A Rational Analysis of Wokism

In most of the article, Cofnas uses the word “liberal” to refer to leftists, which is common in American usage for referring to social liberals or modern liberals. However, “Liberalism” is usually and traditionally associated with a collection of “political and moral philosophies based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law”. I’ve heard that the American usage of “liberal” is uncommon outside the United States, so I prefer to use the word “leftist” as the general term for referring to left-wing political ideologies.

When we understand what wokism is, it will be obvious why it is such a powerful attractor for smart people—at least when the other option is mainstream conservatism.

Wokism is what comes from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of Christian morality. If you assume that all human populations have literally the same distribution of innate ability, it follows that all group differences in outcome must be the result of environmental factors. Suppose you truly believe that African Americans and Chinese Americans would on average be equally good at math and equally likely to run afoul of the law if only they were treated the same. With the right intervention, Nigeria could become like Korea, and our inner cities could be transformed into Silicon Valleys—or at least Koreatowns. The persistence of race differences in income, IQ, education, health, crime rates, etc., almost all disfavoring blacks, triggers an increasingly hysterical effort to find and correct the environmental cause.

Cofnas is essentially correct in how he describes and refers to Wokism throughout his essay. However, I would recommend reading What is Wokism? by Blithering Genius. It is the most clear and descriptive definition of Wokism that I have ever seen.

Smart people are disproportionately attracted to wokism in large part because it offers a more intellectually coherent explanation for the major issue of our time, which is the persistence of racial disparities.

I strongly agree with Cofnas that intellectuals tend to be more leftist. I appreciate that Cofnas did a great job on gathering evidence that leftists tend to be smarter than right-wingers in the first section, Liberals Are Smarter: The Evidence.

Noah Carl already responded to Cofnas that most cognitive elites are better described as “Liberal”, so I won’t touch upon that. However, I will say that “Humanist” is an even better descriptor than “Liberal” because “Liberal” has a more ambiguous meaning.⁴ Wokism and Humanism have a lot of overlap with each other, so we can forgive Cofnas if he confused the two.

Nevertheless, Cofnas correctly identified that white leftists are more intelligent than white rightists. Since the conservative environmental explanation for racial disparities is more reasonable than the wokist environmental explanation, we still need to explain why intelligent whites are more likely to be woke or humanist, rather than right-wing. There are at least five better explanations that I can think of:

1. Humanism and Wokism vs Christianity and Conservatism.
2. The intellectuals don’t want to be associated with whomever the racists support.
3. Why Humanists Support Mass Immigration.
4. Altruism, Hedonism, and Gay Marriage.
5. Social Feedback Loops.

I will elaborate on each of these in the next five subsections and my personal experiences.

The next section of Cofnas’s essay is: The True Origin of Wokism.

The central tenet of wokism, namely, psychological equality, was first expressed by the English philosopher John Locke in 1690. Locke—the father of both blank slatism and political liberalism—declared that the human mind begins as “white paper, void of all characters”.

…

In other words, race differences are environmental. In 1758, Claude-Adrien Helvétius, who was arguably more influential than Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the decades preceding the Revolution in France, developed a radically egalitarian political philosophy based on Lockean psychology. Another English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, may have been the first liberal in a semi-contemporary sense, and he was a Lockean with respect to group differences. In 1848, he wrote that “attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural influences” is the “most vulgar” way of “escaping from the consideration of the effects of social influences on the human mind”. In 1873, he wrote that “by far the greater part of those differences, whether between individuals, races, or sexes”, are “produced by differences in circumstances”.

Other 19th- and early 20th-century liberals and radicals converged on similar conclusions. Alfred Russel Wallace, who independently discovered the principle of natural selection and coauthored the first paper on the theory of evolution by natural selection with Darwin in 1858, was a socialist who claimed that intelligence is equal among all races. In 1859, the German scholar Theodor Waitz published On the Unity of the Human Species and the Natural Condition of Man, which argued that all people are “equally destined for liberty,” and differences between them are not innate but “something acquired in the course of their development, which, under favorable circumstances, might have been equally acquired by peoples who appear at present less capable of civilization”.

The idea of racial sameness was picked up by the Christian abolitionists in America, who used it to argue against the view that blacks are by nature suited for slavery. By the 1880s, if not earlier, race denial was beginning to crystalize as the orthodoxy among liberal intellectuals. Its attraction was mainly ideological. Blank slatism justifies the utopian aspirations of intellectuals.

This information indicates that many people intuitively thought that humans of all races have the potential to be equally intelligent, even before wokism arose. While these authors and claims are notable for the history of the Western belief in equality, I don’t think any of these authors have been particularly important for explaining why wokism became popular in today’s world. I doubt that most people or most wokists would be able to name most of these historical figures.

The trend toward race denial in academia was driven mostly by ideology, and also by the professional interest that anthropologists and sociologists had in deemphasizing biology in favor of culture. In the early to mid-20th century, celebrity anthropologists like Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict argued strongly against race as an important explanatory variable in social science. (Boas himself acknowledged the existence of innate physiological differences in the brains of blacks and whites, which he thought had implications for intelligence. But he wrote these differences off as not very significant.)

Indeed, this is the case with all academic subjects.

After World War II, the association of “race science” with Nazi pseudoscience and genocide gave the moral high ground entirely to the race deniers. Most people don’t make a strong distinction between empirical and moral questions, and when morality conflicts with science, science usually loses. The civil rights movement aroused justified sympathy for the plight of blacks, who had been seriously oppressed. By the time major civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960s, respectable people had almost unanimously embraced the fantasy that legal equality would solve the race problem. Idealistic school teachers inculcated children with the dogma that race is skin deep, and that only a deranged hater could think otherwise. Once a taboo becomes established, it is very difficult to undo it. Full-blown wokism was inevitable.

This paragraph indicates that Cofnas was aware of how Nazism helped cause modern wokism, but I don’t feel that he emphasized this turning point strongly enough in his essay. While Cofnas talked about the historical origins of the intellectual belief in equality in the West, he didn’t talk at all about how Social Darwinism and eugenics also used to be historically widespread values among the West’s intellectuals in the early 1900s. Social Darwinism was largely motivated by accepting traditionally adaptive values and the implications of the theory of evolution that Charles Darwin described in The Origin of the Species. Cofnas’s theory of wokism doesn’t explain how the value in equality eventually dominated and defeated Social Darwinist values.

This is all really important. A proper theory of wokism has to explain why the belief in equality won out. There are other reasons why equality is a common moral value. But the Holocaust, the defeat of the Nazis, and the baby boom that caused the 1960s counter-culture were the most pivotal series of events that set humanity on full course for Wokism. If that series of events had never happened, wokism may never have happened either. At the very least, it certainly would be the same set of delusional beliefs that we see today.

The last section of The Right’s Stupidity Problem is “What to Do”:

In my article, “How to Take Back Academia”, I proposed a three-part plan:

1. Promote knowledge of the cause of race differences.
2. Change the population of decision makers on campus.
3. Leverage political power.

I agree with Cofnas’s plan, but I also believe that there are multiple other reforms that could be done to fix academia. My essay also describes other ongoing problems in academia, and it’s necessary to understand those as well, if we are ever going to fix them.

Promoting knowledge of the genetic cause of race differences destroys the premise of wokism, but this is not enough to attain victory. Our institutions are brimming with delusional–and in many cases mentally ill—true believing Red Guard thugs who were appointed to maintain the ideological status quo. Many of these people will fight to the gates of hell to defend the woke system, and won’t accept evidence for hereditarianism no matter what. We need to find legal ways to remove these people from positions of authority: get rid of fake grievance-studies departments at universities; revoke the tenure of pseudoscholars who were hired in job searches that illegally discriminated against whites, Asians, and men; mass fire the woke commissars in the state department; and so on. We have to leverage political power both to change the population of decisions makers and in order to deprive the woke of one of their most powerful weapons, which is civil rights law. The law might not be the ultimate cause of wokism, but as long as it’s illegal not to be woke, it will be far more difficult to reform our institutions. – Nathan Cofnas

Cofnas acknowledges that hereditarianism won’t be enough to end wokism. I couldn’t agree more. I also like this paragraph so much that I edited my academia critique page to quote it there too.

Rufo is the most effective activist with respect to getting rid of wokesters, and he is pushing lawmakers in the right direction. Hanania’s book is the ultimate guide for how to reform the law. But the anti-woke trident doesn’t work without its first prong: we must destroy the taboo against hereditarianism, and teach people not to seek scapegoats for differences that are the product of nature.

It might be more complicated than this. There are multiple other barriers to ending wokism besides just ignorance. I’ve also proposed solutions for solving each of them.

That’s because a large proportion of race realists—especially those who are willing to admit it–are not actually “realists”. Many of them subscribe to a right-wing version of wokism that substitutes Jews for whites. They cherry-pick, misrepresent, or simply misunderstand findings in psychology and genetics to support their ideological views. My call for a race-realist right is not a recommendation to look to these emotionally disturbed fools for leadership or support. Race realism needs to be incorporated into the right from the top. The priority for right-wing intellectuals should be disseminating accurate information about race and race differences, and devising a new political philosophy that is intellectually and morally appealing to the current left-wing elites.

I’m really glad that Cofnas and I both agree on a non-racist perspective of race realism and that we both stand against race idealism and the ridiculous Jewish Conspiracy Theory. It’s rare to find someone with strong opinions on race who favors a truly meritocratic system of government, especially someone who likes both philosophy and biology. I wish there were more people out there like us.

Meritocracy is a hill that I am willing to die on. Unfortunately, race denialists don’t believe meritocracy, because they believe in holding back relatively successful demographics, like Whites and East Asians. Also unfortunately, racist race realists (and especially racists in general) don’t believe in meritocracy either, because they believe in holding back exceptional people who come from underperforming races. Non-racist race realists are the only ones who fully embrace meritocracy. – Zero Contradictions, Race FAQs

Also see: ZC’s Response to “A Guide For The Hereditarian Revolution” by Nathan Cofnas.

“What is Wokism?” by Blithering Genius is an accurate and concise description of Wokism. I don’t want to regurgitate what he’s already written, but anybody who’s interested in this topic should read his essay. Instead, I’ll just summarize the wokist and social constructivist line of reasoning:

1. We are separate from other animals (and nature) due to the development of culture.
2. Culture is the primary factor for conditioning our behavior (blank-slatism).
3. The current culture results in inequality, and thus oppression.
4. We have to eliminate inequalities.
5. We can greatly reduce division, hatred, and inequality from society if we change the culture.
6. Thus, we need to change the culture.

The main fallacy in this line of reasoning that is that inequality results from nature, not culture. It also assumes that we have obligations to make everybody equal and to relieve everyone’s suffering. Wokists are optimistic because they think that it will be easy to change the culture, but they’re unaware that culture depends on the genetic traits and evolutionary psychology of a population. Nature and biology are inherently inequitable.

It’s interesting to wonder about what other ideologies could’ve become particularly influential today if Humanism and Wokism didn’t become the main ideologies of the West. At various points over the last two centuries, there were opportunities for other ideologies to become more popular and influential instead:

• Christianity
• Nationalism
• Social Darwinism
• Communism
• Classical Liberalism
• Individualism
• Et Cetera

The rise of modernity was caused by a feedback loop of many different processes that happened and amplified each other simultaneously. The same also applies for the rise of wokism.

There are various theories about the rise of wokism that can be approximately summarized as follows. The first three theories were featured in an image from “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem” by Nathan Cofnas, while I added summaries for the last two:

• Christopher Rufo: Critical Theory -> “long march through the institutions” -> Wokism
• Richard Hanania: Civil rights laws demand nondiscrimination -> judges and bureaucrats declare disparities to be evidence of discrimination -> legal bureaucracy enforces civil rights laws -> Wokism
• Nathan Cofnas: WEIRD morality & belief in psychological equality & intractable group disparities -> elites become woke ->
  • -> woke philosophy -> children indoctrinated with woke ideology -> Wokism
  • -> woke law -> law reinforces institutionalized wokism -> Wokism
• Ted Kaczynski: New technology -> life becomes easier -> people no longer have to focus on their survival or work as much -> people need surrogate activities to fulfill meaning in their lives -> people engage in activism to fulfill power process -> over-socialization feedback loop occurs -> Wokism. This could be called the Power Process, Surrogate Activity, and/or Over-socialization Theory.
• Some Academics: Smartphone Use, Social Media, & Culture -> Mental Health Crisis -> Wokism
• Edward Dutton, et al: New technology -> increased survival rates, people have children at later ages -> mutations accumulate in human genome at unprecedented rates -> high mutational load -> Wokism. This is called the Mutational Load / Spiteful Mutant Hypothesis.
• Eric Kaufmann: Liberalism + Egalitarianism -> Left Expressive Modernism + Cultural Socialism (Modernism) -> Wokism
• Zero Contradictions: Basically all of the above, more or less, plus some other causes.

Cofnas already did a great job at explaining the problems with Rufo’s and Hanania’s theories, so this webpage will focus on addressing the other theories, as well as describing my own theory. Each of these woke origins theories contribute some important points, but they each ultimately fail to fully recognize the historical context and background regarding why critical theory, WEIRD morality, and wokism evolved in the first place (the causes of 1960s counterculture, anti-Nazism, etc). None of the theories adequately describe the memetic processes that propagate wokism either.

Social Darwinism peaked in the West from the 1900s to World War II:

• The theory of evolution had wide acceptance, including its implications for humans.
• Academic race denialism wasn’t popular and didn’t use tactical nihilism.
• European empires had colonies all over the world.
• Eugenics policies were enforced in many Western countries and Japan, and had wide support.
• Nationalism and racism had peak popularity in Western countries.
• Segregation and the Jim Crow laws were still enforced in the United States.
• The Ku Klux Klan had its highest popularity ever in 1925, with an estimated ~2-4 million members.
• The economy had few regulations; business profits and stocks peaked during the 1920s.
• Fascist dictatorships arose across Italy (1922), Germany, Spain, and Eastern Europe during the 1930s.

So far, every theory on the origins of Wokism that I’ve seen so far has not offered a satisfactory explanation for how or why the West rejected Social Darwinism in favor of Wokism, despite embracing the former so strongly during the early 1900s. My theory aims to explain this by stating the chain of events and social movements.

The following is a timeline of events in the 20th and 21st centuries that detail the rise of Wokism.

This section will analyze and explain the psychological reasons why wokism and virtue-signaling are common. Kaczynski’s commentary gives another counter-example of a highly intelligent non-hereditarian (or at least someone who’s never said anything that’s explicitly hereditarian) who coherently described wokism, without accepting its ridiculous tenets.

In my opinion, the terms for “wokism” and “virtue-signaling” should’ve been first coined by Ted Kaczynski. In his 1995 manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski managed to identify that leftism [wokism] and [virtue signaling] are largely a result of the power process being disrupted in industrial-technological society. As far as I know, he was the first person to make an accurate and widely read description of the causes and psychology of both [wokism] and [virtue signaling]. Unfortunately, he referred to “wokism” and “virtue signaling” as “leftism” in his manifesto since those terms hadn’t been invented yet. He wrote multiple times that he wish he had a better term(s) to describe what he was trying to talk about. For example, he wrote the following in paragraph 218:

218. Various thinkers have pointed out that leftism is a kind of religion. Leftism is not a religion in the strict sense because leftist doctrine does not postulate the existence of any supernatural being. But, for the leftist, leftism plays a psychological role much like that which religion plays for some people. The leftist NEEDS to believe in leftism; it plays a vital role in his psychological economy. His beliefs are not easily modified by logic or facts. He has a deep conviction that leftism is morally Right with a capital R, and that he has not only a right but a duty to impose leftist morality on everyone. (However, many of the people we are referring to as “leftists” do not think of themselves as leftists and would not describe their system of beliefs as leftism. We use the term “leftism” because we don’t know of any better words to designate the spectrum of related creeds that includes the feminist, gay rights, political correctness, etc., movements, and because these movements have a strong affinity with the old left. See paragraphs 227-230.)

– Ted Kaczynski, Industrial Society And Its Future, The Danger Of Leftism

The difficulty of describing wokists was also mentioned in paragraphs 7, 8, 23, and 223.
Kaczynski further characterized wokists in paragraphs 227 to 229:

227. Our discussion of leftism has a serious weakness. It is still far from clear what we mean by the word “leftist.” There doesn’t seem to be much we can do about this. Today leftism is fragmented into a whole spectrum of activist movements. … To the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of leftism is defined by the discussion of it that we have given in this article, and we can only advise the reader to use his own judgment in deciding who is a leftist.
228. But it will be helpful to list some criteria for diagnosing leftism. These criteria cannot be applied in a cut and dried manner. Some individuals may meet some of the criteria without being leftists, some leftists may not meet any of the criteria. Again, you just have to use your judgment.
229. The leftist is oriented toward large-scale collectivism. He emphasizes the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. He has a negative attitude toward individualism. He often takes a moralistic tone. He tends to be for gun control, for sex education and other psychologically “enlightened” educational methods, for social planning, for affirmative action, for multiculturalism. He tends to identify with victims. He tends to be against competition and against violence, but he often finds excuses for those leftists who do commit violence. He is fond of using the common catch-phrases of the left, like “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “capitalism,” “imperialism,” “neocolonialism,” “genocide,” “social change,” “social justice,” “social responsibility.” Maybe the best diagnostic trait of the leftist is his tendency to sympathize with the following movements: feminism, gay rights, ethnic rights, disability rights, animal rights, political correctness. Anyone who strongly sympathizes with ALL of these movements is almost certainly a leftist.[36]

– Ted Kaczynski, Industrial Society And Its Future, The Danger Of Leftism

Kaczynski’s use of the word “leftism” naturally drew a lot of criticism from leftists, but he probably would’ve drawn less hostile criticism if he had instead been the first to coin neologisms for “wokism” and “virtue-signaling”. These terms would’ve communicated more specific meanings and would’ve been more easily differentiable as different concepts. Kaczynski had a golden opportunity to invent a new word or two that would’ve gained a lot of attention and popularity, but he missed it. Nevertheless, Kaczynski’s commentary is more relevant than ever, especially if we can understand that he was trying to describe “wokism” instead of “leftism”. Kaczynski further described wokism and virtue-signaling in the following paragraphs:

9. The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call “feelings of inferiority” and “over-socialization.” Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while over-socialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential.

– Ted Kaczynski, Industrial Society And Its Future, The Psychology Of Modern Leftism

20. Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists protest by lying down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke police or racists to abuse them, etc. These tactics may often be effective, but many leftists use them not as a means to an end but because they PREFER masochistic tactics. Self-hatred is a leftist trait.
21. Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the over-socialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.
22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.

– Ted Kaczynski, Industrial Society And Its Future, Feelings Of Inferiority

24. Psychologists use the term “socialization” to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are over-socialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they seem.
27. We argue that a very important and influential segment of the modern left is over-socialized and that their over-socialization is of great importance in determining the direction of modern leftism. Leftists of the over-socialized type tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper-middle class. Notice that university intellectuals[3] constitute the most highly socialized segment of our society and also the most left-wing segment.
28. The leftist of the over-socialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes)[4] for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the over-socialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles.
29. Here is an illustration of the way in which the over-socialized leftist shows his real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our society while pretending to be in rebellion against it. Many leftists push for affirmative action, for moving black people into high-prestige jobs, for improved education in black schools and more money for such schools; the way of life of the black “underclass” they regard as a social disgrace. They want to integrate the black man into the system, make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist just like upper-middle-class white people. The leftists will reply that the last thing they want is to make the black man into a copy of the white man; instead, they want to preserve African American culture. But in what does this preservation of African American culture consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food, listening to black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a black-style church or mosque. In other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all ESSENTIAL respects, most leftists of the over-socialized type want to make the black man conform to white, middle-class ideals. They want to make him study technical subjects, become an executive or a scientist, spend his life climbing the status ladder to prove that black people are as good as white. They want to make black fathers “responsible,” they want black gangs to become nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the industrial-technological system. The system couldn’t care less what kind of music a man listens to, what kind of clothes he wears or what religion he believes in as long as he studies in school, holds a respectable job, climbs the status ladder, is a “responsible” parent, is nonviolent and so forth. In effect, however much he may deny it, the over-socialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into the system and make him adopt its values.

– Ted Kaczynski, Industrial Society And Its Future, Over-Socialization

The problem of purposelessness seems to have become less serious during the last 15 years or so, because people now feel less secure physically and economically than they did earlier, and the need for security provides them with a goal. But purposelessness has been replaced by frustration over the difficulty of attaining security. We emphasize the problem of purposelessness because the liberals and leftists would wish to solve our social problems by having society guarantee everyone’s security; but if that could be done it would only bring back the problem of purposelessness. The real issue is not whether society provides well or poorly for people’s security; the trouble is that people are dependent on the system for their security rather than having it in their own hands. This, by the way, is part of the reason why some people get worked up about the right to bear arms; possession of a gun puts that aspect of their security in their own hands. – Ted Kaczynski, Industrial Society And Its Future, Footnote #12

In 1995, Kaczynski made correct predictions in these two paragraphs:

219. Leftism is a totalitarian force. Wherever leftism is in a position of power it tends to invade every private corner and force every thought into a leftist mold. In part this is because of the quasi-religious character of leftism; everything contrary to leftist beliefs represents Sin. More importantly, leftism is a totalitarian force because of the leftists’ drive for power. The leftist seeks to satisfy his need for power through identification with a social movement and he tries to go through the power process by helping to pursue and attain the goals of the movement (see paragraph 83). But no matter how far the movement has gone in attaining its goals the leftist is never satisfied, because his activism is a surrogate activity (see paragraph 41). That is, the leftist’s real motive is not to attain the ostensible goals of leftism; in reality he is motivated by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then reaching a social goal.[35] Consequently the leftist is never satisfied with the goals he has already attained; his need for the power process leads him always to pursue some new goal. The leftist wants equal opportunities for minorities. When that is attained he insists on statistical equality of achievement by minorities. And as long as anyone harbors in some corner of his mind a negative attitude toward some minority, the leftist has to re-educated him. And ethnic minorities are not enough; no one can be allowed to have a negative attitude toward homosexuals, disabled people, fat people, old people, ugly people, and on and on and on. It’s not enough that the public should be informed about the hazards of smoking; a warning has to be stamped on every package of cigarettes. Then cigarette advertising has to be restricted if not banned. The activists will never be satisfied until tobacco is outlawed, and after that it will be alcohol, then junk food, etc. Activists have fought gross child abuse, which is reasonable. But now they want to stop all spanking. When they have done that they will want to ban something else they consider unwholesome, then another thing and then another. They will never be satisfied until they have complete control over all child rearing practices. And then they will move on to another cause.
220. Suppose you asked leftists to make a list of ALL the things that were wrong with society, and then suppose you instituted EVERY social change that they demanded. It is safe to say that within a couple of years the majority of leftists would find something new to complain about, some new social “evil” to correct because, once again, the leftist is motivated less by distress at society’s ills than by the need to satisfy his drive for power by imposing his solutions on society.

– Ted Kaczynski, Industrial Society And Its Future, The Danger Of Leftism

In the early 2020s, many countries and jurisdictions have been trending towards banning and outlawing cigarettes and tobacco, even though many laws had already been passed to regulate them in prior decades. And even though underrepresented demographics have some of the strongest demographic quotas ever, this has not deterred wokists from pushing for ever more discrimination against men, whites, and Asians in highly prestigious universities, fields, and positions.

Kaczynski also managed to recognize that wokists virtue-signal for activism not because they’re more serious about equality, but rather because their actions help them go through the power process. Woke activism will never stop until wokists find another way to add meaning and purpose to their lives.

Eventually, implementing enough woke policies will eventually backfire on achieving their intended goals. For example, banning tobacco will only strengthen drug cartels, just as banning alcohol did in the United States during the Prohibition Era. Enforcing Soviet-style price controls and rent ceilings (as some wokists advocate for) will only make people poorer, not richer. Mass immigration also makes most Westerners poorer rather than richer. Most likely, the smarter wokists will stop being woke once they experience enough cognitive dissonance and re-evaluate their beliefs, while the dumber ones will continue to set new records for insanity.

The demand for hatred and oppression far exceeds the actual supply of oppression in the West. The psychological need for virtue-signaling explains why some wokists are motivated to fabricate hatred and hate crime hoaxes, such as the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax. One political scientist examined 346 hate crime allegations and found that fewer than 1 in 3 of them were genuine. (Book Link)

This further proves that leftists don’t care about solving real problems, contrary to what Cofnas has claimed. They just want to virtue-signal, because they can’t find anything better to do with their lives. Faking hate crimes or hatred of other races is not something that an intelligent person would ever do, though I will grant that such people aren’t representative of most wokists. Nevertheless, wokists don’t support wokism because they’re relatively smart. They support wokism because they’re relatively dumb. The average humanist is smarter than the average wokist.

Ted Kaczynski accurately explained the psychological reasons why virtue-signaling is prevalent these days. However, there are social reasons and feedback loops why it is popular as well:

Virtue-signaling creates a divergence between public and private values. In other words, it creates a divergence between stated preferences and revealed preferences.

Each individual has an incentive to signal his goodness by promoting altruistic social policies. The benefit of virtue-signaling goes the individual. The cost is distributed to all members of society, regardless of their stated political values, and regardless of how they vote in elections. Thus, each individual has an incentive to signal virtue at the expense of the collective. It is a tragedy of the commons. – Blithering Genius, Pathological Altruism

Social pressures push us away from the truth. Society creates a fog of delusion, pretense and deception. This fog is a tragedy of the commons. It is memetic pollution that hides the truth. Society makes us lie to each other, and it makes us lie to ourselves. – Blithering Genius, Bad Faith

Virtue-signaling is easy. Anybody can do it. It might raise public awareness about (important) issues in some cases, but aside from that, it doesn’t actually solve any real problems, especially if it’s focused on raising awareness about fake problems.

Noah Carl noted and presented great evidence that Wokism suddenly arose from Humanism and rapidly accelerated in the early 2010s and onwards:

The thing we’re trying to explain is the dramatic shift in the culture of the English-speaking world that began in the early 2010s, comprising a sudden fixation on “racism” and other forms of bigotry, a marked rise in anti-white sentiment, a massive dialling-up of cancel culture, and the rapid diffusion of “DIE” through academia and the corporate world. – Noah Carl, Responding to Nathan Cofnas

Nathan Cofnas later wrote a response to Noah Carl in “Wokism Is Just Beginning”:

First, it took a few generations for people to absorb the orthodoxy. Race denial began as a relatively transparent Noble Lie that most people probably went along with because it seemed like the nice thing to do. … Each subsequent generation of children was subjected to increasingly intensive brainwashing until the Noble Lie was genuinely believed.

Second, the Great Awokening couldn’t start until after we had tried everything else. Believers in racial sameness originally thought that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s would lead to equality. When that didn’t work, they tried affirmative action, welfare, welfare reform, Head Start, No Child Left Behind, and countless other programs that also failed to equalize outcomes. We finally reached a tipping point around 2012. Obama had failed to live up to liberals’ messianic expectations. It was clear that another generation of affirmative action wouldn’t make a big difference. True believing late millennials arrived on college campuses and demanded an immediate end to the environmental conditions that produce inequality. This inevitably took the form of a hysterical search for hidden “racism”. – Nathan Cofnas, Wokism Is Just Beginning

However, I don’t think Noah Carl, Nathan Cofnas, or any major intellectuals adequately explained why wokism became so radical over the 2010s. I mentioned before in great detail how the Establishment and elites of society became humanist and/or woke, and I also explained why that happened. The social feedback loops, echo chambers, rage addiction, and censorship created by social media were also instrumental. However, there’s still another major reason why wokism sped up in the 2010s.

Wokism on race and LGBT issues accelerated in the United States after gay marriage was legalized in 2015. Once gay marriage became legalized in each Western country, the wokists had to create new goals to be satisfied in order to continue satisfying their psychological craving for power. Hence, why they started pushing for increasingly more unreasonable ideas that move the Overton Window further away from reality.

Some leftists used to say that it’s a slippery slope fallacy that legalizing gay marriage would make pedophilia and other abnormal sexual behaviors more acceptable. Almost a decade later, the conservatives were mostly right. In the past few years, wokists started making children watch drag shows, attempting to teach school children how to have gay sex, and normalizing gender reassignment surgery on young children. The Florida Parental Rights in Education Act and similar laws were passed in the early 2020s in reaction to these attempts.

As Blithering Genius explained, many or most wokists probably won’t support pedophilia since it violates their value for altruism, but we shouldn’t be surprised if some of them start trying to openly normalize pedophilia in the next decade or so.

The psychological and social demand for virtue-signaling explains why woke activism keeps becoming more radical and extremist as the years go by. Satisfying woke demands and/or becoming more accepting of wokism only leads to more extreme wokism further down the road. The 2010s and 2020s are featuring some of the most radical social changes in the West since the 1960s:

• Black Lives Matter activism morphs into Critical Race Theory activism, demand for slave reparations from white people, etc.
• Support for immigration becomes support for illegal immigration, waves of refugees/rapefugees, eliminating national borders, anybody who disagrees is a Nazi, etc.
• Legalizing gay marriage becomes children must watch drag shows, must normalize trans ideology, etc.
• Accepting trans people leads to compelled speech, allowing transwomen men into women’s restrooms and women’s sports, persuading young children to transition, spreading puberty blockers, etc.
• Climate change awareness morphs into Just Stop Oil, public vandalism, disrupting traffic, and exaggerating the effects of climate change, etc.
• “The rich should pay their fair share” morphs into “we should hang and publicly execute billionaires”.
• Et Cetera.

We cannot solve wokism with homeopathy. Give a wokist an inch, and they’ll take a mile. To solve it permanently, wokists need to find a better way to add purpose to their lives.

Analyzing the social ideologies of other countries may give us more insights into the origins of wokism.

Christianity was important for the creation of Humanism and Wokism. Humanism wouldn’t be the same if it weren’t for the relative open-mindedness and altruistic values of Christianity. The absence of Christianity from Muslim and Asian cultures partially explains why they haven’t become Humanist.

The only way anyone could overlook the current anti-white propaganda and policies in the West is if they have an ideology that blinds them to it. When “It’s okay to be white” is labeled a hate slogan, we have a problem. When Westerners think about racism or racial oppression, the first things that usually come to mind are moral narratives, like the history of slavery, the Jim Crow laws, European colonialism, Nazism, or the Holocaust. For this reason, it’s harder for people to notice anti-white racism, even though it’s the most common type of racism in the Modern West.

Links Regarding Anti-White Ideology And Propaganda In The Modern West:

• Systemic Anti-White Bias in Western Media: A Ton of Evidence (Available as PDF).
• The Rise of Anti-White Bias in Media (with Statistical evidence).
• The Intentional Destruction of White Birth Rates: Leaked reports from Planned Parenthood, the Rockefeller Foundation, World Bank, US NSC (including CIA, military etc).
• Imperialism and Colonialism: White Guilt and Historic Non-White Conquests of European Territories.
• Stochastic Terrorism: Non-White academics promote violence against Whites with real-world consequences.
• Woke, Anti-White Wikipedia:
  • Wikipedia: Black Pride.
  • Wikipedia: Asian Pride.
  • Wikipedia: Gay Pride.
  • Wikipedia: Straight Pride.
  • Wikipedia: Disability Pride.
  • Wikipedia: White Pride – Note how this is the only article that portrays racial pride negatively.
• The “Right” Amount of Concern about Racism - Noah Carl, Aporia Magazine: This article presents eight examples of how the West’s concern with anti-racism has gone too far, to the point of being counter-productive: cancel culture, self-censorship, the media’s Great Awokening, responses to police shootings, hiding the race of suspects, hugging people during a pandemic, not profiling terrorists, and ignoring grooming gangs.

The second section of Cofnas’s essay is: “A Hereditarian Revolution Is Feasible”.

It’s true that it took less than 50 years for evolutionary theory to become widely accepted among Western intellectuals, after its initial discovery. While spreading ideas via word of mouth worked in the past, I’m skeptical that it would or could work as effectively in today’s world. Nowadays, ideas mainly circulate within ideological bubbles and echo chambers on the Internet. The technology of the modern world also makes censorship easier than ever nowadays. See: Freedom of Speech by Blithering Genius.

Some intellectuals are probably more resistant to this social isolation if they are smarter and are more driven to seek the truth. However, I believe the social implications of race realism will be considerably harder for people to accept than evolution. Blithering Genius mentioned before how social beliefs can be modeled via information theory. It only 50-60 years for support for liberal racial equality to evolve into woke anti-white racism and a resounding rejection of human biology. The inability of the average human to understand nuance and complex information makes me quite pessimistic about humanity’s future.

The average Westerner is probably also less intelligent today than during Darwin’s lifetime, which I’ve mentioned before in my Eugenics FAQs:

• Near the end of this podcast episode, Dr. Gregory Clark talks more about this with Steven Hsu, and he said that the turning point for when average IQ started to decrease instead of increase was about 1850 for Europe.
• Edward Dutton has made similar claims that human intelligence has been declining in the West ever since 1850, and that the generations that started the Industrial Revolution were the smartest generations ever in human history.
• Wikipedia also says that “contraceptives were relatively common among the middle class and upper class” (in the United States during the 1800s).
• If contraceptive usage was lower among the lower class, and the lower class had lower intelligence than the other classes, then this seems consistent with the claim that intelligence has been decreasing ever since 1850.

This will make it harder for everyone to accept the truth, whether they have relatively high intelligence or average intelligence. The average Westerner is also less European today than in Darwin’s lifetime. The Great Replacement is real, and it is only going to get worse. Most races are less intelligent than Europeans. So not only will it be harder for them to figure out the Truth, but they will also have strong personal and social biases to deny the Truth at all costs.

We can’t expect to win in an afternoon. People’s beliefs and moral intuitions are sticky, and many people are just incorrigible dogmatists. But a taboo is not a law of nature. It can be undermined by evidence. In a world with the Internet and social media, cultural change can happen a lot faster than it could in the 19th century.

With respect to changing the beliefs of ideologues, it’s probably harder than ever, especially if people are less intelligent these day than in the 1800s and can spend all their time in echo chambers. Nevertheless, Cofnas is right that beliefs can be undermined by evidence. My prediction is that most people won’t accept race realism the easy way, so they’ll probably end up accepting it the hard way instead (See: Response to Woke Dystopia: Ignoring Reality Has Consequences). Cofnas gives further justification for the belief in this strategy:

Even if we started by trying to persuade the intellectual and pseudo-intellectual elites, I’m still pessimistic about persuasion. Before we can even begin to persuade the world’s intellectuals, we first need to get their attention. Unfortunately, most modern race realists probably don’t have enough social status for intellectuals to consider listening to them, though that could change.

Even if we could persuade a considerable number of people to accept race realism, we are running out of time to save modern civilization from collapse. Most people don’t talk about these issues. Some even pretend that these problems don’t exist, which makes it much harder to prevent from worsening:

• Overpopulation is inevitable without some form of population control.
• Most Western countries have high amounts of debt, inflation, and real estate bubbles. A global economic collapse within the next few decades or so is probably inevitable at this point. It will be very difficult to recover from it.
• The Great Replacement keeps getting worse.
• The world has ever rising dysgenics.
• The Earth is destined to run out of oil in the next few decades or so. This will have serious devastating consequences for our civilization. If modern civilization collapses, it is unlikely to ever recover.

Since most people probably can’t be persuaded to accept race realism (or truth in general) by setting their beliefs aside and examining the evidence, then the last hope of persuasion is for them to watch their beliefs conflict with reality. Wokists may become more open to re-examining their beliefs as they see further attempts to achieve equality continue to fail. Perhaps only then will it be easier to persuade them.

Read More: Response to Woke Dystopia: Ignoring Reality Has Consequences.

The third section of Cofnas’s essay is: “A Righteous Cause”.

We are told that belief in race differences goes hand-in-hand with Nazism and genocide. In reality, the delusion of racial sameness isn’t what is holding the elites back from mass murder. Most liberal elites already at least implicitly acknowledge the reality of individual differences in traits like intelligence. Yet they don’t go around exterminating the less intelligent, or show any indication of a desire to do so. In fact, America devotes far more money and resources to “special” than to gifted education. The empirical evidence shows that, for the vast majority of people, there is no clear psychological connection between viewing someone as less intelligent and hating them, let alone wanting to discriminate against or murder them.

I agree with Cofnas that race realism doesn’t imply nor justify racism.
His essay, “Are Smart People Superior? A Reply to Noah Carl and Charles Murray” is a good read.

Actual genocidal racist movements were and are based on myths and pseudoscience, not accurate information about group differences. The Nazis didn’t believe in Darwinism, but in a pseudoscientific creation story called “world ice theory,” which is so bizarre I don’t even know how to summarize it. They rejected IQ testing as a tool “of Jewry [to] fortify its hegemony.” Contemporary neo-Nazis are just as scientifically illiterate.

It’s true that Hitler and the Nazis’ ideology weren’t Darwinian in the sense that their beliefs were not what Charles Darwin himself would’ve promoted. That’s how Darwinian is defined in the essay by Robert J. Richards that Cofnas linked. For clarity, the term “Social Darwinism” does describe the Nazis and other ideologues, rather than Darwinism.

Furthermore, Blithering Genius does a good job at summarizing Nazi ideology in his essay, Nazism:

To understand Nazism, you need to understand its central concept: the “Volk”. The Volk was the German people, viewed as a kind of organism. The metaphor of a people as an organism was part of a vitalist strain in social and historical thought that originated in the 19th century and seems to have been strongest in Germany. The human population was viewed as composed of “peoples’’. A people, such as the German Volk, was viewed as analogous to an organism. In this view, a people was a coherent whole that had its own history, developed according to its own plan, and had its own purpose or destiny. The nation-state was the political corollary of the concept of a people. To act as a unit, a people had to constitute itself into a political structure that could act effectively in the world as a unit. That structure was the nation-state.

The metaphor of a people as an organism is deeply flawed. It projects the properties of an individual onto a collective. It involves the fallacy of composition in viewing the whole as essentially the same as its parts. A collective does not have the properties of an individual. A collective of individuals can be organized into a society, but a society is not held together by shared genes or by some mystical essence. A society is held together by a power structure (a system of incentives) that gives it both coherence and agency. The biological raison d’etre of the individual is not to perpetuate a collective or society. It is simply to reproduce. Does a collective have a biological raison d’etre? No, not really.

The vitalist metaphor is persuasive, however. The ordinary person can understand the metaphor of a people as a kind of composite person. And it is easy for the individual to identify with this composite person of which he is a part, and to view his interests as similar or identical to its interests, as they are metaphorically conceived. The vitalist conception of a people, or nation, proved to be useful in organizing individuals toward political ends. It provided a justification for society that ordinary people could understand and relate to emotionally: one that was simple and moral, rather than complicated and causal/functional. It could be used to motivate and organize large collectives toward social change.

Nationalism can be defined as a type of political ideology that:

• Is centered on the definition of the collective.
• Idealizes and personifies that collective.
• Dismisses other concerns as secondary or unimportant.

Nationalism is a form of identity politics, and it usually arises either as a separatist movement within a larger society, or as a reaction to an external threat. – Blithering Genius, Nazism

We will now continue our response to “A Righteous Cause”:

A newly hereditarian elite would not look like the current community of self-identified race realists. As of now, some race realists are truth seekers who followed the evidence where it leads. But many others are misfits looking for an outlet to express “hate,” or they are contrarians who reflexively disagree with the establishment about everything. In the General Social Survey, whites who endorse a hereditarian explanation for black–white socioeconomic disparities score 8.5 WORDSUM IQ points lower than whites who endorse environmentalism. Most self-identified race realists are probably not realists, but subscribers to a different kind of wokism that substitutes Jews for whites and blames the world’s ills on “Jewish supremacy” instead of “white supremacy.” Once we start chipping away at the taboo on hereditarianism and presenting information in a way that smart, relatively normal people can appreciate, race realism will be associated with a higher caliber of person, and it will take a different form.

Cofnas claims that it’s possible to disassociate with the low-IQ racist race realists. He’s probably right about that. Hopefully my Race FAQs will help a lot with this.

The fourth section of Cofnas’s essay is: “Don’t Give Up the Word “Race””.

One of the ways the left protects its taboos is by suppressing language that is necessary to express taboo-violating thoughts. Suppose you make the empirical claim that race differences in intelligence are largely the result of genetic differences. You will be told that “race” is an incoherent concept, there’s no such thing as “black” or “white,” “intelligence” is subjective, and the “nature–nurture” distinction is meaningless. Everyone’s attention is then diverted to interminable philosophical debates about the meaning of “population” or “gene,” and we never get around to examining the evidence for the original claim. If you attempt to express the politically incorrect idea in leftist-approved newspeak, your statement will be so convoluted that no one will understand what you’re trying to say.

This is very true. In my essay, Sapir-Whorf Theory: How Language Influences Thought, I describe how of these tactics work. I also list many examples to help raise awareness of this problem,

I fully agree with everything that Cofnas has written in this section. Reclaiming the language is critical to the successful promotion of Hereditarianism and Biological Realism. My Race FAQs offers innumerous counter-arguments to nearly all the race denialist arguments out there. I don’t have anything else to say regarding this section.

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The fifth section of Cofnas’s essay is: “Strategy”.

One of the reasons why it has been so hard for race realism to get a fair hearing is because, as I noted, most self-identified “race realists” are not actually realists, but below-average-intelligence JQ (Jewish Question) obsessives whose beliefs have little to do with science. Virtually every genuine scholar of race is one or (at most) two degrees of separation removed from deranged crackpots and neo-Nazis, which makes it difficult for intellectually responsible outsiders to know whom to listen to. Even Lynn and Rushton produced some profoundly flawed scholarship and often exercised poor judgment about their associations. With the exception of Aporia–a magazine and podcast that was founded a couple years ago—race-realist institutions tend to be either officially anti-Semitic or closely associated with anti-Semites. (American Renaissance is not anti-Semitic, and it is an important center for high-quality discussions of race. But many JQers attend and speak at its conferences.) Most normal people have no interest in sorting through this mess, so they just dismiss the whole thing. Successful leaders will have to make a greater effort to distinguish themselves from thugs and crackpots, even if, in the short run, this alienates some of their would-be followers.

I agree that this is a problem. If the Pragmatosphere ever becomes large enough, we’ll probably create our own unique, non-racist institute or think tank for promoting rationality, philosophy, and biological realism. Dr. Nathan Cofnas would be more than welcome to join it.

In 2012 Murray appeared on the Colbert Report, where following conversation took place:

Colbert: People interpreted what you were saying [in The Bell Curve] as saying that there were racial and genetic components to black people scoring lower on intelligence tests.

Murray: I know that’s what people said.

Colbert: Right. Did you not say that?

Murray: No, no, the book did not say that.

Colbert: Did you say that?

Murray: I have never said that.

I do not mean to insinuate anything negative about Murray, whom I greatly admire. However, this is not what trying to destroy the taboo on hereditarianism looks like. Perhaps that’s not what Murray was trying to do. (On X Murray said “there’s a story behind” his statement to Colbert that is “too long for tweets.” A couple months ago he said he might tell the story in his next book.) But if we want to convince people to take hereditarianism seriously, we have to show that we believe it ourselves.

Arguments don’t prevail just because they’re good. The people who make the argument have to inspire respect and confidence. How did a small Jewish cult called Christianity become the most influential ideology in the world? It was partly due to the fact that pagans were impressed by the early Christian martyrs who sacrificed themselves in the Colosseum for the sake of their faith. Luckily, we don’t have to do that. Also, unlike the Christians, we have the advantage of having truth and evidence on our side. But we need to be willing to take a stand and demonstrate our commitment, or our arguments will fall flat.

Cofnas is right about this. If people can’t accept the truth, then we’ll just have to reaffirm that feelings can’t change the truth. Race realism is a question of truth, not a question of value or feelings.

That does not mean that I advocate colorblindness or multiculturalism, or say that race is politically irrelevant. A race is like an extended family (although you’ll probably be disappointed if you expect your racial brethren to treat you that way), and it’s natural to care about the fate of your people.

I agree once more. There’s no evidence that racial diversity confers any major advantages to a society in any real way. It was also kind of difficult for me to realize and accept that for myself since I’m mixed-race, but that’s the truth.

Our physical and psychological nature reflects our racial heritage, and for partly biological reasons we may feel a connection to our cultural traditions. Those who truly value diversity should favor the preservation of racial distinctions. There must be some barriers set up between races in order for each one to express its own unique genius. And in the case of group conflict, racial tribalism can sometimes be the key to solving collective-action problems. If whites are attacked qua whites, it makes sense for them to fight back as whites.

I concur. Racial pride is reasonable. I’ve also expressed support for ethnostates for similar reasons.

But race realism crumbles a central pillar of our moral–political system. Widespread acceptance of hereditarianism, especially among the elites, will undermine the reigning left–liberal order as we know it. Initially, many individuals will follow Kathryn Paige Harden’s lead and cling to the old value system even after the empirical claims that undergirded it are shown to be wrong. In the long run the Harden approach will be unsuccessful. When race realism is accepted, our cultural values will change. A new equilibrium will arise.

Once again, I’m pessimistic about how easy it will be to persuade people, although it will get easier as wokists fail to achieve equality. As it stands, the unlikelihood of succeeding is not an excuse for apathy or not trying, as other people might think. We should do whatever we can to promote biological realism, end wokism, and preserve modern civilization. I’ve written a guide on what we can do to accomplish those goals.

In October 2024, Cofnas also published another article “Wokism Is Just Beginning” where he explains that wokism will probably stay the same or increase in the next few decades of so. Younger generations are more wokist, and why we cannot expect them to become more conservative as they get older. This is yet another reason why I don’t believe that humanity is likely to defeat wokism before some potentially irreversible events and consequences happen.

Nathan Cofnas and Eric Kaufmann disagree on how the West should try to end Wokism. In short, Kaufmann believes that wokism should be ended via legal and institutional reforms, whereas Cofnas believes that wokism should be ended by a Hereditarian Revolution, or the promotion and wide acceptance of race realism. Cofnas wrote his opening remarks to the debate in the post, Victory without a Hereditarian Revolution?.

Cofnas and Kaufmann had a debate on this topic. Although I didn’t listen to most of the debate since it’s behind a paywall, I agree with Cofnas that wokism cannot be defeated without a Hereditarian Revolution. More specifically, I don’t think humanity can have any meaningful victory unless we have a broader, Bio-Realist Revolution.

Technically wokism is about more than race and sex differences in outcome: it’s also associated with gender theory (the idea that your gender is whatever you feel like), safetyism, and some other views. But what is distinctive about wokism mostly traces back to race. Race denial destroyed people’s ability to think biologically, thus making them open to radical, social-constructivist views on gender. Part of woke morality, including an emphasis on feelings and safety over free speech, is simply the result of the feminization of our institutions, which was more or less inevitable as women were integrated into schools and workplaces. But the essence of wokism is the equality thesis about race and sex. Wokism could survive a backlash against gender theory. If we kept gender theory but turned hereditarian about race differences, wokism would be over. – Nathan Cofnas, “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem”

Cofnas is essentially right about this. Race realism is the most important and pivotal type of biological realism. Anecdotally, I’ve heard many biological realists say that accepting race realism was the turning point that caused them to accept all the other types of biological realism. Accepting or rejecting race realism has a profound impact on a person’s worldview.

However, I want to be clear that promoting race realism alone is not enough for truly understanding human nature and building an optimal, or even a functional society. There are many smart and dumb race realists out there who still believe in erroneous, ridiculous nonsense about biology, such as the following ideas and people:

• Gene or Group Selection Theory (e.g. Thuletide)
• Kin Altruism (e.g. Emil O. W. Kirkegaard)
• Collectivism (e.g. Race Idealists)
• r/K Selection Theory (e.g. Race Idealists)
• Cornucopianism (e.g. Cremieux Recueil)
• Immortality (e.g. Anatoly Karlin)
• Game Theory Denialism (e.g. Stefan Molyneux)

If we don’t promote more than just race realism, then society could potentially replace one stupid ideology (wokism) with another stupid ideology (race idealism). We’ve already seen how it was possible for society to make a 180° turn away from social Darwinism towards humanism and wokism, so another 180° turn may not be out of the ballpark. While greater acceptance of race realism would certainly be a good thing, we also don’t want to risk false or misguided beliefs getting promoted as well as part of the general information package.

The only solution is that people need to understand all of biological realism. If people don’t understand that humans are individually selfish, then we won’t be able to (optimally) solve the problems of cooperation that every functioning society must solve. If people don’t understand that overpopulation is inevitable without either: 1. high mortality rate, or 2. low and/or sustainable birth rate (which may be accomplished via population control), then mass death will occur and modern civilization will collapse (probably permanently). Most people would prefer eugenic population control instead if they understood this. Reproduction licenses are the only workable long-term solution to overpopulation and dysgenics. Unfortunately, a majority of race realists don’t understand this.

If people don’t accept race realism the easy way, then they will have to face the hard way when reality fails to live up to their unrealistic expectations. Similarly, if people don’t accept the inevitability of overpopulation without population control, then they’ll face the hard way when society is on the brink of collapse from overpopulation. If society only accepts one correct belief but not the others, then the future will have no path to victory. Neither political power nor mere hereditarianism are sufficient for preserving prosperity in the future.

Read More: Essays On Biological Realism and Evolution.

Read More: Zero Contradictions’s FAQs Pages.

In the year 1101, I could have produced a number of graphs showing that Christianity had peaked in 1096–1099. My first graph would plot the number of killings perpetrated in the name of Christianity, which fell precipitously in 1100. Production of swords with cruciform hilts also dropped off, and the percentage of Europeans aged 18–60 who agreed with the statement “It is important to wage Holy War for Christianity” had gone down slightly from its historic high in 1095. Just look at the data, I would have said, before being burned at the stake.

The problem with my data-driven argument that Christianity peaked at the end of the 11th century is that it was missing the bigger context. The Crusade, which, unbeknownst to me, would later be known as the First Crusade, was fought from 1096–1099. It ended not because Christianity was on the wane, but because the Christian extremists had achieved victory and there wasn’t much left to do.

I really like this analogy that Cofnas makes in the introduction. Similar analogies are also great for helping people understand why we can’t rule out the possibility of overpopulation occurring in the future. We cannot expect the world population to peak in 2060 because there’s too many unpredictable factors.

Unfortunately, even if the world population ever reaches 11-12 billion people (assuming it can go that high without destroying and plummeting itself first), the United Nations will probably just raise the population ceiling of their “prediction”, instead of dropping their bogus theory altogether.

Read More: Overpopulation FAQs.

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The first section of the essay is Logic of Wokism.

[T]he Great Awokening couldn’t start until after we had tried everything else. Believers in racial sameness originally thought that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s would lead to equality. When that didn’t work, they tried affirmative action, welfare, welfare reform, Head Start, No Child Left Behind, and countless other programs that also failed to equalize outcomes. We finally reached a tipping point around 2012. Obama had failed to live up to liberals’ messianic expectations. It was clear that another generation of affirmative action wouldn’t make a big difference. True believing late millennials arrived on college campuses and demanded an immediate end to the environmental conditions that produce inequality. This inevitably took the form of a hysterical search for hidden “racism”. The process may have been catalyzed by social media and the feminization of the institutions—two forces that Carl has highlighted. But, ultimately, wokism flows from a simple piece of reasoning rooted in the equality thesis, which was endorsed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965 when he said: “We seek not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

Indeed, the failure of everything else to bring racial equality was yet another factor. The 2010s are notable because they’re separated from the 1960s by 50 years. By the 2010s, African Americans had equal rights to European Americans for nearly two generations, and they still didn’t have similar socioeconomic status, among other racial disparities.

If gender ideology turns out to be a fad but we retain the obsession with white privilege and racial bean counting, wokism will still be with us. On the other hand, if we all become race realists and accept that many racial disparities are the product of nature for which no one is to blame, wokism in any recognizable form will be over even if some race realists demand to be called “zir.”

I mostly agree with this. But even if most people become race realists, that still won’t be enough for fully accepting human biology and maximally expanding rationality, as I’ve explained before.

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The second section of the essay is “We Passed Peak Woke”: A Case of Wishful Thinking.

I agree with all the reasoning that Cofnas used in this section. He’s right about all the reasons why there’s been fewer cancel culture incidents in 2022 than in the preceding five years, and he’s right that the slight dip in wokism during the early 2020s is barely detectable. Wokism is still deeply ingrained into the background of social reality, and universities won’t stop supporting diversity statements any time soon. We have not passed peak wokism.

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The third section of the essay is Go Woke, Go Broke?. I agree with everything written in it, and I’m glad that Cofnas disproved this argument. There’s nothing more to say here.

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The fourth section of the essay is Rise of the Zoomer Red Guard.

Cofnas presents evidence that the Millennials and Zoomers will be the wokest generations ever, and he disproves the idea that they may become more conservative as they become older. Most people are statistically unlikely to change their values past young adulthood, and these generations were already indoctrinated when they were young. This will severely threaten the prosperity of the future.

The fifth section of the essay is Woke Dystopia. As Cofnas mentions, we can predict that society will only be woker than ever once the wokest generations in history take control of the Establishment, as the older and more conservative generations die off:

Within the next couple decades, millennials and zoomers who have no commitment to free speech or free thought will take charge of academia, our major corporations, government bureaucracies, and the judicial establishment. In every area of life, people will be treated according to their position in the woke race and sex hierarchy. Ideas that are now regarded as extreme in the US such as reparations for slavery, explicit racial quotas, prioritizing healthcare on the basis of race, and legal restrictions on speech will become mainstream, and probably written into law.

We may not know when peak wokeness will occur or exactly what it will be like, but we can predict that there are probably limits to how insane it can get, since it is in conflict with reality. Everybody will have to face reality eventually. We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. As Cofnas said before in “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution”, beliefs can be undermined by evidence.

Sebastian Jensen makes a different prediction:

I’m not delusional. I don’t think HBD can ever become a super popular, or maybe even mainstream position. It will morph into the category of perennial questions that nonetheless have right answers, like free will vs determinism. But it’s also irrational to think the taboo can remain forever: entropy applies to societies as well as objects. – Sebastian Jensen, “When will the race taboo disappear?”

To the contrary, it might be easier to persuade people of race realism. Although a correct understanding of free will and determinism is less morally taboo than race realism, there are more serious real world consequences to denying race that would probably be more obvious to people.⁶

If the consequences of accepting wokism get severe enough, society won’t be able to function properly anymore. Societies are established by cooperation between people, which is established by the rule of law. Every government policy has winners and losers.

So far, 2010s and 2020s Wokism rewards unsuccessful demographics at the expense of successful demographics. If 2030s and 2040s Wokism take this too far, then society will stop cooperating, different factions of society will start fighting each other, and everybody will collectively lose.

It’s likely that support for slave reparations will gradually increase over time. However, there’s a lot of legal difficulty in deciding who should give and receive reparations. For simplicity and equality, my prediction is that wokists will choose to tax white people across the board to redistribute the money to people of other races. Some fantasize that the richest citizens will pay for all the reparations, but it’s impossible to liquidate all their net worth and equally distribute it to all the recipients. Regardless of however it may be legally enforced, slave reparations would cause serious economic downturn.

Morality requires hypocrisy. Everybody is ultimately selfish, whether they admit it or not. Although a lot of woke whites may voice support for reparations, most of them would probably change their minds and/or voice different opinions, if they realized that they would have to help pay for the reparations (especially if they understood that most rich people’s assets can’t be liquidated). Likewise, conservatives whites (who are more likely to be armed) would fight back if slave reparations were ever enforced. Even if a slave reparations law got passed, it’s difficult to imagine it working successfully as intended.

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As another example, it probably won’t be possible for the wokists to ever achieve equal demographic quotas for all races and demographics. Wokists face a dilemma. They will either:

1. Cause all demographics to have proportional representation in prestigious fields, at the cost of causing a substantial portion of the white-collar workforce to be unqualified and unable to do their jobs correctly.
2. Give up on demographic quotas out of necessity. Qualified people will work prestigious jobs, but they won’t achieve proportional representation for all demographics.

Certificating unqualified people for white collar jobs could be legal grounds for penalizing educational institutions. The Great Replacement will also make it harder to find enough people with the cognitive potential to fill cognitively demanding occupations. If ideology conflicts with reality, then reality will win. It won’t be possible for society to function if the imposition of demographics quotas is too strict.

On 2024 November 10, Aporia Magazine published an article about how Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 US Presidential election will help to curb wokism in the US, at least for the mid 2020s. If the wokists keep losing, it’s possible that their movement could just fizzle out, as many other forgotten social movements have before in history. It’s currently difficult to imagine this since the wokists have such a strong psychological need to virtue-signal, but time will tell.

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Eventually, everybody will have to directly confront the reality that Earth has scarce resources as well. The most common objection for why humanity won’t have to worry about overpopulation is that global fertility levels are declining, but this argument is unwarranted:

Overpopulation depends on much more than the number of people:

1. The population is still increasing, just more slowly.
2. The death rate has decreased because more people are living longer than ever.
3. Increasing the world’s living standards would increase the world’s birth rates.
4. Newer technologies may prolong human lifespans even further, further increasing the population.
5. As the developing world transitions towards more developed, first-world lifestyles, that will put further strain on the world’s resources, even if the world population were to stay the same and not grow at all.
6. Once evolution finishes selecting for people who don’t use contraception, the world’s fertility levels will continue to rise ever more.
7. Overpopulation can happen instantly and unpredictably.

– Zero Contradictions, Overpopulation FAQs

There are hard limits to how much people can ignore reality before they have to face the consequences.

As Cofnas has said many times before, we won’t be able to end wokism unless people finally give up on the equality thesis (or morality, more generally). Although it’s probably impossible to successfully mandate slave reparations or enforce the strictest demographic quotas, it may take decades before the failure to successfully implement these policies finally makes a majority of wokists reconsider their beliefs, if ever.

Unfortunately, Humanity doesn’t have decades of time to waste, if we want to have a prosperous future. With other problems like Overpopulation, the Great Replacement, real estate bubbles, debt and inflation, global oil depletion, etc, humanity probably won’t solve them, or even recognize them as problems to solve before it’s too late. Most people aren’t sufficiently capable of thinking on a long-term scale or reasoning about complex systems, so they only react to problems until after they happen, instead of before they happen.

Regardless of whether modern civilization survives the 21st century or not, Traditionalism is the future.

Cofnas proposes that educating people about hereditarianism will be sufficient to defeat wokism. Promoting hereditarianism is important, but there are multiple other barriers before we can fully end wokism. Sebastian Jensen has independently conceived some of these arguments as to why promoting Hereditarianism won’t be enough to end Wokism.

• It is quite difficult to change people’s minds.
  • Most people literally believe that it’s “evil” to say or promote anything related to hereditarianism.
  • Virtually every Internet user lives in a bubble these days, so the vast majority of them are never going to see anything that hereditarians write, post, or say. Most people will only hear selectively edited quotes of what hereditarians say.
  • Freethinkers could try to invade and pop other people’s bubbles, but they will probably be blocked, censored, or banned, since people literally believe that they’re evil.
  • Nevertheless, Cofnas and I agree that it will take decades to change the public consensus, if ever.
• The wokists don’t have any effective long-term solutions for bestowing meaning to their lives. Until they do, they will continue to be woke as their way of going through the power process.
• Wokism and virtue-signaling will continue to exist no matter how many milestones the wokists manage to achieve. Nature is inherently inequitable, so wokists will never run out of new equalist milestones to propose. And every time they do manage to achieve some equalist milestone, other ones will just matter more.
• Many people promote wokism because it personally benefits them.
  • Even if wealth disparities are mostly genetic, that won’t stop poor people from supporting welfare.
  • Underperforming demographics support demographic quotas because the quotas benefit them.
  • Feminists promote feminism because it benefits them.
  • Trans people won’t give up on trans rights or trans advocacy.
  • Et Cetera.
• Wokism that focuses on racial disparities isn’t the only type of Wokism. Some wokists prefer to focus instead on sexual disparities, LGBT groups, climate change, environmentalism, disability rights, etc. If promoting Hereditarianism discourages wokists from focusing on racial disparities, they might redirect their attention to focusing on other woke causes. Instead, it would be better to promote a general public knowledge of Biological Realism, rather than just Hereditarianism.
• Cofnas theorizes that if people understand that racial disparities are genetic, then they’ll stop being woke. That’s mostly true, but it may not be enough. Even though everybody knows that disabled people are disadvantaged by definition, woke activism for disability rights and awareness has been gradually increasing ever since the 60s, with no foreseeable end in sight. This suggests that even if racial disparities are widely recognized as mostly genetic, some people won’t stop advocating for reducing or eliminating the disparities anyway.

To be clear, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t promote hereditarianism, nor am I saying that it’s not possible for hereditarianism to become more influential. What I am saying is that if we want to popularize hereditarianism, we will need to do more than just promoting hereditarianism.

Many of my disagreements with Cofnas on how we should end wokism are a result from how we have different theories on why wokism became popular in the first place. Until the issues that are unrelated to public ignorance are mostly resolved, the wokists will continue promoting woke causes to fill the void of meaning in their lives. I propose the following solutions and ideas for ending wokism:

• We need to educate people about Biological Realism and Epistemology.
• Wokists need to understand that absolute equality is impossible to achieve. If people can understand that the goals of wokism are unattainable, they may re-evaluate their beliefs and actions. The only type of equality that is worth reasonably pursuing is equality in opportunities, not equality in outcomes.
• People need to learn the difference between declarative statements and normative statements. Hereditarianism is a truth claim, not a value claim. A lot of misunderstanding is created by confusing these types of claims. Likewise, people who have sufficient cognitive capacity need to learn that morality is an illusion. Hereditarianism isn’t “evil” because nothing is “evil”.
• Prioritizing demographic quotas over merit will eventually have costs, since they will lead to less qualified professionals. We should use this against the wokists. Medical and law schools should be fined with liability penalties every time an unqualified DEI-chosen graduate loses a malpractice claim.
  • As the Great Replacement worsens, it’s likely that the pool of people with the cognitive potential to work in prestigious occupations will decline.
  • Eventually, the wokists may have to settle for weaker demographic quotas, perhaps even ending them entirely out of necessity. Demographic quotas are incompatible with reality.
• We need to have good arguments and present ourselves as reasonable, intelligent people acting in good faith. These will create cognitive dissonance. See: Moving the Overton Window.
• We need to reclaim the language. We need to stop using language that portrays leftist beliefs, values, and arguments in a positive light. We need to stop using terms like “social construct”, “affirmative action”, “diversity”, etc. There are better, more representative terms that we can use instead. When leftists use biased language, we need to call them out on it.
• Rational Humanism: Most humans need to have a belief system or religion to follow and give purpose in their lives. To replace, we need such a religion that has more natural, sustainable, long-term causes. Rational Humanism proposes that people should focus on reproduction and civilization as the main chosen purposes of their lives.

• Biological realists need to get married, have kids, and outbreed the wokists. There’s some evidence that genetic and hormonal differences can affect people’s beliefs.

  204. Revolutionaries should have as many children as they can.

  There is strong scientific evidence that social attitudes are to a significant extent inherited. No one suggests that a social attitude is a direct outcome of a person’s genetic constitution, but it appears that personality traits are partly inherited and that certain personality traits tend, within the context of our society, to make a person more likely to hold this or that social attitude. Objections to these findings have been raised, but the objections are feeble and seem to be ideologically motivated. In any event, no one denies that children tend on the average to hold social attitudes similar to those of their parents. From our point of view it doesn’t matter all that much whether the attitudes are passed on genetically or through childhood training. In either case they ARE passed on. – Ted Kaczynski, Industrial Society And Its Future

• Biological realists need to run for their children’s school boards to take power away from the wokists. Notably, we have to take back K-12 education before we can take back higher education.

  Reform of public schools must be the highest priority. Studies show that school indoctrination really works and is casting tomorrow’s leaders and voters to be champions of DEI. Conservative governments need to purge woke politicization from the classroom, making this an overriding goal. School choice can do little more than nip at the edges of the problem. As the example of Twitter/X in relation to would-be alternatives like Gab and Parler shows, reforming the mainstream is more effective than starting separate institutions. This is true for all but the most competitive sectors (such as online podcast media), with most spheres of society involving varying degrees of market power which raise stiff barriers to new entrants while entrenching the power of established players. – Eric Kauffman, The Third Awokening

• Academia needs to be overhauled to become more truth-oriented, rather than status and advocacy oriented. Alternatively, the status and social power of Academia needs to decay, since it gives a lot of undeserved credibility to wokists. Either way, we need to weaken the Establishment and the theoretical justifications for wokism.
• We must inform people how underperforming minorities benefit from accepting biological realism.
• Promoting white identity and making arguments against the supposed invalidity of white pride and identity will be necessary for exposing the irrationality of anti-white ideology. White identity and support for pro-white policies will gradually increase as white people continue to be marginalized, discriminated against, and demographically replaced (they will constitute a smaller portion of the population).
• i.
• As time passes and as modern civilization declines, it will become more and more clear that Humanists and Humanist beliefs have failed to achieve the world that they’d like to achieve. If enough frustration, disappointment, and apathy develop, they may be more willing to change their minds and reconsider their worldviews.
• Evolution will gradually cause leftists and leftist genes to become less common, since leftists and wokists have lower fertility than conservatives.

Read More: Essays On Fixing Modern Culture.

• Quote from But knowledge about racial differences could be used to justify racism - Race FAQs:

  To be ignorant of racial differences is equivalent to denying racial differences, which is equivalent to denying reality. We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. Even if we wanted to ignore racial differences, we could never completely ignore them in practice. The biological reality of race is still evident when people need organ transplants, when some people are at risk of disease but not others, why racial disparities continue to exist despite social intervention, who tends to wins Olympic sports, and much more.

  Furthermore, knowledge highlighting racial and genetic diversity doesn’t always have to be negative, nor should it be. If different races (and different people) tend to have different strengths and weaknesses, then it makes sense for a rational society to figure out how to leverage every person’s strengths, while brainstorming how to mitigate or cover every person’s weaknesses. This cannot be done if we ignore racial and genetic differences. Diversity and specialization should go hand in hand.

• Meritocracy ultimately benefits a far greater number of people. The only people who wouldn’t benefit from meritocracy are those who would gain power by preventing meritocracy.
• Eliminating racial disparities won’t eliminate disparities in general. Eliminating one type of inequality will only make other types of inequalities matter more. Nevertheless, a true meritocracy should eliminate disparities that are caused by environmental factors, in order to function properly.
• If people from underperforming demographics are chosen in a system with no demographic quotas, then they won’t have to worry about if they were merely diversity hires. They will know that they were chosen because they were the best person society had to offer for filling the position at that time.
• Societal improvements that help everybody will help underperforming demographics as well. This website proposes many ideas for improving society as a whole. For example, we theorize that Georgism would boost economic prosperity, which would collectively benefit everybody, regardless of how disadvantaged a person may be. Even if some amount of inequality between people is inevitable, it may not matter if everybody is able to achieve and afford a decent standard of living.
• See: Why Does It Matter That People Accept That Race Is Biological? - Race FAQs.
• By understanding the true causes of racial disparities, we can figure out how to address them and eliminate them more efficiently. Finding the truth is instrumental to achieving values.
• If some races have stereotypes that negatively affect how other people perceive them, then we need to ask why those negative stereotypes persist:
  • If a minority of Black people are criminals or have been criminals, then that minority of people is creating a bad perception of the entire demographic as a whole. The actions associated with the criminal minority are partially holding the majority back. So, if we can imprison or eliminate that criminal minority, then the rest of the people in that demographic will benefit from a naturally more positive public perception and stereotype.
  • It only takes a few people from a demographic to create a negative stereotype that ruins the public perception of the demographic as a whole. Just a few people ruin things for everyone else.
  • More succinctly, if we want to improve the public perception of some demographics, then we need to eliminate the people who are creating negative perceptions of the demographic, and thus ruining the public perception of the demographic as a whole.
  • As the collective performance of their demographics improve, the negative perception of those demographics having higher crime and lower intelligence will disappear, which will benefit people from those demographics more and more as they get better and better.
  • Instead of pretending that the stereotype and what causes the stereotype doesn’t exist, the biological realists acknowledge it and address it directly.
• Increasing policing and locking up criminals in neighborhoods that have high crime rates would reduce the amount of crime in those neighborhoods. This would benefit all the people living within those neighborhoods, and make them safer places to live, which could help eliminate the main environmental factors that are holding back the demographics who live in those neighborhoods.
• Reproduction licenses would make it harder to have children, which would make having and raising children higher status. This would probably reduce the population of single parent households and fatherless black children. Currently, many black men choose to seek status by being violent thugs and getting reproductive free rides.
• If we can acquire the necessary political will for enforcing reproduction licenses, it would help reduce or eliminate racial disparities over time. Eugenics would help select for better people from those races, which would put people from those races on more equal footing with everybody else.
• Legalizing all victimless crimes would help reduce the police force’s supposed racial bias towards Blacks and Hispanics. The drug war is unwinnable, and a methodical approach to decriminalizing drugs would be best for addressing and reducing the abuse of harmful drugs.
• Increasing gene flow with other races could help reduce the disparity gaps between high-performing and underperforming groups.
• It’s likely that the human race will probably mix into some sort of global race in the distant future, as race mix continues, if modern civilization manages to persist.
• If underperforming groups increase their performance, that will encourage more race-mixing, which will increase gene flow, which will cause some positive feedback loops for making those groups on a more equal level with the higher performing groups.
• Fortunately, all of these proposed ideas have positive feedback loops with each other.

• Underperforming races would benefit enormously from race realism. They would stop going through life convinced they were cheated. They would lose much of their resentment of whites. They would learn the invaluable lesson that success or failure depends overwhelmingly on their own talents, not what whites think of them.
• Black/white relations – and no one claims they are good – would benefit enormously from race realism. If many blacks did not obviously resent whites, race relations would be much less fraught with tension. If whites didn’t have to worry constantly about “privilege” and “microaggressions” and “unconscious bias”, they would have less reason to avoid blacks and better relations with the ones they know.
• Finally, if society were honest about race, the forces that created Dylann Roof, Patrick Crusius, and Payton Gendron would be much weaker. Is it surprising that some young whites get angry when they are taught that they are oppressors, have no history to be proud of, and that their eventual replacement by non-whites will be a triumph of diversity? Violent, sickening acts are even more likely when dissident views are suppressed and called “hate” or “white supremacy”.
• People who have a voice speak; people who are silenced express themselves in other ways. Brenton Tarrant is an Australian who shot up two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. He was opposed to mass, non-white immigration, which he thought threatened the white majority. I feel certain that if there had been a full, public debate on the pros and cons of Muslim immigration, and on the pros and cons of reducing the white percentage of the population through immigration, he would not have killed anyone. – Jared Taylor, America Must Have Race Realism

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What Needs To Be Done To Reduce Crime Rates

In order for a police force to be truly effective, it’s necessary for it to monitor areas with higher crime rates. Effectiveness is measured by the police’s ability to stop and deter crime. Areas with higher crime rates may happen to have higher Sub-Saharan African, Amerindian, or Hispanic populations, but that doesn’t make it “racist” for police departments to monitor those more closely and more often. The problem with ghettos is the people who live in those places.

If anything, the best thing that whites could do for blacks is to police the hell out of those neighborhoods. Increased policing imprisons people who would otherwise be repeat offenders and/or make more offspring who are genetically predisposed to become future criminals. It also increases the game-theoretic pressure to avoid committing crimes, Increased policing will lead to less crime. Less crime thus leads to increased safety and greater prosperity for all.

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In order to end wokism, it is important that underperforming demographics understand how accepting biological realism could benefit them. One of the biggest reasons why such demographics support wokism is because they believe that they will benefit from woke policies. If people don’t understand how the world would benefit from accepting biological realism, then they are unlikely to support it. They need to understand that it is disadvantageous to let wokism continue.

See: Virtue-Signaling vs Rational Activism.

Valuing diversity should imply valuing discrimination, otherwise what value is there to be gained from having diversity? If there is variation, but no selection, there will be no improvements in the ideas or output. Likewise, if there is no diversity, then there would be no value to discriminating. If there is no variation, then there is nothing to select from.

If the left-wing worldview is taken to its logical conclusion, it would actually lead to complete racial segregation. They don’t believe that there are any important differences between people of different races, but if that’s the case, then there can’t be any possible benefit to diversity because we’re all the same. And yet they celebrate diversity, even though they have no reason why it would make anybody’s life better.

At the same time, there are supposed disadvantages that are created by being a minority, so the logical conclusion should be that the best thing to do would be to segregate everybody by race, so that nobody faces the disadvantages of being a minority.

If other cultures and peoples are so insightful, then why don’t the leftists live in those countries? The vast majority of leftists wouldn’t live anywhere else but the West, except maybe Japan and other Westernized countries. If immigration boosts economic growth by increasing the population and thus increasing the size of the economy, then that’s an argument for first-worlders to migrate to third-world countries, not the other way around.

Related: If racism is so bad, why is diversity so good? - Aporia Magazine.

Lookism will probably be the last form of discrimination to ever be eliminated. Not even the most hard-core leftists who claim to be obsessed with eliminating all forms of discrimination have recognized Lookism as a prevalent form of discrimination that exists basically everywhere.

In some cases, heightism can be classified as a subtype of lookism. Heightism is another form of discrimination that leftists don’t address, even though addressing it ought to be part of their worldview.

When leftists use the word “diversity”, sometimes what they’re really talking about is their desire for equal representation of population subgroups into positions of power and influence. In my opinion, equal representation is the only case where “diversity” makes any sense, provided that it’s practical, increases political stability, and it’s not reasonably unachievable due to genetic and biological differences. “Equal Representation” is a better term because it communicates its goal more explicitly and doesn’t have any hidden agendas, unlike “Diversity” which is now a euphemism for anti-white racism, and rightfully carries negative connotations.

The need for equal representation originates whenever there is a sizable portion of the population that is distinctly different from the rest of the population. In countries that are racially and/or linguistically diverse like India, the United States, Nigeria, the DRC, etc, there are great efforts to promote equal representation in government, STEM jobs and research, the corporate world, etc, because their populations are diverse. It’s not possible for a country with lots of racial, linguistic, religious, etc diversity to stay together for very long unless each of the diverse factions are treated equally and have fairly equal amounts of representation in major institutions. In some cases however, the drive for equal representation of all races has gone too far in Western countries to the point where it has lead to white people being nearly erased from advertising and much of the country’s mass media.

Since the United States had a sizable black population of about ~15% for over 200 years, black people in the United States felt excluded since the country still never had a black president until 2009. If black people have always made up an average of about ~13% of the population of the US for the ~220 years for which the US has existed with a president as the head of government (starting with the enforcement of the US Constitution in 1789) up to the start of Obama’s presidency in 2009, then 220 * 0.13 = 28.60 years for which it would be proportionately “fair” for the US to have a black president, if we are working under the thesis that the goal of diversity equal representation is to represent every faction of the population equally. The historical reasons why the United States never had a black president during the 19th and 20th centuries can be attributed to the social and legal inequality of blacks in comparison to whites. Now that social and legal equality between blacks and whites has been achieved, genetic factors are the primary reason why the US is very unlikely to have proportionally as many black presidents as there are black people in the national population for the 21st century and beyond. Hence, it’s not feasible nor reasonable for the US to have a proportionally “fair” percentage of black presidents in its future.

As another example, religion is a very polarizing topic in Nigeria where the population is split in nearly equal halves between Christianity and Islam. If the government and/or president of Nigeria was constantly represented by only one religion but not the other, this would disrupt the balance of power and national stability of the country. Thus, the Nigerian government must alternate between Christian-partisan and Islam-partisan leadership, lest the other side will feel excluded, perhaps even to the point where they will riot over it. Diversity between the two religions would be a less pressing issue if the country was split 95/5, 90/10, or even 80/20 on religion, one way or the other.

Theoretically at some point, some differences in a country’s population could become so small that the differences would basically become a non-issue, from the collective perspective of the entire population. In an ethnically homogenous country like Japan, Korea, Tunisia, etc, it wouldn’t make sense for the people in those countries to promote ethnic diversity in their leadership (government positions, corporation CEOs, representation in STEM, etc) because they are ethnically homogenous. An ethnically diverse government and corporate elite would not be representative of those countries. It probably depends on the context of the situation, but the insignificance of minority factions may have to be as small as 1/20, 1/50, 1/100, or perhaps even 1/1000 before the general population can safely ignore them without fearing any major consequences. Trans Activists who are in favor of stating pronouns believe that a population split of less than 1/100 is still big enough to warrant mandating everyone to state their pronouns, but I disagree on this for practical reasons. In the most general form, this question could be rephrased as:

“How big would the ratio have to be to make it reasonable for the majority of the population to do X to accommodate the minority of the population? 1/1000? 1/100? 1/10? 1/3?”

Since every human society has two biological sexes, there will always be at least one way to divide every human society into at least two separate and nearly equally-sized demographics. So even if a human society was ethnically homogenous, there could always persist a demand for the less represented sex to gain representation in a field of power and/or influence, provided that the society is reasonably egalitarian.

This partially explains why feminism, egalitarianism, and patriarchy are much bigger issues in South Korea. South Korean politics focuses more on men vs women’s rights because the country is racially homogenous. It’s likely that Western countries would’ve seen similar, much stronger political tensions regarding men vs women if Western countries had experienced less mass immigration during the late 1900s.

As of 2024, the United States has never had a female president in the entirety of its 248 years of existence and 235 years for which it has had a president.⁷ Even then, it is difficult to imagine that the US will ever have enough female presidents leading over enough years to ever have a completely equal number of years over which it has had male presidents, because it simply isn’t biologically natural for women to be social leaders at the same rate as men are.

The best way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating by race. Unfortunately, when people get used to preferential discriminatory treatment, equal treatment will seem like discrimination, even though it’s the other way around.

“Affirmative action” is a misleading term, nor is it descriptive of what it actually is. If someone didn’t know what “affirmative action” is, it’s not clear what the “actions” are, nor would it be clear what’s supposed to be affirmed. Sometimes “affirmative action” is about achieving equal representation. But these days and especially in Western countries, “affirmative action” is actually about discriminating against the majority demographic in favor of less qualified minority demographics, by the use of demographic quotas. So when talking about “affirmative action” in general, I shall use the term “racial quotas” and “demographic quotas” henceforth. Likewise, people who are in favor of “Racial Quotas” and “Demographic Quotas” shall be called “Ethnomarxists” and “Demographic Marxists”. These terms are more self-descriptive and intuitive. They also better highlight what “affirmative action” actually is and what it’s about.

However, we should note that these “quotas” may be biases, and are not necessarily strict quotas (i.e. wokists may not be aiming for strict proportions or percentages). More moderate wokists would prefer quotas that are proportioned to the demographic makeup of the population. Whereas more radical wokists want prestigious positions to be filled by underrepresented groups as much as possible (e.g. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Biden administration, etc).

We could more simply just use the words discrimination, racism, sexism, etc to refer to “affirmative action”. But if I call it “discrimination”, “racism”, etc instead, people aren’t always going to know if I’m talking about “affirmative action” specifically or discrimination in general. Hence why I like the term “demographic quota”, even if I have to explain that it’s not necessarily a strict quota.

See: Wikipedia: Asian Quota, Wikipedia: Jewish Quota.

Demographic quotas reward less qualified people at the expense of people with better merits. The end result is that prestigious white-collar jobs are occupied by less qualified people. Eliminating demographic quotas would thus ensure that applicants to universities, scholarship recipients, and other opportunities are all based purely on merit. This is the better approach because it would lead to our society to have better engineers, better programmers, better lawyers, better doctors, etc, which would lead to better machinery, better software, a better legal system, and better healthcare. The merit-based approach thus benefits everyone across the board, whereas the same cannot be said for the demographic quotas approach. Additionally, if a person of color does become a doctor, engineer, lawyer, etc in the future, they won’t have to wonder if they were the best the school had to offer, or the “best adjusted for race”. The rest of society won’t have to wonder or suspect that either when they are the patient, the consumer, or the defendant.

This tweet basically says that black people have no merits and they need a rigged system to get jobs. Apparently, it was written by a parody account rather than a real person, but the point still stands: Racial quotas sound so stupid and absurdly racist when the quiet part is spoken out loud. Ethnomarxists believe that the only way blacks and Hispanics can achieve a Harvard education is if they are given preferential treatment and access.

Another problem with demographic quotas is that you can define an almost unlimited number of intersectional categories. Even if demographic quotas do succeed in selecting applicants with equal quotas for race and sex, wokists may eventually ask “Why stop there?” Applicants should also be selected equally based on childhood upbringing, disabilities, hardships, life circumstances, etc. Going further, leftists may eventually demand that everyone should also receive equal income, equal benefits, equal dating opportunities, etc, in addition to existing race/sex/disability/hardship quotas. If you make one type of inequality go away, then other types of inequality will simply matter more. The same argument can also be made as to why pursuing maximal wealth equality is equally pointless.

To summarize, pursuing demographic quotas and other types of absolute equality has at least two problems: 1. it erodes meritocracy, and 2. it only makes other types of inequality matter more.

Read More: Refuting Leftist Counter-Arguments In Favor Of Demographic Quotas.

If it were truly a “good” thing to have equal numbers of men and women in every field, then leftists would put the same amount of effort (scholarships, marketing, preaching, etc.) into getting more men into female-dominated fields, like education, medical field, linguistics, the humanities, etc. When questioned about this, leftists will tend to say that it’s also important that more men enter the humanities too. However, we have to judge people by their actions instead of their words to figure out what they truly want. Leftists don’t even try to recruit more men into female-dominated fields. They only want more women to study STEM because STEM fields have greater social power. They are where humanity’s technology and innovation take place.

People don’t choose what they want to study based on public perceptions of gender or ethnicities. That whole notion is absolutely ridiculous. Everybody studies what they are interested in or what will benefit them. Even though 60% of college students are women and the ratio of women-only to men-only scholarships at US colleges is also 11 to 1, there are still less women in STEM fields than men (biology and medical fields are exceptions). The gender gap in other STEM fields may be decreasing, but it’s unlikely that it’ll ever decrease enough to be completely equal for both sexes. This implies that the gender gap in STEM participation is primarily due to natural, biological differences between men and women. Men and women simply have different interests, and that is okay.

Even if women were subsidized with scholarships and preferential treatment to encourage an equal participation of women in STEM fields, men would still continue to be the leaders in STEM. If there are two groups that work in STEM and one of them chooses it without financial incentives because they would enjoy more than anything else that they could do, and the other group works in it in part because of the financial benefits, then the group that does STEM without those benefits is going to have the better scientists, the better engineers, and the better mathematicians since they’re more motivated to do the field to begin with without the additional financial incentives. The unsubsidized people that are willing to work in STEM work without any additional incentives (men) will still be the better workers in the long run since they are more motivated by the field itself instead of its economic benefits.

If women can do everything that men can, how come they’ve never successful oppressed an entire gender? – Toler Wolfe

See: Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber by James Damore.

See: What is Feminism? by Blithering Genius.

• The only coherent definition of “woman” is “adult human female”. Trans-inclusive definitions of “woman” require presupposing the male-female sex dichotomy while simultaneously denying it. Nearly all English dictionaries define <woman> as “adult human female”. If a dictionary does include a trans-inclusive definition for <woman>, it’s never the first or primary definition.
• Trans women are not women, and trans men are not men (assuming the most logical definitions of “man” and “woman”). No matter how many surgeries, hormones, or therapy a person receives, no one will ever be able to become the opposite sex of what they were born without showing obvious imperfections. Biology is reality. It will always be impossible to change and/or erase the serious neurological and biological differences between men and women.
• The best and most non-controversial way to define “woman” is via genetics. In mammals, the Y chromosome contains the gene SRY, which triggers male development.
  • A woman is an adult human female, who does not have a Y chromosome that contains the gene SRY. It’s that simple.
  • For people who have (Complete) Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, they are still male by definition. They have a disorder, but it’s a rare boundary case where a person may present as the opposite sex and be accepted as such without any surgeries, hormone replacement therapy, etc. There are thus rare cases when people might refer to a biological male as a woman in a social context, use she/her, etc, but that person is still not a woman, biologically speaking.
• Sex is the most important and primal social distinction in human society. Sex is 2 billion years old. Nations are thousands of years, and race is hundreds of thousands.
• Gender dysphoria is maladaptive, and it is classified as a mental disorder according to the DSM-5. Its occurrence in the modern era is likely yet another negative consequence of modern civilization, technology, and evolutionary mismatch.
  • Some research has shown that transgender brains are structured more closely to brains of the opposite sex compared to cisgender brains, although they’re still structured more closely to their respective biological sexes.
• Early-onset gender dysphoria should be distinguished from late-onset gender dysphoria.
• LGB (drop the T) should be popularized as an acronym, because being gay or bisexual is not the same as being transgender.
• Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) and Liberal Feminists disagree on how trans people should be treated. A majority of trans people are male-to-female (MTF), so TERFs view the trans movement as some sort of convoluted patriarchal scheme that entails an absolute undermining of the female body/identity, and out-competing women in different domains (e.g. rights, sports, etc).
  • It’s amusing when different factions of wokists oppose each other. It’s comparable to how Leftists and Muslims are often united politically, despite being opposed to each other in many ways.
  • The pro-trans faction won and became more mainstream. Some version of feminism still pervades everything, but the trans people are holier, because they are further removed from normality and functionality. Feminists reject the natural order, but trans people actually reject their own bodies.
• Intersex people are to transgender people as albino people are to white people. They are completely different things. Bringing up intersex people as an excuse for the existence of more than two sexes is a Red Herring Fallacy.
• Detransition and regret following a gender transition are related, but distinct concepts.
• The argument that “a woman is what we say a woman is” is a circular definition, and thus fallacious.
• Trans ideology is founded upon the idea of gender and sex being different. But the ideology and arguments are really just a game of defining terms. Things like a legal systems, nations, love, etc have cultural constructions around them, but that doesn’t make the underlying things fake.
• Trans ideology isn’t falsifiable, and no evidence is supplied for why it really exists. If you ask any trans rights activist (TRA) why they believe in the sex-gender dichotomy, they would say that they believe it because the definitions of “sex” and “gender” are true. However, this ignores that they were the ones who invented the definitions. This means that their beliefs are a matter of faith, not rationality.
• Since leftists are changing language to advance their agenda, the rationalists could modify their culture war strategy by using different language. The trans activists acknowledge that “female” only refers to sex and is thus exclusive of transwomen. So instead of excluding transwomen from the definition of <woman>, the rationalists could start using “female” everywhere. Examples:
  • Males should never compete in female sports.
  • Males are forbidden from entering female restrooms and female-only spaces.
  • X does not have to date males, and Y does not have to date females, if X and Y are not attracted to those sexes.
  • “she” is for females and “he” is for males.
  • Et cetera.
  • Note: Since leftists will argue that ’man’ and ’woman’ are social terms and that ’male’ and ’female’ are biological terms, this approach might not work for some social things. In which case, both sides will have to continue arguing over what a ’woman’ is. If the trans activists try to move the goal post again by changing the definition of “female” too, the rationalists can call them out on it.

• The medical field should be focusing on how to treat gender dysphoria (i.e. to cure it; to make it go away), not on how to affirm the illness.
• Trans people may feel that gender reassignment surgeries, hormonal therapies, etc may help them feel better, but there are not enough long-term studies conducted on this, as of the early 2020s. There aren’t many out there since trans-people are a recent phenomenon with not a lot of people to study.
• The long-term effects of puberty-blockers, hormonal therapies, sex reassignment surgeries, etc are still unknown and possibly dangerous (especially for children), and yet they’re becoming more common anyway due to leftist ideology and big pharma.
• The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems and requirements that candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass.
• It could be that some transgender people choose to transition because they want attention and/or because they’re bored because they’re not able to go through the power process in today’s world.
  • Some people who transition due to late-onset gender dysphoria are motivated to transition in part because it’s a fetish for them.
• How does the argument “born in a different body” make any sense? Hypothetically, I could say “I feel like I’m born in the body of a 17th century nobleman”. But I’m not. I can’t change that anymore than I could change what sex or gender I am.

• Pronouns are supposed to make speaking more convenient. Forcing people to remember everybody’s pronouns makes them inconvenient, which defeats the purpose of using pronouns.
• If you have 30 people in a room and only one or two (or zero) have ’preferred pronouns,’ making it mandatory for everyone to announce their pronouns is a tokenistic time-waster. Among strangers, the main purpose of group introductions is to serve as an icebreaker, not so much for everybody to introduce themselves with the assumption that everybody will remember everything. Most people aren’t trying to pay attention, so most people won’t remember anything, much less preferred pronouns.
• How often do people hear their own pronouns anyway? When talking with people, it’s usually just “you” or their name. Requiring people to use preferred pronouns requires third parties to police what people say on the trans-person’s behalf. Why should people care how others describe them when they aren’t around to hear it, especially if they aren’t trying to be rude?
• Even if we do use someone’s preferred pronouns, they might still get upset anyway.
• Forcing people to use preferred pronouns is compelled speech. It violates freedom of expression.
• The only reason all this pronoun nonsense has any traction is because it’s imposed from the top down. Trans activists tend to argue that language changes and evolves, so adding made-up pronouns shouldn’t be an issue. But this argument ignores that the language change is not organic or natural in this case, hence why it is an issue. The language change is being forced on people against their common sense (and self-preservation), and people face consequences if they fail to submit to the leftists’ rules.
• If an employer is hiring people and they see a list of pronouns on an applicant’s resume, they are wise to toss the resume and move on. It’s a red flag that such people can and will play the identity card at the slightest inconvenience, and that their company is guaranteed to lose when the lawsuit comes, even if no laws were broken and no harm was caused.

In real life though, if someone politely asks me to use their pronouns, then I will generally refer to them as they wish and not make a big deal out of it, even if I think that it’s silly and ridiculous.

• Languages that have gendered noun classes pose a barrier to gender neutrality that is unlikely to ever be overcome. Historically, there’s never been such a successful and radical change to a language’s grammar that’s been motivated purely by moralism, so it’s likely to fail.
• The ’inclusive’ language where females are called ’people who menstruate’, ’menstruators’, ’people with vulvas’, etc is arguably dehumanizing and demeaning, although there are also some arguably good reasons for using this language.
• Using preferred pronouns can be a token of respect to people who care about them, so I will use them in optional settings if I’m trying to be polite, but it still feels wrong and unnatural to me, because it requires me to deny reality to an extent.
• Singular they should be regarded as standard, grammatically correct English for a gender-neutral third-person pronoun, particularly if the speaker doesn’t know the gender of the referent. I use singular they for unidentified referents all the time, since everybody else in my generation also uses it.
  • Theoretically, English could evolve to make a natural distinction between singular they and regular they by controlling the verb conjugations, but the difference would still be ambiguous for possessive determiners and object pronouns. Example:
    • Singular They: They is smart. They has to do the job.
    • Regular They: They are smart. They have to do the job.
• If you need/want to avoid using a person’s preferred pronouns, you should only say their name, and use passive voice when/if it helps.
• If a person has a (foreign) name whose gender and pronouns are difficult to discern, they should just say that they are “male” or “female”, and everybody will be able to infer what pronouns should be used to refer to them. This is the best way for someone to indicate their pronouns if they don’t want to imply that they are woke.

• Trans people will never go away, unless governments make it illegal for people to get trans surgeries, hormonal “treatments”, etc.
• People should be required to use the restroom designed for their urinary tracts. Different bathrooms have different toilets that are designed for different urinary tracts. This will also decrease the probability that females get sexually assaulted in female restrooms.
• To throw open the doors of women’s bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman is to throw open the doors to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth. And it’s of growing concern since gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones.
• It should be illegal for puberty-blockers, hormonal therapies, sex reassignment surgeries, etc to be given to children who are not legal adults. Society should reconsider the age of adulthood, although it wouldn’t be too different.
• Trans women should be forbidden from being able to play in women’s sports. Even if they take hormone therapies and surgeries to make them more similar to women, they will still have an unfair biological advantage against them that enables them to win competitions in women’s sports. If trans women want to play in athletic sports competitions, then they must compete in men’s sports instead.
  • I’m not saying that trans women should be forbidden from playing in any sports at all. I’m just saying that they should compete in the same competitions meant for their biological sex.
• Trans people who won’t date other trans people make up a minority of trans people. Having gender dysphoria may be beyond their control, but if they say that they only date “men” or that they only date “women” and they refuse to date trans people, then they are being hypocritical, especially if they would rather affirm their own mental illness rather than try to fix it.
• Every trans person should disclose that they are trans before going on a date with someone. Not just because it’s lying/unethical for them to not do so, but also because it’s in the interest of their own personal safety (they wouldn’t want to piss off a violent, unstable person by lying to them).
• The threshold would have to be incredibly high to argue for anything regarding “trans rights” on utilitarian grounds since they are such a small proportion of the population.
  • Any impositions to comfort trans people that even mildly inconvenience the majority would fail to maximize utility.
  • On the other hand, if comforting trans people was worth inconveniencing the majority, then trans people would be utility monsters, by definition.
• Society’s (and especially leftists’) obsession with gender identity is yet another instance of the modern world’s denial of biological realism.
• The obsession with gender identity takes away from focusing on more important problems, like suicidal problems, economic problems, overpopulation, etc.
• Trans people deserve the same rights and respect that everybody else has.
  • In practice, this often doesn’t happen because they often look ugly, they can’t fully pass as the sex and gender that they’re trying to present as, and many people dislike them for redirecting so much of the public’s attention, culture, and politics.
    • Even if this is the case, that is still not a good reason to deny transgender people respect and decency when they’re minding their own business.