Psychological Causes of "Wokism"

Jordan Peterson, in a recent podcast interview with Paul Rossi, wondered aloud about the causes of “wokeness”: “I keep trying to figure it out, because I’ve been concerned about this for a long time and still can’t get to the bottom of it,” mused Dr. Peterson. “I know there’s a resentment element to it, but I can’t understand exactly what’s driving this, and why it’s … making the headway ... [it is].”

If even Jordan Peterson can’t figure out wokeness, that should be an indication of what a choke-pear this issue really is. Nonetheless, I would suggest that Dr. Peterson has at least the beginnings of an answer well at hand, but has for some unaccountable reason been unable to connect the necessary dots. For hasn’t Dr. Peterson noted on at least several occasions that the best measurable predictor of political ideology (or belief) is personality? And didn’t one of Dr. Peterson’s own students, Christine Andary-Brophy, submit a masters thesis related to this issue? From such sources one can at least form initial conjectures on what might be the underlying motivations behind the horrors of wokism. By adding a few other insights drawn from this place or that, I suspect we can begin to develop an intuitive sense of what these motivations might be—or at the very least draw up the very first outlines for a research program into this difficult issue.

Now I have already introduced most of the following proposed conjectures relating to the causes of “wokeness” in my short book The Psychopathology of the Radical Left. So in this blog post I will be merely restating some of the material introduced in that modest tome.

I’ll begin with what is almost, or at least should be, regarded as an axiom of social science: namely, that when discussing causes of any complex social phenomena, it is naive to assume that there will be a single or even a primary cause. It is unlikely that the causes of wokism can be traced to just one factor, but rather it is likely traceable to multiple factors, some of which may be reinforcing each other in various complex ways. In reducing the complexity of this issue so as to be able to render it comprehensible to the human mind we need to be careful that we are not over-simplifying to the point of serious distortion. 

My broader thesis is that the "woke" left — along with radical leftism in general, of which wokism is merely one of many possible exemplifications — is primarily caused by psychological, rather than intellectual factors. Psychology drives the motivations, which leads to the conduct. Intellectual rationalizations are then concocted to "justify" the behavior — giving a moral gloss to what in its deepest genesis may not be moral at all, but probably arises out of a deep and persistent psychopathology (such as chronic discontent as a consequence of maladaptation to the prevailing social order). These rationalizations, once concocted, can have various rebound affects: that is to say, there may exist reciprocal causation between the motivations and conduct on one side and the rationalizations on the other. The rationalizations should not be regarded as having no influence at all — they just don't constitute the primary cause of this particular species of social dysfunction. Bear in mind that the behavior of the woke left is not dramatically different from previous manifestations of radical leftist behaviors throughout history. Go back to the French Revolution, or the Paris Commune, or the Bolshevik Revolution, or Mao's Cultural Revolution, or the Sixties New Left and you will find examples of variations on very similar themes. What we see among the radical left, particularly among the rank-and-file, are behaviors generated by those who are chronically discontented with Civilization. Radical Leftist elites gin up this discontent to use as leverage to propel them into positions of political power, where they can inflict their various monomanias on the population at large.

Listed below are five possible psychological motivations or causes that could be contributing to the curse of wokism:

(1) Human beings are obsessed with status. (Isn’t that what Jordan Peterson’s lobsters are all about?) Now the problem of this mania for status is that it makes hierarchical structures in society inevitable. The bad side of this is that status hierarchies are, minimally, a zero sum game (or, maximally, a negative sum game). Within a given status hierarchy, there are winners and losers—i.e., people who rise to the top of the hierarchy and those who fall to the bottom. People near the top of the hierarchy tend to be treated “better” by their fellow citizens. They are respected and perhaps even feared. They have what the wokesters call “privilege.” The people who fall toward the bottom, on the other hand, are often treated as infeirors. They are what the wokesters call the “oppressed”—although in a modern free society, that word is palpably hyperbolic. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that those at the bottom of status hierarchies have less "juridicial defense," to borrow a phrase of Gaetano Mosca, and cannot so easily protect themselves from exploitative behavior at the hands of those further up the status hierarchy. 

How does society determine who gets selected for the top positions in the hierarchy and who winds up in the middle or the bottom? In any society there is a kind of selection mechanism which determines one’s position in this hierarchy. Essentially, these selection mechanisms reward competence in certain types of activity. In a capitalist society, business acumen, whether in investment or entrepreneurship, allows for advancement up the hierarchy. One of the reasons why capitalism has been so successful as an engine of abundance and economic progress is because it has made use of status hierarchies to incentivize behavior that leads to wealth creation. The flip side of this is that those who would like to achieve status but who lack the requisite skills for producing and earning riches will not likely be happy with this arrangement, because the selection mechanism for the prevailing status hierarchy is not well suited to their innate aptitudes and temperaments. Such individuals will therefore be inclined to oppose a civilized society based on free markets—although their opposition will be framed in such a way as to conceal their inner motivations. If you want to change society so that its status hierarchies are easier for you to climb, you’re not going to give that as your reason for desiring radical social change. No, you will invent rationalizations that will make your desires for change seem disinterested and even philanthropic. For human beings, the motivations come first, and then “reason” is brought in to paint a happy face over what might otherwise appear much less seemly.

Status motivations are probably more important for the elites of “woke” radical left movements than for the rank-and-file, since it is the elites who will, for obvious reasons, be obsessed with climbing the greasy pole. Even so, there is an element in cancel culture which might be at least partially motivated by status concerns. One aspect of cancel culture is that it seeks to reduce the status of persons perceived as "privileged." By humiliating such people and dragging them to a lower position in the hierarchy, woke leftists can get revenge against those who, because they are better adjusted to the prevailing social order, have been able to attain higher status positions.

(2) Evolution adapts organisms to their environment. Presumably, this would be applicable to human beings as well. But what if our environment has changed so rapidly that evolution cannot keep up? In that case, human beings could find themselves in a environment that they have not evolved to live in.

During the last few hundred years, science and technology, in league with capitalism, has created a world that human beings, by and large, did not evolve to live in. Now while some people may be constituted in such a way that they can adapt and thrive in this brave new world of technology and capitalism, we can't reasonably expect everyone to be that well suited to the new order of things. Techno-capitalist societies tend to reward intelligence, conscientiousness, and perhaps competitiveness as well. Those lacking in these qualities are, all things being equal, going to struggle in the competition for resources and status. This can lead to feelings of distress and chronic discontentment. This disaffected frame of mind predisposes the individual toward ideologies that promise a society that is more congenial to their innate propensities and temperaments. Such people are ripe targets for radical left oppression ideologies such as Marxism and Critical Race Theory.

(3) Excessive agreeableness (or in Paretian terms, excessive “sociality”) may bias the individual against a capitalist order. Because left-wing "humanitarian" motivations often arise from a very emotional place, there is no guarantee that they will be applied in ways that actually help the marginalized people that originally inspired the movement's compassion. Pareto seems to have believed that excessive sociality, whether manifesting itself in asceticism or humanitarianism, led, ironically, to anti-social outcomes. An over abundance of agreeableness may also lead to the kind of decadence one sometimes sees in declining social orders where we are find ruling elites who are unable or unwilling to stand up to violent threats to the social order, such as Antifa or militant Islam. In extreme cases, this unwillingness to stand for a civilized social order against its enemies takes on the aspect of a death wish. In its most decadent forms, leftism can seem like a suicide cult.

(4) If Jonathan Haidt is correct, not all human beings have the same moral view of fairness. Some people see fairness in terms of equality: that is, everyone in society should not only be treated equally, but they should all have, roughly speaking, the same amount of stuff. There are others that see fairness in terms of proportionality: that is, a person who works harder or makes wiser investments deserves more than a person who is lazy or makes bad investments. Now these notions of fairness are not caused by ideas or "philosophy," as intellectuals are apt to believe. People don’t pick ideas randomly from the air and decide, for essentially no reason at all, to follow them. Moral intuitions are, to some extent, hardwired, so that if you see fairness in terms of equality, it’s not altogether clear that you can help that. It’s in your DNA, and so it’s not easily changeable, whether through argument or experience. And so it’s quite possible that there are people among us who, when looking out on the capitalist societies of the West, cannot help but feel morally outraged by the immense amount of inequality that they find in society. What is worse, it's not clear this desire can ever be satisfied without destroying civilization. Since capitalism uses status hierarchies for motivation in relation to investment, innovation, and entrepreneurship, that alone renders equality as a moral standard incompatible with a civilized world order. The planet features over seven and a half billion souls. Keeping this many people alive is a huge challenge—one that we could never hope to meet without the global dominance of free markets. We see what happens when whole nations abandon free markets in pursuit of “social justice”: just look at what’s happened in Venezuela in recent years, where millions have fled across the border into Columbia and millions more have lost at least twenty percent of their body weight (despite devouring their pets and dining on critters from the local zoo). Egalitarianism just doesn’t work. It is not compatible with civilization nor with the survival of billions of people world-wide. But if your moral intuitions strongly predispose you to egalitarianism, what are you supposed to do?

(5) Jonathan Haidt has also brought up the issue of “coddling,” especially in relation to the attempt to eliminate “hate speech” through speech codes and safe spaces. But this coddling has further ramifications beyond what Haidt, along with his co-author Greg Lukianoff, have proposed. By spoiling our children we may be failing to prepare them for the rigors and hardships of the adult world. Being “coddled”—or otherwise facing little in the way of hardship during most of their childhood—makes young people weak and lacking in resilience. When forced to fend for themselves in an ultra-competitive global market, they feel overwhelmed.

This sort of "coddling" can be especially hard on those who are innately low in conscientiousness. Since conscientiousness is a trait rewarded by market competition, its absence puts one at a disadvantage. Now it's quite possible that those born low in conscientiousness may require more discipline to help them overcome this character defect so they won't fall too far behind when they enter adult society. Hence if they are coddled rather than disciplined, this may be setting them up for failure later in life. Failure breeds resentment and resentment breeds radical leftism.