to be seriously depressed, it is seen as serious—and that seems like a dramatic underestimate. For one alarming statistic, Pinker notes

A quarter of [Australian] children are so troubled about the state of the world that they honestly believe it will come to an end before they get older." According to recent polls, so do 15 per cent of people worldwide, and between a quarter and a third of Americans.

It isn’t hard to guess that thinking that the world will end before you get older would put a damper on your happiness. I remember thinking this in 9th grade, and it made me much less happy—I was just sort of existentially gloomy about the fate of the world. Most Americans think things are going in the wrong direction—and this isn’t surprising. When it’s seen as a sin to not be hyper-aware of all the world’s ills, you get people just being generally sad about the world’s ills.

It seems like the primary cause of the increase in depression among teens is social media. But this doesn’t explain the mechanism. Sure, it’s certainly partially body dysmorphia. But some of it is no doubt the constant spreading of depressing and terrifying information on social media that makes the world resemble a mad max film. So I think it’s very plausible that by trying to wake people up to the problems of the world, you just make people miserable. And you get more of these problems.

By waking people up to the problems of mass shootings, you get more mass shootings. The reason anorexia is a problem today is that people were woken up to the problem of anorexia. It sounds good to say that people should be woken up to injustice, but it rarely ends up being anything other than an unmitigated disaster.

Cancellations

The phenomena of wokeness is responsible for much of cancel culture. People face personal and professional consequences as a result of holding controversial—or even not-so-controversial—views. For example, David Shor, a far-left political activist, got canned for retweeting a study finding that police protests hurt left-wing politicians. Apparently, tweeting about the results of a study is a fireable offense. There are tons of examples of high-profile cancellations, wherein ordinary people have lost their jobs for dumb reasons.

As DeBoer notes (read the full article—it’s all around excellent).

This prohibition against criticism is enforced with the same instrument that the members of this community use to enforce everything: absolute social destruction. There is no probation in the eyes of the social justice world. The only penalty is the death penalty, the attempt to commit permanent character assassination. I suppose that some will call this claim inflammatory, but it seems to me to be far easier to find examples of people being forever shunned in the social justice world than to find examples of people who were gently educated and allowed to perform penance. This brutality is self-replicating: the executioners know that they could become the condemned with the slightest slipup. The most reliable way to prevent that is to be the most aggressive prosecutor you can. So the cycle actively rewards a never-ending escalation of vindictive punishment. This makes the social justice world, it’s fair to say, a somewhat unpleasant space.

This isn’t a totally made-up worry. As Cato notes, “50% of Strong Liberals Support Firing Trump Donors.” (Note, this is not to excuse right-wing attempts to fire people—the percentage of people who want to fire their political opponents is higher for Democrats than Republicans but alarmingly high in both cases). Cato also notes that about a third of Americans fear being fired for their political views. When you have high-profile cases of something happening and a third of people fear it happening to them personally, it is hard to call it a totally fictitious risk. Haidt and Lukianoff note

FIRE found that between 2015 and 2020, the annual number of incidents in which professors and other scholars were targeted for ideological reasons has increased from 28 to 120. Furthermore, the annual number of petitions against scholars has increased from five in 2015 to 84 in 2020. These disturbing trends are driven largely by undergraduates, who initiated half of the documented incidents since 2015, and almost two thirds of the incidents in 2020. These examples include 251 tenured professors who were targeted and more than a dozen tenured professors who were fired, a result that was unimaginable even 10 years ago when tenure was thought to be nearly perfect employment protection.  

A large number of cases now follow a pattern that was uncommon just a few years earlier: a group of people outright trying to get someone fired, expelled, or otherwise punished for their views. Some describe this practice as “cancel culture”; others dismiss that term and prefer “consequences culture” or “accountability culture.” Whatever you want to call it, attempts to punish, ostracize, fire, or otherwise “cancel” people in response to an alleged verbal or visual offense greatly increased in the summer of 2020. 

Now you might think “that can’t be a big deal—it only affects about 120 people.” But imagine one raised the same point about police shooting². In 2022 about 225 black people were shot by police. But this doesn’t refute the importance of police shootings. Because police shootings signal something important. For every specific example of a police shooting, there are 1,000 examples of police abusing people without shooting them or searching them unjustly or harassing them. In a similar way, for every professor who was targeted by the mob, there were 1,000 professors who had to walk on eggshells in classes or issue self-flagellating apologies for no good reason or didn’t publish an otherwise great paper because of fear of backlash. When about one in three people are terrified of being fired, you get a whole lot of self-censorship. I frequently say things behind closed doors that I would never say in public (though I would write it here for you, dear readers).

I’m willing to write inflammatory things and say what I think. And this has lost me several friends, even good ones. Now, I’ve probably been more affected by this than nearly everyone given that I decided to write an incendiary blog article criticizing an entire unhinged community, but nonetheless, it’s negatively affected several people I know. I know one person who had his life enormously detrimentally affected by a false allegation that he had violent and sexual fantasies.

We know this problem is especially prominent on college campuses. As Haidt and Lukianoff note

FIRE also completed the largest survey of student attitudes about freedom of speech on 160 campuses, involving over 37,000 students. They found that over four in five students (83%) report self-censoring their viewpoints at their colleges at least some of the time, with just over one in five (21%) saying they censor themselves often. 

83% self-censor. That’s a truly remarkable number. When the overwhelming majority of people are self-censoring for fear of backlash, cancel culture and wokeness has gone too far.

And you also just get vindictive assholes attacking people on social media for the fun of it and pretending that they’re championing some social justice cause. When I wrote my article criticizing the debate community, lots of people took to social media to make fun of the way that I look. Now I don’t care much, I am not self-conscious about my body. But imagine if I had been. If you’re worried that you’re ugly and hideous, and then you have many people telling you that you look ugly and hideous, it won’t be good for your confidence. If you tell yourself that your fears are just figments of your imagination, then when lots of people start telling you exactly what you’re self-conscious about, that will be terrible for your self-confidence. And this no-doubt affects people who are mentally ill way more than bombastic writers of substacks defending utilitarianism.

Scott gives a list of various consequences of this

• The level of social-justice-inspired bullying online and offline that can drive people to suicide for even slightly disagreeing with social justice orthodoxy.

• The chilling effect on research when science is subordinated to political ideology, and how researchers whose results contradict social justice orthodoxy can expect to be ignored at best and subject to death threats and harassment campaigns at worst.

• The trivialization of and hostile response to anybody who claims to be suffering in a way that doesn’t fit the social-justice narrative, and opposition to attempts to alleviate such suffering.

• The use of social justice as a bludgeon by which sophisticated elites from top colleges can condemn all subcultures except their sophisticated elite subculture as being problematic, and credibly demand that they subordinate themselves to the sophisticated elites as penance.

• The conflation of the vitally important will toward political reform with the most trivial pop culture clickbait, so that instead of worrying about inequality and technological stagnation our brightest minds are discussing whether the latest Game of Thrones episode reinforces structural oppression, or if people’s Halloween costumes are okay or not.

Conclusion

This is just the tip of the iceberg (Hanania lists some more harms in this fascinating article). But this is enough to show just how pernicious and pervasive the problem is. It’s absurd that so many commentators dismiss this as a conservative illusion when it’s plausibly making millions of people depressed and hundreds of millions of people self-censor and fear professional backlash. Think about the horrific and slanderous allegations against people like Singer and ask yourself—do you really think that has no deleterious effect on academic expression?

It’s time for it to stop. It’s time for serious and sophisticated people to stop denying this is an issue. It’s not the biggest issue in the world, but it’s not the smallest issue either. It’s certainly a bigger issue than lots of other things that people spend their time talking about. When people have killed themselves based on twitter mobbing and it’s a non-trivial cause of gratuitous misery, it’s time for us to take it seriously.

The position that wokeness isn’t something to worry about isn’t the position of a sophisticated and even-handed political analyst who knows how to put everything into perspective. It’s the position of an overly political hack, whose partisan blinders make them totally ignore a problem that’s making us divided, polarized, miserable, and more racially prejudiced. And yet despite this, these faux experts look down on us unsophisticated dilettantes as if we’re the ones who don’t have things in perspective.

Let me be clear. I am a liberal. I’ve been a liberal for several years. If anything, my bias is to blame things on conservatives and ignore the harms of liberal and woke insanity. But sometimes, you just have to recognize that the things being done by what is ostensibly your side are insane, and it is not wise or sophisticated to deny this obvious fact.

(If you enjoyed this article, send it to your friends and like it so that more people can read it).

1. I once started writing an article about Lindsay, but it unfortunately required ingesting an unhealthy amount of James Lindsay, so I stopped immediately.

2. Note for stupid people—I am obviously not saying these two cases are exactly the same, merely that both illustrate that the mere fact that some incident only happens infrequently doesn’t mean it can’t signal a more insidious trend.