Pragmatists Guide to Crafting Religion Review - Chapter 3B - Wokeism

Previously:
Preamble
Chapter 1 - The Why (Chapter 1 digressions)
Chapter 2 - Numbers Go Up
Chapter 3A - The Hardness Spectrum (Chapter 3 digressions)

[audio available here, courtesy of AskWho]

Chapter 3 - TYPES OF CULTURES (continued)

The last type of culture discussed is super-relevant to the issues of the day, so it gets the rest of this chapter (and a lot of mentions in the rest of the book). It is Wokeism. The Collinses refer to it as the supervirus, but we all know what it is and we don’t need another new term.

They assert that the vital purpose at the heart of Wokeism is to prevent emotional pain.

Historically, pop cultures, simple memetic viruses, evolved to target single nodes. These cultures would flip target nodes (convert them) by offering individuals an easy life and positive emotional subsets […] The supervirus evolved a new strategy. Instead of flipping individual nodes, it works to flip entire nodal networks. Instead of selling the promise of minimizing emotional suffering within a single node, it entices nodal systems with the prospect of minimizing negative emotion across the entire network.

This is not what I would have said is the core of Wokeism, but this is their book, and I’m not sure it matters anyway as long as we all know what we’re talking about.

They lean hard into the virus metaphor, and I think it’s a good one. It captures Dawkins’ original concept of a meme and adds some compelling imagery:

Once an organization reaches a certain level of infection, it begins to grow departments or branches designed to do nothing but spread the infection and accumulate resources, much like growing tumors hijack blood supply. The core function of these new departments and branches is to impose the supervirus’s values (e.g., all emotional distress = violence). These departments also systematically identify, target, and remove groups and people immune to the supervirus (i.e., they report “problematic” information and people).

The concept of a memeplex evolving to remove those who are immune to it was one I hadn’t been directly aware of before, it was nice to have it brought to my attention this explicitly.

The most interesting new claim they make is that Wokeism has evolved to kill the institutions it infects, because this allows it to spread faster. Much like pre-modern cholera was non-lethal (because the host dying meant the cholera died), but once humans became concentrated into cities with communal water systems it evolved to make people shit themselves to death because the supply of hosts was functionally infinite, so too…

In addition to draining resources from infected nodal networks, the parasitoidal supervirus eventually kills them and does so “intentionally.” Iterations of the supervirus that randomly mutated into versions that kill their hosts have outcompeted strains that do not. […] Once an organization, cultivar, or movement is infected by the supervirus, portions of its internal machinery get redirected toward infecting as many members of that organization as possible. This would be a fairly slow reproductive strategy if those individuals all stayed within that organization’s static nodal network, which is why parasitoidal iterations of the supervirus have a competitive advantage

…a fully-infested organization that falls apart releases all its constituent members back into the social/labor pool to infect a large number of new hosts.

How?

the supervirus begins to modify the infected nodal network’s governing structure to repeatedly and systemically target anyone in a leadership position while encouraging large amounts of infighting—all while spawning dozens of spontaneously forming and dissolving sub-governing councils (this process can be seen in the Occupy Wall Street movement, The Women’s March, Gawker, and CHAZ

an organization infected by the supervirus will act in a way that is riskier and more likely to lead to self-destruction than one would expect

an infected organization will act in a manner that draws a lot of media attention in an effort to infect even more people before it functionally dies

A fascinating assertion, and one that explains a lot! Go Woke Go Broke isn’t a bug, it’s a feature! As they say: “This is a problem … a big friggin’ problem … when something like a country's controlling political organization is infected.”

The supervirus is unique among cultures in that it does not strive to create its own cultural identity but instead “wears” the skin of its victims to hide from societal immune systems that historically would have protected against a shameless, self-replicating piece of code. The virus will puppet the corpse of its victim, point to good things the host accomplished before becoming infected and say: How can you criticize me? I am an X, and X is all about helping people! Look at all the great things I have done!”

Emphasis added, so I can comment that this is extremely annoying. I’ve talked with people who claim wokeism is responsible for black civil rights in the US, despite not having existed until decades later. I’ve had it claimed to my face that wokeism is why we have gay rights, despite having been active in gay rights activism myself and knowing full well this ideology did not exist back then. This is another reason why immortality would be really good for the human species — the more people that were around in the past to see it that can now say “I was there, stop lying” the better. Destruction of the collective experience and knowledge of humanity is a travesty.

A note on blame-worthiness

Just as the supervirus is apolitical, it is also neither “evil” nor constructed by some group of ill-intentioned individuals or guided by any intentionality. The supervirus evolved into existence, shaped by trial and error. It spreads because it is better at spreading than the competition. It exists and grows only because it is good at shutting down the immune systems of existing cultivars and organizations, then hijacking their machinery to self-replicate.

We don’t “win” by destroying this thing. We “win” by creating something that gives people hope, purpose, and inspiration. The virus can only spread into spaces that are so spiritually malnourished that something like this looks attractive. Similar to how (most of) the rats in the opium-cages stop taking opium if you put them in enriching environments with rat-friends.

Which is much of the point of this project, right?

Why is Wokeism bad?

IMO it’s because bigotry and authoritarianism are both bad, and Wokeism loves both! But the Collinses have additional reasons.

Diversity?

Once the supervirus controls a certain number of nodes within a cultivar, it begins to systematically erase that cultivar’s core, including its inherent values and objectives […] In erasing the genuine differences in how these cultures historically saw the world—the “offensive” bits—the supervirus robs us of these cultivars’ rich cultural histories and unique approaches to problems.

Because the supervirus targets the most prosocial, open-minded people in any given society and culturally castrates them, our grandchildren will live in a much less open-minded and intellectually engaged society. Minority groups heavily poached by the virus will have permanent genetic scars from this over-hunting of their best and brightest.

I dunno… this feels like a stretch. I feel like the best and brightest are mostly keeping their heads down and avoiding Wokeism, and it’s mainly the normies that are getting caught up in it. Which still sucks, since they outnumber the best and brightest.

A key factor behind the virus’s success is its ability to prevent any seriously infected individual from engaging with any idea or concept it has not vetted. […] If a single point is found that makes the person seem to not be on their “team”—they then will ignore the rest of the content and immediately go online and “tag” the text/individual as dangerous to other infected individuals. […] it’s happy to destroy the lives of three faithful adherents if it also wipes one immune node off the chessboard. Therefore, it does not require adherents to actually find violating language or thoughts in order to tag a node. If an individual merely suspects someone else might be immune to the virus and hiding it, they will accuse them of “dog-whistling,”

A good description of authoritarian compliance tactics. However they end this with the weird claim that “the concept of a “dog whistle” is a totally new cultural innovation.” I’m sorry, but what? Rooting out the heretic by searching for any hint of thought-crime has been a time-honored tradition since the first fanatic created the first fanatic interest group!

The system has no “job is done; turn things off now and stop escalating” mechanism […] this paperclip maximizer will never stop advancing its quest to remove emotional pain from the universe. Talk to the most infected individuals about the problem of birth rates in a trusted environment (something we do frequently), and they will let you in on the truth: Humanity itself is a curse on the planet from their perspective, and most humans endure net suffering.

I admit that this is true from my experience as well. I’m not sure about the direction of causation here. Negative Utilitarianism is almost always (maybe just always?) the result of prolonged depression/self-loathing (ask me how I know!). It seems very plausible that since Wokeist ideology centers suffering so strongly it’s hard to be active within it and not become misanthropic. However it’s also possible that due to its misanthropic nature it just draws in the people who are already naturally so inclined.

It’s probably a combination of both. There’s a lot of power to be had in removing inhibitions on destructive behavior and encouraging the embers of self-loathing that we all carry within us to flare into bonfires.

But yeah, I’ve never seen anyone be made better off psychologically by becoming woke, and I’ve seen a lot of people spiraling downward by doing so. :(

To be clear, while we do not think the supervirus is the primary cause of falling birth rates, we do think it is the primary factor blocking honest discourse about the ramifications of a hard landing on demographic collapse

I think that it is certainly a contributing cause. Why would you want to bring new humans into a world that’s so bad it would be better if no one existed?

What Doing?

So long as it doesn’t manage to kill us all, it will eventually go extinct on its own. Such is the curse of low birth rates

Eh heh….

The only way to counter it is to “genetically engineer” stronger cultivars that are not susceptible to it and build a framework for these cultivars to differentially work with each other while using the supervirus’s own strategy of deprioritizing vulnerable nodes. Essentially, we must create a mirror society.

Huh.

Well, yes, we are trying to create a cultural/community/religion structure that gives the people closest to us what they need to thrive. Once they have that, they won’t really be vulnerable to Wokeism. I’ve seen this happen with my own two eyes, it’s beautiful. But I don’t think the goal is to counter the woke supervirus, that’s just a side-effect.

The phrase “while using supervirus’s own strategy of deprioritizing vulnerable nodes” really worries me. I think that actually the most vulnerable in our society should have extra priority given to them so they are not lost. But perhaps I’m misreading this. Perhaps they mean “don’t invite in people who are vulnerable/compromised.” Which I strongly support. I have a personal rule to not date or sleep with woke women anymore, and it’s intensely healing, I recommend it to everyone. I am definitely wary of any group that doesn’t have some defense against the woke creeping in, so if they’re advocating having those defenses up, I’m all for it.

Creating a mirror society though… that’s a lot. It reminds me of the Two Americas. Or Scott Alexander’s dark matter world of conservatives that must exist but he never meets. I think of the divide between Red and Blue restaurants (Chick-Fil-A vs Cafe Rio), Red and Blue media, and Red and Blue businesses generally. Do we really want to create two parallel societies in the same geographical location that don’t intersect at all? I don’t think this is the best idea tbh. Let’s start with making a relatively smaller values-aligned distributed community first. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses did. Except without the crazy woo stuff.

here’s one very simple protective mechanism: Any cultivar that systemically punishes people who give in to their emotions—be they positive or negative—will be totally immune. Viewing emotions as mere signals and inconvenient products of our evolution (our ancestors who had them had more surviving offspring) makes flagging language like “that might hurt someone’s feelings” impotent.

Emphasis in the original. This is going too far IMO. We Are Godshatter. Emotions are great actually, and based on all my viewings of Based Camp, Malcolm intrinsically believes this even if he claims otherwise.

Perhaps for the people the Collins’s religion is for this is a good line to push, because it is meant to serve a head-strong and fiery folk. The people I’m hoping to serve are traditional rationalists — people who have a long history of suppressing their emotions far too much. We really need the post-rats to help us incorporate vibes and embodiment, to make friends with our animal bodies rather than trying to break them. We don’t need to crush them further.

That being said, one of the things that getting in touch with your emotive self grants you is the understanding that actually hurting someone’s feelings is often fine. Hurt is an experience that all living beings sometimes have, like hunger or fear, and trying to avoid it at all costs is far more damaging than being a grown-ass adult about it. In short, we can and should all learn to be far more like Aella.