Samizdata

cult conversions … occur by using doctrine to resolve some core emotional vulnerability. … A… clear sign that one is dealing with a cult indoctrination … is making the mark live up to contradictory demands. You must understand racism and admit that you cannot understand racism. You must admit to your complicity in racism and pledge to do better knowing that it is impossible to do better. You must be an ally but accept that you will always do your allyship wrong. … these impossible and paradoxical demands dramatically deepen commitment to the cult … The concept of “white fragility” in the antiracist Woke cult is exactly this sort of emotional shakedown. … Lead the mark to take a step further in, coach them into rationalizing why that step was good, and then repeat with a further step. … when the mark rationalizes these objectively bad decisions and the cognitive dissonance that doing them causes, they nearly always rationalize themselves much further into the cult.

The Cult Dynamics of Wokeness analyses how it spots and indoctrinates its marks, but says little about the mark’s original issue that the woke exploit:

Sometimes, the underlying emotional vulnerability is there for personal reasons, or as a result of life events.

Sometimes, indeed it is – their prime targets are students, who often arrive at university with plenty of youthful insecurity and teenage angst. But wokeness itself can provide the distress as well the abusive ‘resolution’. Students arriving at a politically-correct university are immediately plunged into an artificial racial reality that they are forbidden to notice: affirmative-action admissions ensure that the academic ability of their fellow students correlates strongly with skin colour. Next, the disparate impact theory they are taught offers them only two explanations, one explicit, the other implicit, for the disparities it highlights:

– blacks are statistically unequal to whites because of white racism

– blacks are statistically unequal to whites because they are inferior

No third option is allowed into any target’s mind – not if the woke can help it (if they even know one themselves!). So the mark has a simple choice: believe in the explicit explanation, or become the moral equivalent of Hitler by believing the implicit one. No-one wants to be morally equivalent to Hitler, so, since they know no third option (since the very idea there could be any other alternative to the evil implicit one has never risen into their awareness), every doubt that subtle white racism explains the discrepancy, every argument that denies that white racism, however hidden, is at the root of the differences they’re taught to hate and the even more obvious differences they’re forbidden to notice, threatens them with becoming that object of loathing to their (and society’s) principles, a racist! When these two alternatives are the only ones that a student knows deep down (and up top, in the surface of the mind, they hardly dare think of the implicit one) then the claim that one is either a racist or else admits to being a racist seems to make sense.

(It was the same under Stalin and Mao. In both Russia and China, the mass famines were followed a few years later by the mass purges. Either you accepted that saboteurs, wreckers and enemies were fouling up the scientifically-proven socialist dream, or you were a vile capitalist-roader, an exploiter. One communist who had served the Party in the Ukraine famine and been shaken by what he saw, later wrote:

For that very reason, however, my conscious mind reached out desperately for alibis, for compromises with conscience. … It was imperative to squelch these emotions, to drive them into the underground of my mind. I laboured to repair my loyalties. With the purge in the offing, this urgency was even greater.

“With the purge in the offing …” – the far lesser but real dangers of cancel culture have a similar effect of ‘encouragez les autres’. This encouraging of indoctrinated minds to discipline themselves is as important to wokeness as the conscious fear that cancel culture inflicts on outsiders.)

So, does a better understanding of the problem point us towards any solutions?

The only ways I know of to effect a deprogramming of this are these three: (1) striking right to the heart of the point of vulnerability in a completely different and more healthy way …

The first of the three is what I will talk about. However,

None of this is easy. In fact, it’s all usually very difficult … … People who have been reprogrammed into a cult mentality will perceive all attempts to free them from the cult as malicious attempts to drag them … back to the Bad Emotional Place that they have come to strongly associate with that awful feeling of vulnerability that was used to initiate them into the cult in the first place. The doctrine is the opium that dulls their emotional pain … anyone trying to talk sense to a fully reprogrammed cult member … will be, in a very real sense, interpreted as trying to do harm to them … because the cult doctrine is the proffered resolution to the … emotional vulnerability that led them to be indoctrinated and reprogrammed in the first place. And you must appreciate just how much that vulnerability has been inflamed by the cult initiation, indoctrination, and reprogramming process.

At this point it’s time to talk about the elephant in the room; that third explanation (for why blacks in the US today can be statistically unequal to whites) which, of all others, wokeness most trains its victims never to see. Political correctness is a parasite on the backs of those it pretends to help.

“Although the big word on the left is ‘compassion’, the big agenda on the left is dependency.”

I owe that quote to Thomas Sowell, who has described how lucky he was to be born at a moment when the old prejudices about blacks were dying, and the new ones with which the PC would replace them had not yet grown strong (read his books). Sowell’s long life also lets him witness against what another coloured academic calls the woke’s “ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations”. A third black analyst concludes that

“woke whites would do more good by doing nothing”

Etc., etc., etc.

So in a way, I’m not disagreeing with those woke whites who say they’re racists. THAT’S MY POINT! They are – just not in the way they’ve been led to believe. That fact is the ‘more healthy way’ to confront their distress. Even in a struggle session, with leaders organised and ready to shout or sneer you down, it may sometimes be better – and even safer – to be last heard expressing the ‘wrong sort’ of anti-racism than just denying their sort. In a private conversation with an early inductee, it may even be productive.

cult deprogramming almost always proceeds from an initial doubt that spirals out of control

I agree with Edmund Burke that “lying and falsehood are allowed in no cause whatever … but a man may speak the truth by measure, that he be allowed to speak it longer”. If you can either avoid triggering the emotional vulnerability at the very start of a personal discussion or else trigger it in “a more healthy way”, then you may manage to speak the truth for longer – maybe as long as can save a soul from the woke lie. The very fact that your truth is more costly to adopt than their current lie can be turned to polemical advantage. Robert Conquest became a communist at 17 – and also ceased to be a communist while still 17. Thomas Sowell was a marxist in his early 20s – but not thereafter. Modern victims of the education establishment experience are more propagandised than those two ever were, but can still be reached.

Of course, woke leaders (and many a follower – those who believe the dogma for other reasons or none, or because they were not infected with emotional vulnerability by indoctrinating educators but brought a personal one with them to university), will not be reached by this, but as the increasingly abusive rituals of politically-correct ‘anti’-racism show, there are a lot of self-flagellating followers.

— [ADDED TWO YEARS LATER] —

Only recently did I discover that crude Ibram Kendi (born Ibram Rogers) had once spelt it out in an interview with Vox:

“There’s only two causes of, you know, racial disparities,” Kendi said on a Vox podcast. “Either certain groups are better or worse than others, and that’s why they have more, or racist policy. Those are the only two options.”

(Quoted in The New Definition of Racism, h/t Critical Race Theory and the Long March Through the Institutions). The idea also seems to be presented with a cruder obviousness in his book ‘How to Be an Antiracist’ than in the work of white CRT intellectuals – an opinion that Ibram would doubtless insist has to be either false or proof of his innate genetic inferiority, but which I suggest can have another cause. 🙂