Viruses are much maligned in this discussion. Real viruses are (rarely) parasitical, sometimes mutualistic (bacteriophages), and sometimes just hanging around in the environment (or on or within our bodies) doing not much of anything in particular.
Wokism is more like a religion in that it is a broad framework of belief most humans seem to need (or most humans at least have a brain space that seems to long to be occupied by a belief system of this sort) - a framework that creates community, meaning, and purpose in life. A framework that helps us make sense of the world in moral and social terms and allows us to simplify otherwise complex and confusing information into something more easily digested. This is why my preferred term has always been Neopuritanism.
But let’s not continue to malign the poor viruses. We’d all be dead were it not for their hard work in controlling the bacterial population!
"Wokism is more like a religion in that it is a broad framework of belief most humans seem to need (or most humans at least have a brain space that seems to long to be occupied by a belief system of this sort) - a framework that creates community, meaning, and purpose in life."
Yeah, this makes sense, but I think this begs the question what's the distinction between a religion and a cult, and does modern wokism constitute one or the other? You could think of something like Scientology, for example, which claims to be about one thing, but its leaders sure seem awfully interested in whatever money they can wheedle out of its rank and file adherents. Ditto for a lot of Megachurch Christian pastors. Mormonism, in its early days, seems to have been in large part about creating theological justifications for the polygamous desires of its leaders, as well.
The members of these groups still must have been getting something positive out of their affiliations with them; otherwise, they'd quit. But that said, it's hard not to look at these examples as something of a grift, in that some members of the group benefit at the expense of others via somewhat underhanded means. I think you can make a strong case that woke ideology is very similar in this regard.
I suppose my definition of the difference between a cult and a religion is that if long after the death of the "founder" the cult and beliefs persists, then it has become a religion. YMMV, but most actual cults mostly disappear in a couple of generations after the founder dies.
The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein thought all supernatural explanations were nonsense and used to say something like this: "Most people are born into a religion and stay there. They don't really think about it. It's social and comfortable. That's a religion. But some people break with their born religion and join a different group with a different set of supernatural beliefs . They actually think about them and accept the group's dogma. That's a cult."
My initial reaction to Humuer’s metaphor is positive, but I think your explanation is more accurate and more valuable. I also like Dan’s article on the mind virus that argues for respectful dialogue and against the mind virus metaphor.
Here’s a second cut at your thoughts with my grammar.
Wokism is less like a mind virus and more like a religion in that it is a broad framework of belief most humans seem to need (i.e. most humans have a brain space that seems to long to be occupied by a belief system of this sort). Wokism is framework of belief that:
- creates community, meaning, and purpose in life;
- helps us make sense of the world in moral and social terms;
- and allows us to simplify otherwise complex and confusing information into something more easily digested.
I’m not sure about the Neopuritanism name, so I deleted that part, but go ahead and elaborate on your thinking there please.
The worst of the woke religious precepts remind me, stylistically, of Puritanism when it comes to their restrictive use of language, conduct, and their approach to guilt or innocence. Just like the Puritans, they tend to punish wrongdoers through modern day witch trials where guilt is assumed and force a confessional self-flagellation on the guilty. All of this is reminiscent of the Puritans in an American context, thus Neopuritanism.
Richard Dawkins did a lot to advance the notion of the “meme” using language of genes and evolutionary biology. I think this is an excellent analogy even as it’s true that virus’s are little more than vectors carrying beautiful little computer programs that may or may not get executed, mutate, permanently join or even kill the host.
I wrote a longer comment in the area below about the similarities between two very real, contemporary memes (viruses) which I called “Project 1619-2025”, that each work to inject new DNA into their hosts. Whether society, as then collective host, turns that DNA on or off remains to be seen. Discussing Gene expression requires an entirely different set of analogies.
Interesting. I disagree with this analysis of psychology and wokeism - woke people clearly believe in truth (I should know given that I inhabit a social and professional world dominated by wokeism) - and the "belief system defences" are simply motivated tactics strategic ideologues deploy, not adaptations of a "mind virus" that bypass people's rationality. Nevertheless I'm looking forward to the book.
“Woke people clearly believe in truth” —Ha! No XY person has, nor can, become an XX person. All “real women” are XX females who identify as women. Woke folk disbelieve this truth, and instead redefine “real women” to be merely a gender claim. They look for & find, in the Market of Rationalizations, other high status folk who claim & support the same false belief.
Like “mostly peaceful protests” with burning buildings in the background. Related to all racial groups have same average IQs.
Most woke SJW folk don’t even talk honestly about the need for more jobs for those people with low IQs (euphemisms are not honest, deliberately.)
Thanks for coming here with your comment, most of your ideas are excellent. Tho you and Arnold both are a bit unfairly critical of Trump, who has little humility, in fair comparison with Obama, either Clinton, or Biden or Harris.
Everyone believes that. Definition of "man" and "woman" or "real man" and "real woman" would be so easy if:
1) Everyone was an XX or XY;
2) All XXs had fully developed female parts (and no male parts) and all XYs had fully developed male parts (and no female parts):
3) All XXs felt deep down that they were females and all XYs felt deep down that they were males.
Alas, reality is not that simple.
1) Some people are XXY (Klinefelter syndrome). They almost always identify as male but often have delayed or incomplete puberty and a more feminine body. There are also people with XYY, XXX, and an X with a missing or incomplete other X.
2) A substantial number of people are born with some male parts and some female parts. Often, none of them fully develop.
3. Some XX people with fully developed female parts feel deep down that they are actually males who got put in the wrong body. In a sense, they are male souls in a female body. Some XYs feel they are females in a male body.
People in category 1) can usually be slotted fairly easily into male or female. Medical professionals have always had a problem with 2). "Do we cut off parts at birth? If so, which ones? Do we then give hormones at appropriate points in the life cycle?" Category 3) was traditionally fairly easy to deal with. Since nobody could change the body, people in category 3) would be considered whatever the body showed. As so often, technology messes with philosophy. With modern surgery and hormones, it is possible to change your body to, at least sort of, agree with your soul.
So, partly for that reason, some people now define "man" and "woman" as what you feel. But it is also a response to the fact that some people are genuinely miserable that they are "a this-sex soul in a that-sex body." No doubt the reaction has been excessive. Steve Sailer may well be right that a lot of "gender dysphoria" is like anorexia several decades ago, a way of dealing with unhappiness that was, not a fad, not "fashionable", but "in the air" and acceptable. However, for some people, the misery is real. Imagine waking up in the opposite sex body and knowing that is your fate for the rest of your life.
Maybe not perfect examples but close enough. I was ready to like until I got to the Trump part. I don't remember AK talking much about Trump, Biden or Harris and I don't remember any specifics but off the top of my head I'd guess he's been more critical of Biden and Harris, if he's even said anything about Harris.
My experience is that woke people believe in truth as long as it doesn't conflict with their world view. I find that's true of nearly everyone, maybe everyone, but especially people with lots of extreme views.
Woke people have lots of extreme views. Trump supporters have lots of extreme views. Issue activists tend to have lots of extreme views. People who see out country going to hell in a hand basket tend to have lots of extreme views. All of them discount or ignore facts that don't fit their world view.
Well, due respect, a main difference is that essentially ALL woke people have extreme views, while merely MANY Trump supporters do. If you want to say essentially all of Trump’s *base* has extreme views, I could accept that analogue (even if I thought it wasn’t really true - IMO merely *many* of Trump’s base have extreme views).
Unless of course, you are going for the “almost everyone has extreme views about *something*”, but from the thrust of your comments, you seem to explicitly going in the opposite of that direction.
I already said nearly everyone or everyone has extreme views on something.
When I said Trump supporters, I did not mean anyone and everyone who voted for him over the alternative. Basically, I mean the crowd who thinks he was the best President ever, or something close to that.
For the definition of woke that you and I might mostly agree on, I agree those people all have to extreme views. I know some liberals who are less progressive and see it as more awareness and not the activism. Of course even those liberals tend to think all conservatives are unaware racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-moslem, anti-LBGT but that doesn't make them extreme in the way we see the activist type woke.
Because “clearly” to many of us a) the woke believe/affirm things that are not true, and b) often make claims that impersonal reasoning is irrelevant, that power and identity trump reasoning.
Since I don’t think you’d dispute my above sentence much, what exactly do you mean by your statement? Especially your “clearly” part? If it’s merely that some of them will acknowledge that 2+2=4 (even if mathematics is racist 😏), then it’s not a claim that means much…
People can believe in truth without holding true beliefs - that's one of the whole points of my essay that I've made elsewhere many times as well. I think it's true that wokeism sometimes involves rejection of Enlightenment norms concerning the importance of rational argument. But that's not because they don't believe in truth; it's because of their worldview concerning what the truth is. Finally, lots of people in the comments are pointing out that woke people are often biased, selective, unreasonable, etc - but that's not unique to wokeism and not usefully illuminated by the mind virus concept.
I just strongly suspect that most “normies” think that “clearly believe in truth” means roughly believing in / upholding Enlightenment norms about rationality.
Because as you’ve described it, “truth” literally (old school use of that term 😏) means something different to the woke than to normies.
Which to me is almost completely separate from different people with different (“normie”) worldviews are biased, selective unreasonable, etc., and will come to differing conclusions about which things are true while believing in truth - which of course is indisputably true(!).
Eh, just descriptively, I'd summarize the viewpoint as something more like "Power relationships matter immensely in finding truth, and people who go on about "2+2=4" and similar, are often trying pull some sort of con about racism, sexism, etc., via presenting it as the natural order of the Universe and bashing everyone else". The skin-crawling amount of pseusoscientific racism which can be found in pretty much any of these comment threads makes me give some respect to that viewpoint (without by any means endorsing it entirely).
If you don't mind, I'd rather not get into what is sure to be an acrimonious personal argument with someone. Instead, I'd like to point you to the 1861 "Cornerstone Speech" by the Vice President of the Confederacy, because it devotes a lengthy section to what might be called The Science Of Slavery. It was shocking to me just how much of what he says can be found recited almost word for word today (in some case, maybe exactly) in advocacy of pseudoscientific racism.
"Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. ..."
"That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal."
On and on. I don't want to post it all, but there's a lot of this.
In the vernacular: It's Science, you woke Commies, and you abolitionists are trying to impose your postmodernist Marxist-Leninist ideology against reality where you should Trust The Science - checkmate Libs!
Again, I think those who point out the invocation of Science this way, and draw a connection to extremely similar arguments today _ad nauseam_, have a strong case about how power determines Truth in society (once more, I'm not endorsing everything here).
I think the "mind virus" idea can be useful if you look at it like Handle does above, "Huemer's metaphor is just a typical example of any abstract evolutionary metaphor, which is always validly applies to situations of "iterated selection in context of competition" with greater relative rates of survival and propagation being defined as due to better 'fitness', that is, being better adapted to the context of the competition, which is often unrelated to being "better" along any one particular trait." Mind viruses are easy to "catch", or at least easier than the alternatives at a particular time and place.
But the idea has a big negative. A "virus" is almost universally seen as negative. But most "mind viruses" in Handle's sense are positive. They either are empirically true (e.g., other people have minds similar to mine) or lead to a socially positive result (e.g., it is wrong to cheat).
Oh please, did you even read that article? Huemer's metaphor doesn't have any affinities with woke magical thinking, ironic or otherwise. Let me help you out:
Woke Magical Thinking: Fundamentally, if one can't answer the question, "What evidence would compel you to reject your thesis," then one isn't dealing with verifiable truth. That's fine if one admits it - that one is operating on faith about things which haven't been verified, perhaps can't be verified - but not if one is pretending to be dealing with verifiable truth. That's the problem with woke magical thinking, it's magical, but pretends otherwise. It's a form of cart-before-the-horse rationalization based in a determination to salvage a particular perspective that a particular kind of culpability of particular people and social patterns exists and is the proximate cause for certain observed group disparities. Specifically, the tendency of progressives to react to empirical disproofs or high-threshold legal tests by retreating to more generalized claims which dispense with the need to uncover and point to specific acts of intentionally unjust discrimination, and which are by their very nature unfalsifiable, shifting the burden of proof by demanding defendants (those accused of culpability) to do the impossible and prove themselves innocent, and to modify legal rules in general (e.g., "disparate impact") to mirror these presumptions to bias holdings in favor of accusers. So, one starts with, "The truth is that X is to blame for Y," and comes up with a magical rationalization, magical because, by consequence of its design preventing its failure under the typical tests, no one can agree on a test that could ever make it fail.
In contrast, Huemer's metaphor is just a typical example of any abstract evolutionary metaphor, which is always validly applies to situations of "iterated selection in context of competition" with greater relative rates of survival and propagation being defined as due to better 'fitness', that is, being better adapted to the context of the competition, which is often unrelated to being "better" along any one particular trait. The metaphor gets applied to companies and products succeeding or failing in the competitive marketplace all the time without objection, again, with good validity. In the context of beliefs which attract large numbers of followers, it was Richard Dawkins himself who used this evolutionary metaphor when he proposed "meme" as a metaphor for "gene", and complexes of memes which spread to and guide large numbers of minds regardless of how true or false they may be are indeed analogous to "mind viruses" in that sense.
The thing is truth and fact aren't synonyms. To paraphrase an economics saying "If a womyn's social status depends on her honest belief in the truth of her convictions, there will be no end to her ignorance of the facts nor lack of curiosity"
1) His book won't 'innoculate' anyone....because the kind of people who need innoculating will never read it and in the unlikely event that they did, the defense mechanisms he alludes to would kick in anyway.
2) this whether it is a 'mind virus' or not a 'mind virus' discussion is just a silly bit of pendantry.
3) there are many other worthwhile perspectives on what one might term The Madness of Intelligentsias than seem to be allowed into this 'In My Tribe' framing.
Broadly speaking - as 20th century technological wizardry rolled out over the old verities of Christendom - the Universal Love moral imperative came to be re-imagined as Social Justice. This shares many characteristics with the old religion. A big part of the pull of the Social Justice religion (as with all the Abrahamic religions) is the salvation it promises. No you don’t get to go to Heaven but you do get to feel very virtuous. And so much more so than your ‘uncaring’ redneck peers. Thus has it become (for everyone other than intellectual contrarians) a 21st c. article of faith; existing on a rarefied plane beyond the scope of political/philosophical interrogation. Disrespecting it is blasphemy...as in “So you don’t care about injustice then?!” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/love-of-the-people
Very succint of GK. I remember some months back Arnold opining (and I agree with him) that people shouldn't write non-fiction books because anything worth saying in that way could be said in a 3000-word essay. (Book-length is for novels in my view.)
I think both you and Dan Williams are on the right track. The tangential reference to religion is more valuable than 'mind virus'. IIRC John McWhorter was more direct in calling Wokism a religion.
Re: "In the case of Woke Progressivism, the defense mechanism is to deny the existence of truth and instead to claim that power relationships determine what people believe."
Another mechanism is necessary: "Asymmetric insight." Perhaps a woke person believes that she is a truth-seeker and that conservatives are in the grip of self-serving mechanisms of belief-formation, rooted in privilege.
Mind virus + Asymmetric insight —> Tribalism.
There are still other mechanisms, too; for example, "Cognitive dissonance reduction" (cf. Leon Festinger). When a person experiences internal inconsistency among her beliefs and values, her beliefs might — in a behind-the-back psychological mechanism — adjust to support her values. For example, if a seemingly neutral rule has troubling disparate impact, then the path of least resistance, psychologically speaking, might be to impugn the rule, rather than to dig deeper, not knowing where inquiry will lead.
My larger point is that Huemer and Williams (and Festinger and others), each, in different ways, have explicated various pieces of a larger puzzle.
When “mind virus” is defined so as to include wokeism, it does so, when Dan Williams defines it to exclude woke, it does so. Huemer is more useful and intuitively correct: infects, spreads, defends against truth.
Gurri, noting that faith in Leviathan is replacing faith in God, echoes the quasi-religious infection—woke provides meaning. It spreads, especially to those like childless unmarried cat ladies who are Brides Of The State (BOTS). And it defends against T-truth, objective, often deploying “we all have our truths.”
It would be great for Arnold to try to interview either or both Williams & Huemer.
I am glad to see that Huemer wrote that out. Williams' argument seemed to almost actively misunderstand the concept, or at least how selection works for parasites. Parasites are adopted by a system based on how well they avoid or invert the defense mechanisms of the system along with how well they extract resources from it. If the system's defenses have star shaped holes, star shaped things are going to start getting through them, regardless of whatever those things are intending. Likewise, if humans have short circuits in how they think that prevent them from seeing truth and reevaluating/rejecting ideas, sooner or later ideas that activate those shirt circuits are going to accumulate and not be rejected. Williams argues that knowledge and ideas come from others' assessments as well, but if others are collecting those short circuiting ideas they are going to spread them to those they interact with. If those ideas are resistant to rejection then interaction isn't going to solve the problem.
Compare Arnold Kling's previous blogpost, "The decentralized religion that persecutes heretics" (28 November 2020) and the comments about it, at the link below:
I think the virus analogy is useful in the sense that we think of viruses capable of harming the host, just like a set of beliefs can; the obvious example being the promise of 72 virgins in the afterlife for a Muslim who achieves martyrdom. To relate it back to the topic at hand, you could also think of David Austin Walsh, the white guy who got his PhD at Princeton, writes a bunch of hard left garbage decrying white supremacy, and then complains that he can't get a tenure track job in academia because he's white, which only leads to him getting mocked and scorned by members of the very minority groups he'd been (so he imagined) sticking up for:
I think you can object to this with the observation that as highly social animals, humans routinely make sacrifices on behalf of whatever group they belong to, and so accepting some type of harm in the furtherance of an ideology which serves as the basis for some group or other is not necessarily irrational. There's an element of truth to that, but that said, it's worth questioning the degree to which a political or social movement really constitutes a group worth sacrificing for, or whether they simply hijack people's mental circuitry related to group or tribal belonging and then bend it to their own use. E.G., the Walsh situation above. I think lurking at the heart of a lot variants of woke ideology is good old-fashioned ethno-nationalism or ethno-chauvinism of different minority groups; black, Hispanic, Indian, Arabic, etc. A nice liberal progressive white person who makes personal sacrifices on behalf of such a movement seems to me rather less like an ally or strategic partner and much more like a useful idiot. I'm willing to grant Mind Virus status to a set of beliefs that makes that possible.
Note that real virus and parasites in nature also use defense systems to prevent the hosts immune system from killing them. The analogy of a "mind virus" attacking the very concepts of truth and rationality fits very well.
Science is only mainly true because it has a mechanism for self correction that is totally missing from progressive social science simple minded analysis. Real science has the blood sport of being able to prove the other guy wrong (great fun when you actually know how the systems works and your opponent doesn't see how his results are a function of his experimental design.)
I think that John McWhorter made the same point a couple of years ago in his book about Woke Religion. I sort of agree with this, in the sense that there are some norms and beliefs that cannot be questioned but must be taken on faith. But the dangers of wokeism pale in comparison to the dangers of the idolatrous Trump MAGA religion. Trump is the antiChrist, in case no one has noticed.
Hmmm. That's just a really weird thing to write. If it's really true you should tell CNBC. Perhaps I shouldn't have written the last sentence. I thought it was clearly facetious but evidently not. What I meant was that Trump's behavior does not suggest to me that he in any way justifies the claim that he is God's selected candidate, as most evangelicals believe. His behavior is as un-Jesus-like as any individual I've encountered. So much so that he seems to embody opposite of Christ's teachings. Although I'm not sure where Christ would have stood regarding immigrants and cats.
The Project 1619-2025 virus: The 1619 Project and Project 2025 may seem unrelated but either could be called “viruses” because both want to inject and make several ”new DNA” assumptions about our collective hearts and minds (not just in our history).
At face value, one seems to dwell needlessly on the past, while other appears only fixated on the future. But essentially, they’re both trying to dominate the same thing—our understanding of what America is, who we are, the risks and opportunities we have available.
This may all sound a bit ironic: One makes bold statements about the past with subtle implications for the future, while the other makes bold statements about the future with subtle implications about the past.
To summarize, the 1619 Project reinterprets the founding of the country by placing slavery and its legacy at the core, arguing that the real birth of the U.S. wasn’t in 1776 but rather, in 1619 with the arrival of enslaved Africans. By establishing this basic revision, 1619 hopes to reframe, even litigate, the entirety of the American story. In doing this, the 1619 Project is not only about redrafting the past but rather, by implication it’s aiming to re-work the foundations of prior case law in order to legally reshape the future.
On the other hand, Project 2025 is an explicit (rather than implicit) political initiative to directly establish the game plan for a more “conservative” American future: Smaller government, more “freedom” (whatever this means), less focus on identity politics (and all that 1619 talk). These were never actually “Conservative American” values - the story and naming conventions were much more complicated.
In short, DNA gets injected, mutated, turned on and off, for reasons we often either forget about or we just never knew. Ideas are simply a different kind of DNA. Humans want the narratives of DNA, but they are almost never “truths” - they are only viruses that mutate and later, get turned on or off.
I think it may be helpful to consider the idea of a mind virus as a metaphor. So-called infectious memes are not really catching, but you can model them as if they were using models based on those developed for epidemics.
One might acquire the meme through the action of prestige and in-group bias. Once you have it you may occupy a space when most people also have it and so you have it reinforced through *three* evolutionary forces: prestige, in-group and also frequence bias. Against this would be individual learning and direct bias. For most people the former is stronger than the latter. Not only that, but most of the people arguing against crazy ideas on the right are on the left, while those arguing against the same on the left are right. Here in-group bias serves to reduce the force of their arguments because it comes from the other side.
But it is not that the meme inhibits rational thought. In time there will be prestige holders who are on their side who will argue against the crazy ideas. Examples: Richard Hanania for the right and Freddie DeBoer doing for the Left. This process can be analogized the acquisition of resistance and the herd immunity provided to suppress "infection" from newly entering cohorts,
Eventually the radical beliefs subside and they go back "underground" where they will incubate for another 30-40 years before a popping up again (in a mutated form), once those who learned their lesson for this bout have aged out of relevance and no longer have prestige, much as the Boomers who went through this the last time in the late sixties and early seventies have no influence on the discourse anymore.
"Well, on Tuesday, I received my order of philosophy professor Michael Huemer’s book, Progressive Myths"
Do you plan to do a book review? It sounds enticing but likewise sounds very red meat and bias confirming pandering for sales. The PR blip that raised my heckles (?sp) was the disingenuous question of "Do American police regularly murder unarmed black men just for being black? ... exposing myths" as it's refusing to acknowledge that question is really just a shortcut for "Do police at a statistically significant level use race as a meaningful factor in their discretionary decisions" whereas the synopsis seems like the author is playing the gotcha game of literalism.
Obviously literally it's not true because murder is a crime and police are rarely charged, much less convicted and likewise obviously being black isn't the only criteria as I'm sure "black man is still breathing" is a factor as is "black man physically exists within an area I can influence " and regular of course means 51% of the time and 51% of the remaining black men in America aren't being killed daily.
And I'm guessing his other "myths" suffer a similar problem.
"Do police at a statistically significant level use race as a meaningful factor in their discretionary decisions"
Since, at a statistically significant level, people of different "races" commit crimes at very different rates, I would expect them to. Should they ignore that bit of knowledge?
Many people would answer, "Yes, they should", either because you should ignore a person's race or because crime rates don't vary for different " races". The first is a moral/philosophical reason and people have different beliefs about what is right. But the second is a denial of reality. However, lots of people believe it.
I don't disagree at all but my point is the book's claim is "are police murdering unarmed black men ONLY because of their race" and, outside some fringe people, nobody earnestly believes that unless it's be used as a euphemistic shorthand whereas the book is treating it like the gospel and saying "ah ha!! gotcha!!!". That's only from the synopsis though hence my curiosity if Arnold will do a book review.
Btw on your second point, I'm not convinced that is true. I'd wager at best it's a cultural, or more accurately sub cultural thing, not a racial thing. Likewise it might be true within a particular crime but not crime as a whole; our gangbanger may be more likely to commit murder but he's probably less likely to commit tax fraud or, heaven forbid, repaint his back porch a non approved color without a permit. Likewise I've seen nothing that says Jews are, independent of all other factors such as wealth or health, less likely to jaywalk than Hmongs.
TBH it's probably a wash were we to actually enforce and prosecute ALL crimes but because we don't crime stats paint a misleading picture. For example recently over on Volokh they were saying something like 50% of murders are never prosecuted, maybe all were committed by Japanese but as a concerted public policy effort not charged because it would undermine the narrative of blacks are particularly violent and nobody wants that. And since we know selective prosecutions are the rule, not the exception, all as applied stats are suspect.
My point was that simply as an observational thing, it's true, and the disparities are pretty big. I would add, too big to be a result of bad statistics. Why the disparity exists is another question.
Viruses are much maligned in this discussion. Real viruses are (rarely) parasitical, sometimes mutualistic (bacteriophages), and sometimes just hanging around in the environment (or on or within our bodies) doing not much of anything in particular.
Wokism is more like a religion in that it is a broad framework of belief most humans seem to need (or most humans at least have a brain space that seems to long to be occupied by a belief system of this sort) - a framework that creates community, meaning, and purpose in life. A framework that helps us make sense of the world in moral and social terms and allows us to simplify otherwise complex and confusing information into something more easily digested. This is why my preferred term has always been Neopuritanism.
But let’s not continue to malign the poor viruses. We’d all be dead were it not for their hard work in controlling the bacterial population!
"Wokism is more like a religion in that it is a broad framework of belief most humans seem to need (or most humans at least have a brain space that seems to long to be occupied by a belief system of this sort) - a framework that creates community, meaning, and purpose in life."
Yeah, this makes sense, but I think this begs the question what's the distinction between a religion and a cult, and does modern wokism constitute one or the other? You could think of something like Scientology, for example, which claims to be about one thing, but its leaders sure seem awfully interested in whatever money they can wheedle out of its rank and file adherents. Ditto for a lot of Megachurch Christian pastors. Mormonism, in its early days, seems to have been in large part about creating theological justifications for the polygamous desires of its leaders, as well.
The members of these groups still must have been getting something positive out of their affiliations with them; otherwise, they'd quit. But that said, it's hard not to look at these examples as something of a grift, in that some members of the group benefit at the expense of others via somewhat underhanded means. I think you can make a strong case that woke ideology is very similar in this regard.
I suppose my definition of the difference between a cult and a religion is that if long after the death of the "founder" the cult and beliefs persists, then it has become a religion. YMMV, but most actual cults mostly disappear in a couple of generations after the founder dies.
The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein thought all supernatural explanations were nonsense and used to say something like this: "Most people are born into a religion and stay there. They don't really think about it. It's social and comfortable. That's a religion. But some people break with their born religion and join a different group with a different set of supernatural beliefs . They actually think about them and accept the group's dogma. That's a cult."
Max,
My initial reaction to Humuer’s metaphor is positive, but I think your explanation is more accurate and more valuable. I also like Dan’s article on the mind virus that argues for respectful dialogue and against the mind virus metaphor.
Here’s a second cut at your thoughts with my grammar.
Wokism is less like a mind virus and more like a religion in that it is a broad framework of belief most humans seem to need (i.e. most humans have a brain space that seems to long to be occupied by a belief system of this sort). Wokism is framework of belief that:
- creates community, meaning, and purpose in life;
- helps us make sense of the world in moral and social terms;
- and allows us to simplify otherwise complex and confusing information into something more easily digested.
I’m not sure about the Neopuritanism name, so I deleted that part, but go ahead and elaborate on your thinking there please.
The worst of the woke religious precepts remind me, stylistically, of Puritanism when it comes to their restrictive use of language, conduct, and their approach to guilt or innocence. Just like the Puritans, they tend to punish wrongdoers through modern day witch trials where guilt is assumed and force a confessional self-flagellation on the guilty. All of this is reminiscent of the Puritans in an American context, thus Neopuritanism.
Richard Dawkins did a lot to advance the notion of the “meme” using language of genes and evolutionary biology. I think this is an excellent analogy even as it’s true that virus’s are little more than vectors carrying beautiful little computer programs that may or may not get executed, mutate, permanently join or even kill the host.
I wrote a longer comment in the area below about the similarities between two very real, contemporary memes (viruses) which I called “Project 1619-2025”, that each work to inject new DNA into their hosts. Whether society, as then collective host, turns that DNA on or off remains to be seen. Discussing Gene expression requires an entirely different set of analogies.
Interesting. I disagree with this analysis of psychology and wokeism - woke people clearly believe in truth (I should know given that I inhabit a social and professional world dominated by wokeism) - and the "belief system defences" are simply motivated tactics strategic ideologues deploy, not adaptations of a "mind virus" that bypass people's rationality. Nevertheless I'm looking forward to the book.
“Woke people clearly believe in truth” —Ha! No XY person has, nor can, become an XX person. All “real women” are XX females who identify as women. Woke folk disbelieve this truth, and instead redefine “real women” to be merely a gender claim. They look for & find, in the Market of Rationalizations, other high status folk who claim & support the same false belief.
Like “mostly peaceful protests” with burning buildings in the background. Related to all racial groups have same average IQs.
Most woke SJW folk don’t even talk honestly about the need for more jobs for those people with low IQs (euphemisms are not honest, deliberately.)
Thanks for coming here with your comment, most of your ideas are excellent. Tho you and Arnold both are a bit unfairly critical of Trump, who has little humility, in fair comparison with Obama, either Clinton, or Biden or Harris.
Something about my browser prevents me from liking this comment; here is my workaround LIKE !!
"No XY person has, nor can, become an XX person."
Everyone believes that. Definition of "man" and "woman" or "real man" and "real woman" would be so easy if:
1) Everyone was an XX or XY;
2) All XXs had fully developed female parts (and no male parts) and all XYs had fully developed male parts (and no female parts):
3) All XXs felt deep down that they were females and all XYs felt deep down that they were males.
Alas, reality is not that simple.
1) Some people are XXY (Klinefelter syndrome). They almost always identify as male but often have delayed or incomplete puberty and a more feminine body. There are also people with XYY, XXX, and an X with a missing or incomplete other X.
2) A substantial number of people are born with some male parts and some female parts. Often, none of them fully develop.
3. Some XX people with fully developed female parts feel deep down that they are actually males who got put in the wrong body. In a sense, they are male souls in a female body. Some XYs feel they are females in a male body.
People in category 1) can usually be slotted fairly easily into male or female. Medical professionals have always had a problem with 2). "Do we cut off parts at birth? If so, which ones? Do we then give hormones at appropriate points in the life cycle?" Category 3) was traditionally fairly easy to deal with. Since nobody could change the body, people in category 3) would be considered whatever the body showed. As so often, technology messes with philosophy. With modern surgery and hormones, it is possible to change your body to, at least sort of, agree with your soul.
So, partly for that reason, some people now define "man" and "woman" as what you feel. But it is also a response to the fact that some people are genuinely miserable that they are "a this-sex soul in a that-sex body." No doubt the reaction has been excessive. Steve Sailer may well be right that a lot of "gender dysphoria" is like anorexia several decades ago, a way of dealing with unhappiness that was, not a fad, not "fashionable", but "in the air" and acceptable. However, for some people, the misery is real. Imagine waking up in the opposite sex body and knowing that is your fate for the rest of your life.
Maybe not perfect examples but close enough. I was ready to like until I got to the Trump part. I don't remember AK talking much about Trump, Biden or Harris and I don't remember any specifics but off the top of my head I'd guess he's been more critical of Biden and Harris, if he's even said anything about Harris.
"woke people clearly believe in truth”
My experience is that woke people believe in truth as long as it doesn't conflict with their world view. I find that's true of nearly everyone, maybe everyone, but especially people with lots of extreme views.
Woke people have lots of extreme views. Trump supporters have lots of extreme views. Issue activists tend to have lots of extreme views. People who see out country going to hell in a hand basket tend to have lots of extreme views. All of them discount or ignore facts that don't fit their world view.
Well, due respect, a main difference is that essentially ALL woke people have extreme views, while merely MANY Trump supporters do. If you want to say essentially all of Trump’s *base* has extreme views, I could accept that analogue (even if I thought it wasn’t really true - IMO merely *many* of Trump’s base have extreme views).
Unless of course, you are going for the “almost everyone has extreme views about *something*”, but from the thrust of your comments, you seem to explicitly going in the opposite of that direction.
I already said nearly everyone or everyone has extreme views on something.
When I said Trump supporters, I did not mean anyone and everyone who voted for him over the alternative. Basically, I mean the crowd who thinks he was the best President ever, or something close to that.
For the definition of woke that you and I might mostly agree on, I agree those people all have to extreme views. I know some liberals who are less progressive and see it as more awareness and not the activism. Of course even those liberals tend to think all conservatives are unaware racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-moslem, anti-LBGT but that doesn't make them extreme in the way we see the activist type woke.
“woke people clearly believe in truth”
Methinks you’d be best to clarify this claim.
Because “clearly” to many of us a) the woke believe/affirm things that are not true, and b) often make claims that impersonal reasoning is irrelevant, that power and identity trump reasoning.
Since I don’t think you’d dispute my above sentence much, what exactly do you mean by your statement? Especially your “clearly” part? If it’s merely that some of them will acknowledge that 2+2=4 (even if mathematics is racist 😏), then it’s not a claim that means much…
People can believe in truth without holding true beliefs - that's one of the whole points of my essay that I've made elsewhere many times as well. I think it's true that wokeism sometimes involves rejection of Enlightenment norms concerning the importance of rational argument. But that's not because they don't believe in truth; it's because of their worldview concerning what the truth is. Finally, lots of people in the comments are pointing out that woke people are often biased, selective, unreasonable, etc - but that's not unique to wokeism and not usefully illuminated by the mind virus concept.
Thanks, well put and all fair.
I just strongly suspect that most “normies” think that “clearly believe in truth” means roughly believing in / upholding Enlightenment norms about rationality.
Because as you’ve described it, “truth” literally (old school use of that term 😏) means something different to the woke than to normies.
Which to me is almost completely separate from different people with different (“normie”) worldviews are biased, selective unreasonable, etc., and will come to differing conclusions about which things are true while believing in truth - which of course is indisputably true(!).
Eh, just descriptively, I'd summarize the viewpoint as something more like "Power relationships matter immensely in finding truth, and people who go on about "2+2=4" and similar, are often trying pull some sort of con about racism, sexism, etc., via presenting it as the natural order of the Universe and bashing everyone else". The skin-crawling amount of pseusoscientific racism which can be found in pretty much any of these comment threads makes me give some respect to that viewpoint (without by any means endorsing it entirely).
No personal offense intended there.
Can you give an example of the "pseusoscientific racism which can be found in pretty much any of these comment threads"?
If you don't mind, I'd rather not get into what is sure to be an acrimonious personal argument with someone. Instead, I'd like to point you to the 1861 "Cornerstone Speech" by the Vice President of the Confederacy, because it devotes a lengthy section to what might be called The Science Of Slavery. It was shocking to me just how much of what he says can be found recited almost word for word today (in some case, maybe exactly) in advocacy of pseudoscientific racism.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech
"Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. ..."
"That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal."
On and on. I don't want to post it all, but there's a lot of this.
In the vernacular: It's Science, you woke Commies, and you abolitionists are trying to impose your postmodernist Marxist-Leninist ideology against reality where you should Trust The Science - checkmate Libs!
Again, I think those who point out the invocation of Science this way, and draw a connection to extremely similar arguments today _ad nauseam_, have a strong case about how power determines Truth in society (once more, I'm not endorsing everything here).
None, taken, at least by me.
I agree with you.
Your use of the word pseudoscientific more concisely describes MY point that the woke redefine “truth” Alice-in-Wonderland-style.
I think the "mind virus" idea can be useful if you look at it like Handle does above, "Huemer's metaphor is just a typical example of any abstract evolutionary metaphor, which is always validly applies to situations of "iterated selection in context of competition" with greater relative rates of survival and propagation being defined as due to better 'fitness', that is, being better adapted to the context of the competition, which is often unrelated to being "better" along any one particular trait." Mind viruses are easy to "catch", or at least easier than the alternatives at a particular time and place.
But the idea has a big negative. A "virus" is almost universally seen as negative. But most "mind viruses" in Handle's sense are positive. They either are empirically true (e.g., other people have minds similar to mine) or lead to a socially positive result (e.g., it is wrong to cheat).
Yeah, Huemer's "mind virus" diagnosis may have some ironic affinities with woke magical thinking?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201802/hidden-forces-and-essences-psychology-magic
Oh please, did you even read that article? Huemer's metaphor doesn't have any affinities with woke magical thinking, ironic or otherwise. Let me help you out:
Woke Magical Thinking: Fundamentally, if one can't answer the question, "What evidence would compel you to reject your thesis," then one isn't dealing with verifiable truth. That's fine if one admits it - that one is operating on faith about things which haven't been verified, perhaps can't be verified - but not if one is pretending to be dealing with verifiable truth. That's the problem with woke magical thinking, it's magical, but pretends otherwise. It's a form of cart-before-the-horse rationalization based in a determination to salvage a particular perspective that a particular kind of culpability of particular people and social patterns exists and is the proximate cause for certain observed group disparities. Specifically, the tendency of progressives to react to empirical disproofs or high-threshold legal tests by retreating to more generalized claims which dispense with the need to uncover and point to specific acts of intentionally unjust discrimination, and which are by their very nature unfalsifiable, shifting the burden of proof by demanding defendants (those accused of culpability) to do the impossible and prove themselves innocent, and to modify legal rules in general (e.g., "disparate impact") to mirror these presumptions to bias holdings in favor of accusers. So, one starts with, "The truth is that X is to blame for Y," and comes up with a magical rationalization, magical because, by consequence of its design preventing its failure under the typical tests, no one can agree on a test that could ever make it fail.
In contrast, Huemer's metaphor is just a typical example of any abstract evolutionary metaphor, which is always validly applies to situations of "iterated selection in context of competition" with greater relative rates of survival and propagation being defined as due to better 'fitness', that is, being better adapted to the context of the competition, which is often unrelated to being "better" along any one particular trait. The metaphor gets applied to companies and products succeeding or failing in the competitive marketplace all the time without objection, again, with good validity. In the context of beliefs which attract large numbers of followers, it was Richard Dawkins himself who used this evolutionary metaphor when he proposed "meme" as a metaphor for "gene", and complexes of memes which spread to and guide large numbers of minds regardless of how true or false they may be are indeed analogous to "mind viruses" in that sense.
Thanks for sharing this good piece - I hadn't read it before.
You describe the subjective experience, sympathetically.
From the outside it looks much like descriptions of demonic possession. I like the mind virus analogy better, don’t you?
The thing is truth and fact aren't synonyms. To paraphrase an economics saying "If a womyn's social status depends on her honest belief in the truth of her convictions, there will be no end to her ignorance of the facts nor lack of curiosity"
1) His book won't 'innoculate' anyone....because the kind of people who need innoculating will never read it and in the unlikely event that they did, the defense mechanisms he alludes to would kick in anyway.
2) this whether it is a 'mind virus' or not a 'mind virus' discussion is just a silly bit of pendantry.
3) there are many other worthwhile perspectives on what one might term The Madness of Intelligentsias than seem to be allowed into this 'In My Tribe' framing.
Broadly speaking - as 20th century technological wizardry rolled out over the old verities of Christendom - the Universal Love moral imperative came to be re-imagined as Social Justice. This shares many characteristics with the old religion. A big part of the pull of the Social Justice religion (as with all the Abrahamic religions) is the salvation it promises. No you don’t get to go to Heaven but you do get to feel very virtuous. And so much more so than your ‘uncaring’ redneck peers. Thus has it become (for everyone other than intellectual contrarians) a 21st c. article of faith; existing on a rarefied plane beyond the scope of political/philosophical interrogation. Disrespecting it is blasphemy...as in “So you don’t care about injustice then?!” https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/love-of-the-people
G.K. Chesterton: "The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad."
Very succint of GK. I remember some months back Arnold opining (and I agree with him) that people shouldn't write non-fiction books because anything worth saying in that way could be said in a 3000-word essay. (Book-length is for novels in my view.)
I think both you and Dan Williams are on the right track. The tangential reference to religion is more valuable than 'mind virus'. IIRC John McWhorter was more direct in calling Wokism a religion.
Re: "In the case of Woke Progressivism, the defense mechanism is to deny the existence of truth and instead to claim that power relationships determine what people believe."
Another mechanism is necessary: "Asymmetric insight." Perhaps a woke person believes that she is a truth-seeker and that conservatives are in the grip of self-serving mechanisms of belief-formation, rooted in privilege.
Mind virus + Asymmetric insight —> Tribalism.
There are still other mechanisms, too; for example, "Cognitive dissonance reduction" (cf. Leon Festinger). When a person experiences internal inconsistency among her beliefs and values, her beliefs might — in a behind-the-back psychological mechanism — adjust to support her values. For example, if a seemingly neutral rule has troubling disparate impact, then the path of least resistance, psychologically speaking, might be to impugn the rule, rather than to dig deeper, not knowing where inquiry will lead.
My larger point is that Huemer and Williams (and Festinger and others), each, in different ways, have explicated various pieces of a larger puzzle.
When “mind virus” is defined so as to include wokeism, it does so, when Dan Williams defines it to exclude woke, it does so. Huemer is more useful and intuitively correct: infects, spreads, defends against truth.
Gurri, noting that faith in Leviathan is replacing faith in God, echoes the quasi-religious infection—woke provides meaning. It spreads, especially to those like childless unmarried cat ladies who are Brides Of The State (BOTS). And it defends against T-truth, objective, often deploying “we all have our truths.”
It would be great for Arnold to try to interview either or both Williams & Huemer.
Arnold interviewed Dan Williams several months ago. Here is the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f60KspE780k
Sadly I missed joining that one, so had to see it without asking any questions. It was worth it, thanks for link again.
I don’t recall mind virus being discussed.
I am glad to see that Huemer wrote that out. Williams' argument seemed to almost actively misunderstand the concept, or at least how selection works for parasites. Parasites are adopted by a system based on how well they avoid or invert the defense mechanisms of the system along with how well they extract resources from it. If the system's defenses have star shaped holes, star shaped things are going to start getting through them, regardless of whatever those things are intending. Likewise, if humans have short circuits in how they think that prevent them from seeing truth and reevaluating/rejecting ideas, sooner or later ideas that activate those shirt circuits are going to accumulate and not be rejected. Williams argues that knowledge and ideas come from others' assessments as well, but if others are collecting those short circuiting ideas they are going to spread them to those they interact with. If those ideas are resistant to rejection then interaction isn't going to solve the problem.
I will need to pick up M.H.'s book soon myself.
Re: Michael Huemer on wokeness as religion.
Compare Arnold Kling's previous blogpost, "The decentralized religion that persecutes heretics" (28 November 2020) and the comments about it, at the link below:
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/the-religion-that-persecutes-heretics/
I think the virus analogy is useful in the sense that we think of viruses capable of harming the host, just like a set of beliefs can; the obvious example being the promise of 72 virgins in the afterlife for a Muslim who achieves martyrdom. To relate it back to the topic at hand, you could also think of David Austin Walsh, the white guy who got his PhD at Princeton, writes a bunch of hard left garbage decrying white supremacy, and then complains that he can't get a tenure track job in academia because he's white, which only leads to him getting mocked and scorned by members of the very minority groups he'd been (so he imagined) sticking up for:
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1795087824678498803
I think you can object to this with the observation that as highly social animals, humans routinely make sacrifices on behalf of whatever group they belong to, and so accepting some type of harm in the furtherance of an ideology which serves as the basis for some group or other is not necessarily irrational. There's an element of truth to that, but that said, it's worth questioning the degree to which a political or social movement really constitutes a group worth sacrificing for, or whether they simply hijack people's mental circuitry related to group or tribal belonging and then bend it to their own use. E.G., the Walsh situation above. I think lurking at the heart of a lot variants of woke ideology is good old-fashioned ethno-nationalism or ethno-chauvinism of different minority groups; black, Hispanic, Indian, Arabic, etc. A nice liberal progressive white person who makes personal sacrifices on behalf of such a movement seems to me rather less like an ally or strategic partner and much more like a useful idiot. I'm willing to grant Mind Virus status to a set of beliefs that makes that possible.
Note that real virus and parasites in nature also use defense systems to prevent the hosts immune system from killing them. The analogy of a "mind virus" attacking the very concepts of truth and rationality fits very well.
Science is only mainly true because it has a mechanism for self correction that is totally missing from progressive social science simple minded analysis. Real science has the blood sport of being able to prove the other guy wrong (great fun when you actually know how the systems works and your opponent doesn't see how his results are a function of his experimental design.)
No group is truly monolithic; there are varying views within the progressive population eg: this hope-eliciting article:
https://cafeamericainmag.com/credentialist-cretins/
Hat Tip to the estimable
https://jeffreycarter.substack.com/
I enjoyed that piece. Thank you.
I think that John McWhorter made the same point a couple of years ago in his book about Woke Religion. I sort of agree with this, in the sense that there are some norms and beliefs that cannot be questioned but must be taken on faith. But the dangers of wokeism pale in comparison to the dangers of the idolatrous Trump MAGA religion. Trump is the antiChrist, in case no one has noticed.
You are so right. He has 666 tattooed on his right butt cheek. I found out when he had me ass-fuck him. True story.
Hmmm. That's just a really weird thing to write. If it's really true you should tell CNBC. Perhaps I shouldn't have written the last sentence. I thought it was clearly facetious but evidently not. What I meant was that Trump's behavior does not suggest to me that he in any way justifies the claim that he is God's selected candidate, as most evangelicals believe. His behavior is as un-Jesus-like as any individual I've encountered. So much so that he seems to embody opposite of Christ's teachings. Although I'm not sure where Christ would have stood regarding immigrants and cats.
My attempt to defend the concept of mind viruses: https://ataraxiaorbust.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-the-concept-of-mind
The Project 1619-2025 virus: The 1619 Project and Project 2025 may seem unrelated but either could be called “viruses” because both want to inject and make several ”new DNA” assumptions about our collective hearts and minds (not just in our history).
At face value, one seems to dwell needlessly on the past, while other appears only fixated on the future. But essentially, they’re both trying to dominate the same thing—our understanding of what America is, who we are, the risks and opportunities we have available.
This may all sound a bit ironic: One makes bold statements about the past with subtle implications for the future, while the other makes bold statements about the future with subtle implications about the past.
To summarize, the 1619 Project reinterprets the founding of the country by placing slavery and its legacy at the core, arguing that the real birth of the U.S. wasn’t in 1776 but rather, in 1619 with the arrival of enslaved Africans. By establishing this basic revision, 1619 hopes to reframe, even litigate, the entirety of the American story. In doing this, the 1619 Project is not only about redrafting the past but rather, by implication it’s aiming to re-work the foundations of prior case law in order to legally reshape the future.
On the other hand, Project 2025 is an explicit (rather than implicit) political initiative to directly establish the game plan for a more “conservative” American future: Smaller government, more “freedom” (whatever this means), less focus on identity politics (and all that 1619 talk). These were never actually “Conservative American” values - the story and naming conventions were much more complicated.
In short, DNA gets injected, mutated, turned on and off, for reasons we often either forget about or we just never knew. Ideas are simply a different kind of DNA. Humans want the narratives of DNA, but they are almost never “truths” - they are only viruses that mutate and later, get turned on or off.
I see no reason to not accept that power largely does indeed determine what people believe, but that woke progressives have the power
I think it may be helpful to consider the idea of a mind virus as a metaphor. So-called infectious memes are not really catching, but you can model them as if they were using models based on those developed for epidemics.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/cycles-of-radicalization
But the mechanism through which these ideas spread is through the same mechanisms as other culture spreads, there is nothing special.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-cultural-evolution-works#:~:text=A%20combination%20of,in%20an%20epidemic.
One might acquire the meme through the action of prestige and in-group bias. Once you have it you may occupy a space when most people also have it and so you have it reinforced through *three* evolutionary forces: prestige, in-group and also frequence bias. Against this would be individual learning and direct bias. For most people the former is stronger than the latter. Not only that, but most of the people arguing against crazy ideas on the right are on the left, while those arguing against the same on the left are right. Here in-group bias serves to reduce the force of their arguments because it comes from the other side.
But it is not that the meme inhibits rational thought. In time there will be prestige holders who are on their side who will argue against the crazy ideas. Examples: Richard Hanania for the right and Freddie DeBoer doing for the Left. This process can be analogized the acquisition of resistance and the herd immunity provided to suppress "infection" from newly entering cohorts,
Eventually the radical beliefs subside and they go back "underground" where they will incubate for another 30-40 years before a popping up again (in a mutated form), once those who learned their lesson for this bout have aged out of relevance and no longer have prestige, much as the Boomers who went through this the last time in the late sixties and early seventies have no influence on the discourse anymore.
"Well, on Tuesday, I received my order of philosophy professor Michael Huemer’s book, Progressive Myths"
Do you plan to do a book review? It sounds enticing but likewise sounds very red meat and bias confirming pandering for sales. The PR blip that raised my heckles (?sp) was the disingenuous question of "Do American police regularly murder unarmed black men just for being black? ... exposing myths" as it's refusing to acknowledge that question is really just a shortcut for "Do police at a statistically significant level use race as a meaningful factor in their discretionary decisions" whereas the synopsis seems like the author is playing the gotcha game of literalism.
Obviously literally it's not true because murder is a crime and police are rarely charged, much less convicted and likewise obviously being black isn't the only criteria as I'm sure "black man is still breathing" is a factor as is "black man physically exists within an area I can influence " and regular of course means 51% of the time and 51% of the remaining black men in America aren't being killed daily.
And I'm guessing his other "myths" suffer a similar problem.
"Do police at a statistically significant level use race as a meaningful factor in their discretionary decisions"
Since, at a statistically significant level, people of different "races" commit crimes at very different rates, I would expect them to. Should they ignore that bit of knowledge?
Many people would answer, "Yes, they should", either because you should ignore a person's race or because crime rates don't vary for different " races". The first is a moral/philosophical reason and people have different beliefs about what is right. But the second is a denial of reality. However, lots of people believe it.
I don't disagree at all but my point is the book's claim is "are police murdering unarmed black men ONLY because of their race" and, outside some fringe people, nobody earnestly believes that unless it's be used as a euphemistic shorthand whereas the book is treating it like the gospel and saying "ah ha!! gotcha!!!". That's only from the synopsis though hence my curiosity if Arnold will do a book review.
Btw on your second point, I'm not convinced that is true. I'd wager at best it's a cultural, or more accurately sub cultural thing, not a racial thing. Likewise it might be true within a particular crime but not crime as a whole; our gangbanger may be more likely to commit murder but he's probably less likely to commit tax fraud or, heaven forbid, repaint his back porch a non approved color without a permit. Likewise I've seen nothing that says Jews are, independent of all other factors such as wealth or health, less likely to jaywalk than Hmongs.
TBH it's probably a wash were we to actually enforce and prosecute ALL crimes but because we don't crime stats paint a misleading picture. For example recently over on Volokh they were saying something like 50% of murders are never prosecuted, maybe all were committed by Japanese but as a concerted public policy effort not charged because it would undermine the narrative of blacks are particularly violent and nobody wants that. And since we know selective prosecutions are the rule, not the exception, all as applied stats are suspect.
My point was that simply as an observational thing, it's true, and the disparities are pretty big. I would add, too big to be a result of bad statistics. Why the disparity exists is another question.