Why Woke Failed
The movement was based on flawed understandings of human nature.
A research proposal on cosmic inflation from an acclaimed German quantum physicist is rejected because she did not address the relevance of her findings to “sex, gender, and diversity.” Could it be because… there is none?
A respected peer-reviewed physics journal publishes a paper on introductory physics courses that identifies whiteboards as complicit “with white organizational cultures, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.” No mention of blackboards.
A collection of 67 papers published in the Journal of Chemical Education includes “Decolonizing the Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum” and “Integrating Antiracism, Social Justice and Equity Themes in a Biochemistry Class.” What’s next—the Periodic Table of Intersectional Elements?
Rice University offers a course on “Afrochemistry: The Study of Black-Life Matter.” BLM, get it?
And don’t get me started on Scientific American where, for 214 consecutive months, I debunked all manner of flapdoodle and flimflam in my “Skeptic” column, only to see this once-august publication announce “Modern Mathematics Confronts its White Patriarchal Past,” and “The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather is Wrong,” concluding from this (mis)reading of the scientific literature that “[i]nequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.” Peak wokeness was reached when Scientific American explained “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ is Problematic for Describing Programs that Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion,” explaining that Star Wars characters are too white, toxically masculine, religious, ableist, eugenicist, and worst of all resolved their conflicts through “duels with phallic lightsabers.” Phallic lightsabers? What would Freud say?
Does anyone actually believe such claptrap? Obviously some do, and the fervor of their woke faith only makes them all the more able to convince themselves (and others of parallel ideological stripes) of the truth of claims that nearly everyone else can see have little-to-no contact with reality.
So how do we understand this? It seems to help to divide the ideology of “woke” into “proximate” and “ultimate” causes. The proximate causes are what is more or less consciously going on in people’s minds as they adopt stridently woke positions that may fly in the face of their own common sense. The ultimate causes are a little deeper, more historical and psychological. And the deeper we go, the more ultimate causes seem to base themselves in unrealistic conceptions of human nature.
Proximate Causes
Moral Progress and Changing Standards of Immorality
We have made so much moral progress since the Enlightenment—particularly since the civil rights and women’s rights movements that launched the modern campus protest movement in the first place—that our standards of what is intolerable have been ratcheted ever upward to the point where many people are hypersensitive to things that, by comparison, didn’t even appear on the cultural radar half a century ago. Thus it is that modern moral crusaders have forgotten how far we’ve come since the abolition of slavery, the elimination of the death penalty in most countries, the franchise for all adult citizens, children’s rights, women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights, and even the rights of future generations to inhabit a livable planet. In other words, most of the big moral movements have been fought and won, leaving today’s moral crusaders with comparatively smaller causes to promote and evils to protest, resulting in demands for safe spaces and trigger warnings, and paroxysms thrown over microaggressions and misgendering trans people.
Cancel Culture and Pluralistic Ignorance
In his magisterial overview of this movement, The End of Woke, Andrew Doyle documents that most of the claims made by far-left progressives are endorsed by a slim margin of people—only around 8% of the population of both the UK and the United States, according to a poll conducted by the organization More in Common. More specifically, a New York Times/Ipsos poll found that 79% of all Americans object to transwomen (men) competing in women’s sports, and that even two thirds (67%) of Democrats support keeping men out of female-only sports.
Why, then, do so many people think that so many other people endorse this ideology? The specific and recent phenomena of cancel culture generates accusations of bigotry and transphobia that lead people to keep their mouths shut, itself an example of a deeper common knowledge problem found in the psychological phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance, or the spiral of silence, in which each individual is under the illusion that everyone else believes something, even though most people do not believe it. Woke has a great deal of visibility to it, and has a way of hoovering up the spotlight, creating the impression that far more people subscribe to it than actually do.
Puritanical Purging and Virtue Signaling
Social movements tend to turn on themselves in the puritanical purging of anyone who falls short of moral perfection, leading to preemptive denunciations of others before one is so denounced. The witch crazes of the 17th century degenerated into such anticipatory condemnations, resulting in a veritable plethora of nonexistent sorceresses being strapped to stakes and torched. Members of a movement compete to signal who is the most righteous by (A) recounting all the moral acts one has performed, and (B) identifying all the immoral acts others have committed. This leads to an arms race to signal moral outrage over increasingly diminishing transgressions, such as unapproved Halloween costumes at Yale University. One of the first acts of totalitarian regimes is to restrict dissent and free speech, so perhaps it should be called totalitarian liberalism, or the totalitarian left.
4. Parasitic Ideas and Suicidal Altruism
Gad Saad’s theory of idea pathogens posits that—analogous to biological parasites—ideological parasites can take hold and corrupt reason not only in individuals but within entire populations (at the moment, Canada appears to be one such place, England may be another). In that conception, ideas that are wholly untethered from reality can flourish in ideological echo chambers—like universities—and then have a tenacious hold once they find their way into the population at large.
A framework like that helps us move from what I am calling “proximate” causes to “ultimate” causes, in which we can understand the woke movement as offering facile, and tempting, answers to fundamental questions about human nature and the nature of progress. Many of those answers, notwithstanding their mimetic appeal, have a way of falling apart once exposed to any real scrutiny.
Ultimate Causes
Anti-Reason Historical Trends
In our search for the ultimate causes of this tragic period in history we could consider a number of historical trends, starting with the lack of viewpoint diversity that took hold in the academy in the 1990s and accelerated into a massive shift in the professoriate and student body to the point of there being next to no conservative voices anywhere to be found by the 2010s and 2020s. And certainly the science wars of the 1990s, following on from the postmodernism movements in the humanities of the 1970s and 1980s, which challenged the view that there is a reality and that it can be known through reason and the methods of science. And those threads can be pulled back to the anti-Western, post-colonial, post-capitalist Marxist liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s, themselves reflecting the anti-Enlightenment Romantic movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. But underlying these historical trends are deeper themes rooted in the interpretation of human nature.
Identitarian Collectivism
The liberal tradition that evolved out of the Enlightenment is grounded in individual autonomy. It is the individual who is the primary moral agent because it is the individual who survives and flourishes, or who suffers and dies. It is individual sentient beings who perceive, emote, respond, love, feel, and suffer—not populations, races, genders, groups, or nations. Historically, immoral abuses have been most rampant, and body counts have run the highest, when the individual is sacrificed for the good of the group. Rights protect individuals, not groups; in fact, most rights (such as those enumerated in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution) protect individuals from being discriminated against as members of a group, such as by race, creed, color, gender, and sexual orientation.
Contrary to this liberal tradition, collectivism holds that individuals are expendable parts of a larger whole: the band, tribe, state, nation, religion, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and countless intersectional variations on these collective cohorts. As such, individual identity is lost to what Andrew Doyle calls identitarian collectivism, for which “the illiberal left and the authoritarian right both share this habitual inclination towards collective thinking.”
The Blank Slate Model of Human Nature
This widely-held belief holds that, since people are inherently equal, any inequalities in education, health, wealth, income, housing, home ownership, employment, crime, imprisonment, and the like, can only be the result of discrimination rather than inherent inequalities. Once such discriminatory policies are eliminated, blank slaters believe, such outcome inequalities should disappear.
So, the deepest problem with wokeness is that it based on a flawed theory of human nature, a point made by Thomas Sowell in his 1987 book A Conflict of Visions, in which he argued that the vision one holds about human nature—either as constrained (conservative) or unconstrained (liberal)—determines if one emphasizes equal opportunities or equal outcomes:
If human options are not inherently constrained, then the presence of such repugnant and disastrous phenomena [inequalities] virtually cries out for explanation—and for solutions. But if the limitations and passions of man himself are at the heart of these painful phenomena, then what requires explanation are the ways in which they have been avoided or minimized.
Which of these natures you believe is true will largely shape which solutions to social ills you perceive as most effective. “In the unconstrained vision, there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason why they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment,” Sowell continues, while contrasting that with a “constrained” vision that is built around “trade-offs.”
Although some liberals embrace just such an unconstrained vision of human nature, most understand that human behavior is at least partially constrained—especially those educated in the biological and evolutionary sciences who are aware of the research in behavior genetics—so the problem lies chiefly with woke illiberals, who are full-on blank slaters, unconstrained visionaries, and utopian dreamers with no purchase on the reality of human nature, or what, in my book The Believing Brain, I called a Realistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained in all respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold a Realistic Vision of our nature. In keeping with the research from behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology, let’s put a number on that constraint at 40 to 50 percent. In the Realistic Vision, human nature is relatively constrained by our biology and evolutionary history, and therefore social and political systems must be structured around these realities, accentuating the positive and attenuating the negative aspects of our natures.
A Realistic Vision rejects the blank slate belief that people are so malleable and responsive to social programs that governments can engineer their lives into a Great Society of its design, and instead believes that family, custom, law, and traditional institutions are the best sources for social harmony. A Realistic Vision recognizes the need for strict moral education through parents, family, friends, and community because people have a dual nature of being selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative, greedy and generous, and so we need rules and guidelines and encouragement to do the right thing. A Realistic Vision acknowledges that people vary widely both physically and intellectually—in large part because of natural inherited differences—and therefore will rise (or fall) to their natural levels. A Realistic Vision of human nature is what James Madison was thinking of when he penned his oft-quoted dictum in Federalist Paper Number 51:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
The resulting structure of the United States government and its nearly 250 years of successful governance is a tribute to Madison’s (and the other founders’) realistic vision of human nature. If you have a flawed theory of human nature, however, much follows that will also be flawed, including disastrous social policies and failed social movements that have taken hold in recent years and that mark the results of the woke movement.
Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, to be published in 2026.
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The woke horse is dead. Stop beating it. Go after the jackals, hyenas and snakes that are running amok.
Thank you. I often find myself, wondering how smart, college educated people have developed such a Manichaean view of the world, where everybody is either all good are all bad, and all bad things are caused by bad people. It’s the kind of morality you’d expect if the only thing someone has paid attention to is childhood cartoons.
By the time I was in high school, I had internalized a lot of basic things that many college educated people today have not:
- The world is complex, and people in it have complex natures.
- We are not inherently more moral or good than people in the past. We are made of the same stuff.
- Nobody has a monopoly on the Truth. Any one of us may be wrong and we won’t know it until it is pointed out.
- The world will never be perfect. However, through our own effort, now is the best time to live in all history. Life in the past was a lot worse compared to now.
- Most existing problems have elusive solutions because if they didn’t they would have been solved long ago.
- It is important not to romanticize but to try to adopt a neutral, cooler perspective if you really want to understand things.
I don’t fully know what the reason is for this failure. The only thing I feel sometimes is that kids should read more, but read what?
I certainly think the conservatives who are attacking universities are no better and in fact are trying to replace one set of platitudes with another set of Manichaean ones like “America is all good all the time; capitalism never results in anything bad; anyone who criticizes the wrong thing is one of ‘them’ and hates everything we stand for, etc.”