In a footnote in his famous (or infamous) The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper relates a famous (and famously misunderstood) idea called the Paradox of Tolerance. It is, as it turns out, one of the most important concepts that any free society much reckon with—and solve.

Popper only devotes a single paragraph to this fundamental paradox of freedom, which can be summarized as “being tolerant of intolerance eventually results in an intolerant society, but being intolerant of intolerance is already a feature of an intolerant society.” In that paragraph, he outlines a solution, though he’s thin on the details. Here’s how he phrases it, in full:

Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

Radicals on both the Left and the Right have run with this famous paradox of free societies in various ways. For example, it is popular on the Left to present only Popper’s conclusion about claiming the right to suppress intolerance without expressing his rather strict criteria for that suppression. On the (radical) Right, on the other hand, this formulation has been criticized (e.g., by R.R. Reno in Return of the Strong Gods) as planting a dialectical seed that turns tolerance into totalitarian intolerance over time

In these analyses, the Left is dishonest, and the Right is simply wrong, as is their wont in each case. The Left desires, like their Nazi pseudo-nemesis Carl Schmitt, to have the power to declare the intolerant enemy and have him destroyed without acknowledging how seriously Popper takes the conditions of such action. The Right simply fails to recognize that the devil is in the details for working with such a situation in reality. Of course, by way of its error, the Right also desires, like their Nazi semi-hero Carl Schmitt, to have the power to declare the enemy and have him destroyed.

Though Popper doesn’t develop the idea further, and though the devil will remain in the details, he does lay out criteria by which intolerance of the intolerant might be acted on wisely, as opposed to unwisely, to borrow from his own phrasing. This is where the rubber meets the road for the Paradox of Tolerance, to quote the relevant section again

…for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

What Popper is proposing here, though thin on the details, is a theory of tolerance in free society. He is saying we must retain the right to suppress intolerance that might answer our tolerance with a combination of irrationalism, intolerance, and violence. He clearly states we should regard such militant and subversive intolerance as a kind of incitement and refuse to protect it as free expression.

In practice, this is trickier than can be contained in a footnote. It is not sufficient to invoke legal intolerance against views that are merely irrational, anti-rational, that denounce argument, or that forbid followers from listening to rational arguments because they are allegedly deceptive. The law already has some mechanisms for dealing with intolerance that looks to answer arguments with fists and pistols, imperfect as those might be. Further, these are not the central part of the problem of overreaching tolerance.

Popper seems to miss the most essential characteristic for finding a strong solution to his paradox. This essential characteristic is located in the fact of the paradox itself: the intolerant will not reciprocate tolerance, given the opportunity. In essence, what he is looking for, but does not find, is a Golden Rule for the issue of tolerance.

We might call such a strong solution Reciprocal Tolerance. In short, Reciprocal Tolerance would be a doctrine like: we, the people of a free society, should extend tolerance only to any who, given power over us, would also extend tolerance to us in return. That is, we will treat others as we can reasonably expect they would treat us, as determined from their own words, deeds, charters, relationships, and organizational principles.

This principle of Reciprocal Tolerance is not reversible like through some postmodernist trick or psychopathic “DARVO” because it is applied from a free society. In full generality, it is that free societies are perfectly free to be intolerant of any politically intolerant political organization.

This principle is also not a principle regarding speech. People are free to say whatever intolerant, hateful, or bigoted thing they want, even in their group settings. It would apply to any political group and its members or leadership that organize a faction with the expressed intention of acquiring political power at least in part in order to revoke tolerance from others who, absent the case of such intolerance, would not revoke tolerance from them.

Free societies live or eventually die based on their solution to the Paradox of Tolerance. Tolerance cannot be unlimited or it will be exploited and taken advantage of, but it also must be broad enough to keep society free

The solution is toleration in the bounds of good-faith, Reciprocal Tolerance. We are under no obligation socially to tolerate subversives who operate in bad faith, nor are we under any obligation legally to tolerate any demand for tolerance that would not be reciprocated if the people making the demand themselves got their hands on the levers of power. While the first of these may only be a social convention unless people are illegally deceived and defrauded, the latter certainly falls within the range of legally actionable responses to intolerance we could enforce well within the boundaries of the Constitution, which we are seeking to protect and preserve.

Once either of these fouls against a free society is detected and verified, some generally acceptable and legally narrow mechanism of intolerance against them must be able to be employed. Practically speaking, at a minimum, there is no reason to extend tax-exempt status to nonprofit organizations that explicitly espouse agendas to amass power to abolish the existing tolerant political order in favor of intolerant ones that would, if successful, revoke tolerance of those who allowed their growth. Further, entities that espouse or articulate such beliefs that receive funding from foreign sources should not be tolerated.

A principle of Reciprocal Tolerance could therefore serve as a solid basis for both social norms and legal activity to better navigate the Paradox of Tolerance that lies at the heart of every society that wants to be free. Organized intolerance ought not to be tolerated for precisely the reason that it would withdraw tolerance from those it seeks to rule.

President George Washington died at his home on December 14, 1799, at the age of 67. He died, as it turns out, of a particularly bad and sudden upper respiratory infection, most likely strep throat, that the doctors of his day (the best available) did not know how to treat. (Penicillin as a treatment wasn’t discovered until 1928.)

After going out on a cold and wet evening on December 12 to inspect his fields, President Washington returned to Mount Vernon to rest with a tickle in his throat. On December 13, he continued to work outside in the cold, wet conditions, and by evening realized he had a problem. By morning on December 14, he had a full-blown, emergency infection and got Martha to summon help. Doctors were on the scene and went to work that morning.

Not knowing how to treat President Washington’s sudden illness, his doctors made his predicament worse by using the best of 18th century “medicine” on him, starting with extensive blood-letting. In fact, they drained nearly half of the great man's blood from his body hoping to cure him. It made things worse, at the very least weakening him greatly while he was otherwise afflicted.

They also had him drink and gargle a number of potions that would have blistered his throat and increased the inflammation while doing nothing to combat the infection. Some of these included Spanish fly, potions made out of infusions of beetles, and a solution of butter, molasses, and vinegar. They also gave him a completely unhelpful enema.

Washington, certainly partially as a result of his “medical care,” succumbed to this now-trivial disease in under 24 hours, said goodbye to his family as the end drew undeniably near, closed his eyes one last time, and died, allegedly with the words “‘Tis well” being the last words from his lips before he went. That night, America lost a giant, perhaps in an untimely fashion.

Now imagine for a moment that among his doctors one had a stroke of divine inspiration (or connecting the dots between other observations he had made in similar circumstances) that led him to conclude before any treatment began that, in fact, The President was suffering from a simple bacterial infection of the upper airways and trachea. Imagine further that he was able to convince his fellows of this stroke of accurate and correct insight.

Would acquiring this accurate diagnosis have cured President Washington? No, not on its own.

Would President Washington still have succumbed and died of this simple but aggressive infection? Probably, but that cannot be known.

Even if he would have still died, would that diminish the value of the accurate diagnosis? Not at all, and that’s the point.

The accurate diagnosis alone could not have saved President Washington’s life, but one thing we might guess is that understanding that his illness was caused by an invading pathogen growing in his throat that had nothing to do with “bad blood” or “evil humours,” he may well have avoided the blood-letting in his treatment, saving much of his strength for fighting the severe but routine infection.

Furthermore, the potions and concoctions he was given to gargle and drink might have been better purposed to deal with a direct infection, per long experience with animals or other people, and perhaps would have been chosen in a way that was more beneficial or benign, especially if some understanding of the role of inflammation was part of the blessed miraculous insight of our hypothesis. Maybe they would have been chosen only for his comfort and to keep his airways clearer.

It’s very unlikely that his doctors would have realized that a certain strain of mold properly prepared and administered would have surely cured him, but they might have realized their primary focus should have been on keeping him breathing as well as possible while his body fought the infection, potentially preventing many of the other, harmful things they did.

One young doctor did propose such a solution, in fact, recommending a radical new surgical technique at the time called a tracheotomy, which was not performed. Whether or not he understood the situation (likely not), he did understand that the emphasis was to keep Washington breathing until he could recover under his own power (which would have been increased had he not been drained of half his blood and given to drink various potions, some of which were surely unhealthy). Had that surgical intervention been performed cleanly and correctly, many today think, Washington likely would have survived.

In other words, a correct diagnosis might or might not have saved President Washington in that last dark month of the eighteenth century, but it would have certainly achieved at least three effects:

1) It would have ruled out dangerous false “solutions” like blood-letting and perhaps some of the concoctions he was given;

2) It would have focused energy and attention on doing more productive, even if insufficient, things than were done, which combined may actually have saved The President's life; and

3) It still would have been correct and therefore a robust foundation for pursuing and achieving real, reliable solutions to the same problem in future circumstances, independent of Washington’s fate.

That is, getting an accurate diagnosis matters even when the diagnosis itself is not sufficient to solve the problem at hand. The likelihood of finding a viable solution to a problem goes up dramatically with an accurate diagnosis, and the likelihood of avoiding bad false “solutions” in the process also goes up dramatically in this case.

Now let’s turn our attention to Woke, a societal infection if ever there was one.

Woke, which is ultimately a group-based victimhood complex channeled through social philosophy, is always an incorrect understanding of the phenomena of society. It therefore cannot lead to correct solutions, only to ridiculous things like blood-letting (criticism, in metaphor).

It does not matter if we are talking about left-wing Woke, right-wing Woke, postmodern Woke, modern Woke, or premodern Woke. Woke is a petulant misunderstanding of the circumstances, therefore it cannot provide a correct diagnosis. Therefore, again, it cannot, except by a combination of luck and failure, produce a meaningful solution.

To wit, Marx did not have good criticisms of society, capitalism, free markets, free trade, liberalism, feudalism, slavery, or anything else he criticized—as is often asserted—because all of his criticisms relied upon his own modern-era Woke theory of social alienation and conflict that is fundamentally not correct. (It is sociognostic and just as heretical as any other Gnostic heresy, as such.) The solutions he applied are wrong not merely on their own but also because his diagnostic framework is wrong.

Keeping the diagnostic framework while recommending different solutions (right-wing Woke, or Woke Right) will not fix the fundamental problem because the diagnostic framework is still wrong. Therefore, the prescribed solutions will also be wrong. Right-wing Woke, maybe like Washington’s enema, is not an answer to left-wing Woke.

Getting accurate diagnoses about bad social theory—not by using it—is not on its own a solution any more than one of President Washington’s doctors realizing he has a strep infection would have been a cure. It is, however, the foundation for finding a cure, or at least for favoring minimal and palliative care dedicated toward the right objectives (keeping him breathing and full of his own blood while his body fought the infection) rather than taking detrimental wrong turns.

Similarly, Woke theories and obsessions with power, victimhood, and group identity, but for “right-wing” causes, is an easily avoidable wrong turn that can be avoided by understanding that Woke theory and its obsession with power, victimhood, and group identity are the disease itself. Or, more deeply, that both are aspects of the same dialectic that is making our society sick.

I hope Western Civilization can survive, even if we are unaware of the cure. Like the body of President Washington in December 1799, it already has many of the resources (like the Constitution) needed to fight the Woke infection it is currently suffering from—as long as we keep it breathing and don’t unnecessarily weaken it with false “solutions” like more Woke, more criticism, more victimhood, more identity politics, and more obsession with power, even if they’re pointing in the “other” direction.

Perhaps the best analyst of the cult of Maoism, from which Woke derives (including Woke Right, as we’ll see), was Robert Jay Lifton, who was in Hong Kong in the early 1950s interviewing and documenting refugees and exiles from the newly formed People's Republic of China

Lifton wrote books about this including the thorough case-study driven Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China (1961). In this book, inter alia, Lifton gives a few vivid descriptions of the cult phenomenon of the “thought reform” environment in China (also translated: “ideological remolding”) that characterizes two aspects of it as what he calls a “cult of confession” and a “cult of enthusiasm

These two cult orientations may be comprehensive of the Maoist Communist milieu, but to them I would add a third, a “cult of transgression,” for modern Woke cult environments and behavior, only there in nascent form in Mao’s People's Republic, at least before the Cultural Revolution. In fact, the “cult of transgression” model is what might distinguish the Cultural Revolution environment (1966–1976) from the rest of Mao’s time in power (from 1949 forward).

The Cult of Confession Dynamic

The “cult of confession,” as Lifton has it, is a key feature of the totalizing cult because creates incredible vulnerability in each individual. The way it works is by getting people to confess to their own wrongdoing, increasingly as defined against the ideological expectations of the cult. The idea is that people would confess to their sins against the cult doctrine and each other in order to bond, avoid punishment, signal adherence and understanding of the doctrine, etc. Lifton describes the phenomenon this way

Closely related to the demand for absolute purity is an obsession with personal confession. Confession is carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal, and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself. There is the demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed. (p. 425)

Every confession has a number of psychosocial effects. First, it induces massive vulnerability in the confessor. The whole group is hearing things the confessor will be judged for, perhaps harshly. Second, it therefore opens a gate to a carrot-or-stick reaction of punishment or leniency that enables trauma bonding of the confessor to the group and its leadership cadres. Third, it provides catharsis for the confessor and even some of the people witnessing that confession, allowing them to vent the pressures of cult belonging into deeper cult commitment. Fourth, it inspires more people to confess for themselves and, in fact, competitive confession where people try to give bigger and bigger confessions as it goes from one person to the next, amplifying the all the other psychosocial effects

You can easily imagine the last of those characteristics if you’ve ever sat in a class where everyone is supposed to give some kind of introduction of themselves with an update on their emotional growth (yoga classes often do this, for example). The first few people say a little, and by the end it’s a sob-fest with long, detailed stories of high emotional content and valence and tons of flowing empathy. As Lifton explains, this is a semi-performative act of self-initiation into a totalizing cult environment,

But as totalist pressures turn confession into recurrent command performances, the element of histrionic public display takes precedence over genuine inner experience. Each man becomes concerned with the effectiveness of his personal performance, and this performance sometimes comes to serve the function of evading the very emotions and ideas about which one feels most guilty. (p. 426)

Lifton adds the following color to the situation,

The totalist confession takes on a number of special meanings. It is first a vehicle for the kind of personal purification which we have just discussed, a means of maintaining a perpetual inner emptying or psychological purge of impurity; this purging milieu enhances the totalists’ hold upon existential guilt. Second, it is an act of symbolic self-surrender, the expression of the merging of individual and environment. Third, it is a means of maintaining an ethos of total exposure—a policy of making public (or at least known to the Organization) everything possible about the life experiences, thoughts, and passions of each individual, and especially those elements which might be regarded as derogatory. (pp. 425–426)

Now imagine that but confessing evils you have committed, including against imaginary crimes. The Woke Left made strong use of this “cult of confession” dynamic. DEI meetings were, in essence, exactly this program rammed into a professional workplace setting. Accusations of mysterious “structural” racism or transphobia or whatever were leveled, and everyone has to look for ways they’ve contributed or been complicit and confess it all in front of the group (Lifton: “confess[ing] to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed

There is also much confessing of “I used to be like this but then I learned how much harm it causes to people of color for white people to go hiking” or some such claim of self-improvement—or, “ideological remolding,” or, thought reform. Cult-like mantras follow: “Hiking-while-white encodes whiteness into the recreation, hiking culture, and the outdoors, which is exclusionary.” You get the idea. Lifton explains

The cult of confession can offer the individual person meaningful psychological satisfactions in the continuing opportunity for emotional catharsis and for relief of suppressed guilt feelings, especially insofar as these are associated with self-punitive tendencies to get pleasure from personal degradation. More than this, the sharing of confession enthusiasms can create an orgiastic sense of “oneness,” of the most intense intimacy with fellow confessors and of the dissolution of self into the great flow of the Movement. And there is also, at least initially, the possibility of genuine self-revelation and of self-betterment through the recognition that “the thing that has been exposed is what I am.” (p. 426)

The purpose of this ritual, Lifton tells us, is ultimately horrifying and fundamental to its nature as a totalitarian practice:

The assumption underlying total exposure (besides those which relate to the demand for purity) is the environment’s claim to total ownership of each individual self within it. Private ownership of the mind and its products—of imagination or of memory—becomes highly immoral. (p. 426)

Thus we come to understand the dynamic of a cult of confession as central to that of a totalizing cult, thus the totalitarian environment.

The Cult of Enthusiasm Dynamic

Alongside the “cult of confession” dynamic in totalitarian environments, Lifton characterizes the “cult of enthusiasm” as partially derivative to the cult of confession and partly free-standing. In short, the cult of enthusiasm refers to a strong current of enthusiasm for supporting the cult program, beliefs, and its leadership. It’s also usually highly emotional in nature and meant not to create and manipulate guilt and shame so much as to whip up frenzy, mania, and enthusiasm in the participants. As Lifton explains,

Thought reform has the opposite ethos [to traditional Chinese culture of self-restraint], a cult of enthusiasm (enthusiasm in the religious meaning of rapturous and excessive emotional experience), with a demand for total self-surrender. It is true that thought reform implies a promise of a return to restraint, and of an attainment of relaxed perfection some time in the mystical Communist future, just as Confucius claimed that these ideals had existed during an equally mystical past or “golden age”— but enthusiasm and restraint, once established, are not always so easily controlled. (p. 397)

Notice that Lifton characterizes this activity as driven by a “demand for total self-surrender.” Surrender—or submission—is a key component of the totalizing (or authoritarian) cult environment, as submission to the ideology and its perceived authorities is a key aspect of cult (and authoritarian) psychology and sociology. Lifton here, though, describes a kind of ideological innervation through this surrender of self to the cult and its ambitions.

Now, part of the ideological innervation Lifton describes here can be done directly, particularly in the People’s Republic of China context in terms of enthusiasm for the party and party leadership (esp. Mao) worship or various icons that were held up as ideal comrades. Communist doctrine tends to be held maniacally, as Lifton relates through one of his interview subjects, a Catholic priest who had been wrongly imprisoned by Mao’s thugs, exhibiting characteristic symptoms of a mind that had been broken to the point of admiring its tormenters:

The Communists have tremendous enthusiasm in their outright devotion to their doctrine. … What they believe, they do. … We are divided between doctrine and practice. … There is a discrepancy between religious life and doctrine. Therefore we are weak. … They are superior to us in carrying out their actions. … They have dialectic and a strange use of their proofs. … They have a keen instinct for finding out what each man may be doing against his own creed and his work. … I don't know where human beings can find such proofs. (p. 140)

Some of the mania of the “cult of enthusiasm” in the totalizing environment is derivative to the cult of confession, however. After confessing, there often follows an enthusiasm to “do better,” with people frantically and manically participating in the cult’s behaviors and rituals, including denunciations of class enemies or those who haven’t confessed sufficiently or at all. That is, victims become perpetrators through this transformation from one cult dynamic to another.

Psychologically, the cult of enthusiasm dynamic energizes members of the cult, helps them bond in a shared sense of activity and worldview, reinforces the cult’s beliefs, inspires loyalty and commitment, and reinforces the sense of the high social cost of dissent while also discouraging it through general social pressure and enthusiasm for the common cult direction. The highly emotionally charged atmosphere of this cult dynamic is instrumental to binding and orienting people with the cult’s doctrines

The Woke Left does this as well, as indicated by my deliberate wry usage of the phrase “do better” just above. These denunciation rituals—which relate to what Maoists called “speaking bitterness”—are obvious and, in fact, more or less characterize Woke Left behavior in most people’s minds. They also present a general enthusiasm for “liberation” and a “socially just world,” as we hear in ridiculous terms like “trans joy.” Every Pride parade was an increasingly libidinous “cult of enthusiasm” exercise, as were many of their other rallies, protests, demonstrations, and so on. (This has led me in the past to say that protest is Woke church.) They were something more too, though: deliberately transgressive, which is indicative of a Cultural Revolution program where “change agents” destroy the norms of the past for a brighter future.

The Cult of Transgression Dynamic

Lifton, writing well before the Cultural Revolution, does not focus in Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism upon any such “cult of transgression” dynamic, but the seeds of this particularly pernicious form of personal and societal destruction are clearly present. Of course, they must be, because they represent the same Jacobin spirit from the French Revolution that runs through all of Communism. Lifton, describing the situation of one of the captives in Mao’s People’s Republic makes this apparent:

He also developed the concept that it was necessary to degrade oneself “to convince the Communists that you are with them—and not in grace in the bourgeois world—so that the Communists would feel that you were so degraded in the bourgeois world that you could not go back.” (p. 166)

It’s difficult to read those words and not recognize the self-humiliation rituals of Woke Leftism today, especially as we might see them in Queer Activists or around “Pride” displays. The words “so degraded in the bourgeois world that you could not go back” haunt the participants in those displays perfectly. This self-degradation as a means of distinguishing oneself from the “bourgeois” (or normal, or fallen, or mundane) world is also the basis for a cult dynamic in Wokeness, though: a cult of transgression.

The purpose of Woke theory is often to transgress norms and boundaries, especially in Queer Theory, which is explicitly formulated to do this and only this. bell hooks (name intentionally not capitalized) even published a famous book called Teaching to Transgress (based on Paulo Freire’s “Marxification” of education model, as I called it, itself based on Mao’s thought-reform methods) that highlights the centrality of this behavior in a semi-formal academic way, even though, again, every Pride demonstration made it obviously clear in a more tangible and blatant way. hooks makes clear that there’s a connection between enthusiasm and transgression, as does every monstrosity performed in the name of “Pride”:

I longed passionately to teach differently from the way I had been taught since high school. The first paradigm that shaped my pedagogy was the idea that the classroom should be an exciting place, never boring. And if boredom should prevail, then pedagogical strategies were needed that would intervene, alter, even disrupt the atmosphere. Neither Freire’s work nor feminist pedagogy examined the notion of pleasure in the classroom. … Excitement in higher education was viewed as potentially disruptive of the atmosphere of seriousness assumed to be essential to the learning process. To enter classroom settings in colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement, was to transgress. (p. 7)

The idea of the cult of transgression is essentially the idea of teenage rebellion but turned deeply pathological. Teenagers naturally rebel against their environments, parents, norms, etc., just as a way of testing out boundaries in the effort to stake out an independent adult identity for themselves. They often do this in tightly knit social groups that develop their own slang language, set of in-group jokes, and sets of transgressions that prove their defiance, and they often play off one another to increase the transgressive capacity of their bubble until it strikes various boundaries from which it is supposed to learn important lessons about public versus private behavior, social norms and limitations, etc. That’s normal, but it can also be the basis for a cult of transgression defined by people pushing the boundaries of prevailing norms through cult doctrine and eventually socially and psychologically isolating themselves from those outside the cult

In organic situations like with teenagers, this transgressive behavior is likely mostly harmless and even in some ways edifying, but when there is a directed cult ideology in play, it can be a potent cult recruitment and commitment tool that takes the form of what we might call the “ritual of transgression

The Ritual of Transgression

The ritual of transgression is best described by saying that everyone in a group within the cult, or the cult itself, competes to transgress the expected norms of behavior and thought a little more but always in a particular direction in line with cult doctrine. You can imagine a group of young Critical Race Theorists sitting around starting with a transgressive statement like “the police are racist” (not worthy of respect) and going down a deep rabbit hole of wanting to defund police, abolish police, abolish prisons, imprison police, kill police, etc. You can also easily imagine another rabbit trail in which “police are racist” turns into discussions of why everything else is racist too, even hiking and probably the mountains people want to hike on

Radical feminist behavior over the last fifty years (thus Woke activism in many ways) can almost be defined by participation in a combination of these three cults with the tip of the spear being the cult of transgression; hence bell hooks’s book title. They did this in both theory (blaming men, patriarchy, misogyny, “rape culture,” etc., for more and more ridiculous things) and in practice (say, making themselves deliberately hateful and ugly to “reject gender norms” and “being nice” and blaming men for thinking they're ugly and hateful). They were, and are, as Lifton has it, making themselves “so degraded in the bourgeois world” that they cannot “go back.”

The Maoist cult did this too, particularly in the Cultural Revolution under the doctrine of “Smash the Four Olds,” which admittedly came long after Lifton’s research (mid-1950s) and publication of Thought Reform (1961). Young people rejected their elders (became transgressive) and went on to “smash” anything reminiscent of “old” society (today: “Boomer mentality

These actions were blatant transgressions against the existing society, by the way. Streets were renamed, temples desecrated, relics looted, smashed, and burned, and even people were killed or struggled into suicide over their adherence to “old ways of thinking” or “old habits” (today, again: “Boomer mentality

In the cult of transgression, the ritual is to transgress to the limits of tolerability with no backtracking and to do so in a social environment where everyone is going a little deeper into the ideology and doctrine of the cult. In the process, through the transgressions themselves and the cultish identification with them to which they become increasingly socially bound, the cult isolation and commitment deepens. The dynamic is partly by these transgressions becoming the bases for “in-jokes” they can’t share elsewhere because they’re too transgressive, which is also socially isolating, and partly through a shared sense of rule-breaking. The transgressors are now in it together and defined by opposing the world. As you might imagine, this slope is extremely slippery, and past a certain point, there’s almost no way back, psychologically or socially.

Ultimately, this creates massive social co-dependence on other members of the cult and a self-isolation from outsiders (who will eventually have to be driven away) who might act as moderating forces. The transgressors cannot relate well to normal society any longer while maintaining a sense of degenerate superiority over it, literally in the mold of “Left-hand” or “black” magic. They’re bound together as self-satisfied outsiders who believe they’ve transcended a false moral universe through their acts of transgression

Of course, this perverse antinomian behavior sets up exactly the kinds of guilt and shame mechanisms that drive the cult of confession dynamic forward. The false light of enthusiasm fills in the growing darkness as a psychological and social cover, and the false enlightenment of shedding morality through transgression rationalizes the participants’ fall. Coming to believe morality to be false and imposed, thus in need of transgressing in the first place is what it means to become “Woke.” The participants’ “wake up,” from their own perspectives, to a higher morality that transcends and disparages the real thing.

Woke Cult of Transgression

A peculiar feature of the cult of transgression is that it’s like a system of social valves that increasingly lock a participant into the cult ideology and its most radical views. It even defines the vanguard of the Woke cult’s detachment from reality. That is, participants cannot easily go backwards without a total break from the cult and its totalizing environment

Once a person transgresses morality and society to a certain degree and the cult accepts that level of transgression or extremism, to back off or to moderate at all is actually to violate the terms of the cult of transgression itself. At that point, the cult will turn on the participant for denying the ritual

All participants in a cult will eventually participate in the punishment of hypothetical or real moderates or eventually “traitors,” so they will each know that more than social rejection awaits them if they deviate or show any sobriety against the cult environment. Put differently, the cult of transgression dynamic is a radicalization vehicle with no safe escape hatch and that becomes harder to escape the longer one participates in it and the deeper one gets

Take, for example, a cult of transgression dynamic that calls everything racist from a Critical Race Theory perspective. Suppose someone says something isn’t racist after someone else in the cult transgresses the boundary of saying that it is. According to the rules of the cult, that poor reasonable person is now maintaining racism, so they’re a racist—so they’re a traitor; so they’re evil. Punishment will ensue

Not only can we easily imagine dozens of examples of this pattern of behavior on the Woke Left from recent memory and experience, we can also credit it with the whole of the “transgender” phenomenon. Radical feminists wanted to say “gender is a social construct,” so they had sacrificed access to a place of epistemic authority necessary to stop a movement claiming “sex is a social construct”—or any of its derivatives, like that men who claim to be women belong in women’s sports punching them in the face and breaking their skulls (which is a huge transgression, when you think of it that way). They just got called “TERFs” and expelled from the vanguard of their own movement while the transgressive cult marched on without them

The Woke Right’s Cult Dynamics

Now, of course, Woke Right circles exhibit all three of these cult dynamics too, most notably the cults of enthusiasm and transgression. In fact, those largely define “Woke Right” in a functional sense

The Woke Right is wild-eyed (enthusiastic) with the idea of “winning” instead of “always losing because of ‘muh principles.’” Principles are therefore expendable against the cult of enthusiasm dynamic of “winning,” and the values and norms upon which those principles are based will have to be transgressed as a matter of creating permission structures to pursue more unprincipled “winning.” As a result, nearly everything they do (under the misapplied brand name of being “based”) is transgressive of the norms of both Woke and through illegitimate conflation polite and normal liberal society. (Yes, this makes Woke Right a “queering” movement in many ways, just like the Woke Left

The word the Woke Right misuses internally for its cult of transgression is “based,” which has nothing to do with being based in reality or principle. For them, being “based” does not mean to be unafraid to state uncomfortable truths against social pressure while maintaining your values; it means saying edgy things you’re not supposed to say in polite society or under Woke hegemony. That is, it means being transgressive, or, in the Woke Left parlance for the exact same thing, being “queer,” but in a “trad” way. Their primary cult of confession dynamic is in confessing to having not been based enough to transgress earlier or further than they did in the past.

Woke Right social dynamics tend to involve competitively saying or expressing more “based” (that is, Woke or queer-trad) things, whether that be racist, sexist, anti-gay, Jew-hating or blaming, patriarchal, chauvinistic for their own groups, or extreme (anti-Constitutional) MAGA policy positions or reactions to politics relevant to MAGA policy goals. To go backwards against these transgressive cult-social values is to be labeled and treated as “controlled opposition,” “cucked,” “neocon,” “warmonger,” and a long litany of other names, or simply and in Red-Guard fashion “Boomer minded.” Such is verboten in the Woke Right cult

In the Woke literature, the principle of the cult of transgression is ultimately characterized most blatantly by Herbert Marcuse in “Repressive Tolerance” (1965), where he calls the principle “liberating tolerance.” He defines it thusly,

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: … it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.

Another way to term liberating tolerance would be “No Enemies to the Left (NETTL).” The parallel concept in the Maoist cult would be “No Enemies of Mao Zedong Thought,” and in the Woke Right cult would be “No Enemies to the Right (NETTR),” which is explicitly and strongly argued for and held to in the Woke Right cult and its various cults of transgression and enthusiasm. These forces are all the same and serve only the function of deepening radicalization, commitment, and cult communal self-isolation

This cultish program on the Woke Right is underwritten by the logic of what is called the “friend-enemy distinction” in politics. Where Karl Marx divided the people into “oppressor and oppressed,” Mao Zedong separated the population into “the people” and “the enemies of the people,” and Herbert Marcuse broke the population into “the Left” and “the Right,” the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt described politics as the dynamic between “friends” and “enemies” who are pitted in an existential battle over the direction of society. It doesn’t really matter which formulation we use, however; the effect is the same: destructive cult-like tribal politics based on mutual enmity that becomes increasingly totalitarian and self-justifying in the name of the conflict that is explained to be defining of a given sociopolitical moment.

Lifton gave us the tools to understand these dynamics, however, as they are the dynamics of totalism—a cult environment. The cult dynamics of confession, enthusiasm, and transgression are defining of a psychological and social environment. They are also indicative of being “Woke” in the sense of having “woke up” to a pervasive “false morality” in society that must be transcended with themselves as the intrepid vanguard movement away from the old (repressive) and into the new (liberated).

None of these “Woke” cult dynamics is healthy for their participants or for the society plagued by them. All should be understood for what they are: dark, destructive cult dynamics indicative of the totalitarian condition, thus the enemies of peace, freedom, and civilization. Thus we can understand Woke across its many manifestations through history and today—and reject it for the sickness that it is.