How the woke-mind virus infected the Western world

Gad Saad is a marketing professor and academic researcher in behavioural science who has spent his career studying how perceptions and ideas can produce biological effects. Woke concepts like postmodernism, moral relativism and social constructionism act much like pathogens on people’s minds, Saad argues, and wokeness can spread, damaging people’s ability to think rationally, in the same way that other dangerous ideologies have warped the minds of masses in the past. I recommend everybody to study his fascinating works.¹

Now, let´s dig in to how woke conquered the Western world and what that means.

The term ”political correctness” has existed at least since the 18th century,² then meaning ”in line with prevailing political thought and policies.” In the 20th century officials in the Russian Communist Party used it after the revolution 1917.³ At that time it was used as a kind of honorific for loyal party members who never deviated from the Party line. It was later adopted by American socialists in the 40s and 50s as a derogatory term for an attitude considered to disregard things like compassion and implied bad politics.

The terminology for political correctness also partly derives from the Cultural Revolution in China during the 60s. This happened when the Chinese leader Mao Tse Tung introduced a new way of speaking in accordance with the party line in 1966. By making certain words and concepts unacceptable and impossible to use. In this way, Mao, just like other brutal dictators like Stalin and Hitler, wanted to stifle all the arguments of his critics.

This then spread to the West, partly through the writings of political theorists like Herbert Marcuse, a marxist who advocated a “repressive tolerance” in which traditional ideas and practices were suppressed while revolutionary ideas and approaches were celebrated. According to Marcuse, the tolerance that liberal democratic societies claimed to offer was only an illusion. One should therefore be intolerant of movements and opinions from the right and tolerant of those from the left. Those this sound familiar?

Marcuse was an advocate of Critical Theory, a social philosophical theory that sought to achieve a critical understanding of contemporary capitalist society. Marcuse was a member of the so-called Frankfurt School that was formed at the end of the 1920s by academics, intellectuals and dissidents dissatisfied with the current analyses of society. The Frankfurt School questioned Stalinism but also believed that prevailing theories were not sufficient to explain the revolutionary social climate that characterized the capitalist societies.

Archaeologist Jonathan Lindström, author of the mammoth work ”Sweden’s Long History: People, Power, and Gods Over 14,000 Years”, questions critical theory, which he believes hinders scientific knowledge, creativity, and the ability to scrutinize material. Lindström believes that there is a contempt for the level of knowledge of readers within academia.

A contemporary follower of the Frankfurt School was Theodor Adorno, a philosopher and sociologist influenced by the works of Marx and Freud. In his book “The Authoritarian Personality,” he attempted to develop a method for identifying and diagnosing people who might be fascists. For example, if someone claimed that  there were things of importance science could never explain, that was a sign that the person suffered from blind faith in authority, a characteristic of fascists, according to Adorno. Not surprisingly, bourgeois, especially conservative, values, ended up in the crosshairs of these theories.

In the 1960s, modernism began to be questioned by french academics such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Their theories was called postmodernism and described as a deconstruction of what the West usually takes for granted. The great Western narratives of the Enlightenment, Christianity and science were not objective truths, they believed, but rather subjective stories elevated to strengthen our stories at the expense of others. Therefore, they were bad and had to be dismantled.

This view then spread from France to Great Britain and on to the United States and the rest of the West, where it flourished until the mid-1980s. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a second postmodernist phase followed, the so-called applied postmodernism, a theory that argues that the way society works has been artificially constructed by white people. By then, Identity-based critical theories was given a lot of space in academic institutions.

During the 1970s and 80s, the concept of political correctness had been used as a form of ironic self-criticism among feminists and other progressives. During the 90s the term was taken over by the right and then acquired a negative meaning through a new connotation. In ”Illiberal Education” from 1991, the conservative author Dinesh D’Souza launched a tough attack on what he claimed was the left’s constant fixation on identity politics.

Identity politics can be described as political organization based on belonging to different social groups such as race, class, religion, gender and orientation. In simpler terms, it means that people’s political views are shaped based on the identity they take as members of loosely cohesive social groups such as race, class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ideology, sexual orientation, culture, medical condition, work or hobby.

Common to this view is that one sees a systematic oppression in the whole of society that is directed against individual identity groups. This means, among other things, that white men should not have the right to speak for the rights of women or blacks simply because they are white, and, according to this philosophy, bear a collective guilt for everything that the white patriarchy has done to other races historically.

Identity politics also requires that identity groups must be represented in education, professions and positions in proportion to their shares of the population. The essence of this approach is that more women are needed on the boards of listed companies, more immigrants and women in the police force, in the cultural sector and on the stock exchange, etc. There is of course nothing wrong with that, but the problem is they are trying to force it through statutory quotas, which means that gender and race take precedence over merit. A reverse discrimination, all in the name of “justice” of course.

In the 2000s, the term “woke” was introduced in the US. It became an expansion of the political correct concept and described an “awareness” about equality between ethnicities, about gender, social justice, discrimination and racism.

Since the activists and groups in the woke-movement, whether they are environmentalists or otherwise, see themselves as fighting for the good and noble, or even as saviors of the world, every opponent becomes an “evil” enemy. Therefore, they believe almost anything can be excused, including vandalism, months of occupation of streets, squares, malls, university campuses, the destruction of art and even the obstruction of airplanes who are about to land or of motorists, firemen and ambulance drivers trying to get trough.

The ends justify the means. After all, these ”good” activists always fight for “what is just in the world.”

Anyone who questions them can expect hysterical backlash and accusations of insult.

At King’s College in London, security police has now been introduced at student gatherings and political discussions so that no student  is exposed to “stressful opinions.” The medical schools at Harvard University and the law schools at Yale University offer therapy dogs that students can pet to reduce their stress. It sounds like Monty Python, but is actually true.

In the book ”Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody,” authors Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay asks the question why radical feminists don’t stand up for girls who are subjected to Islamic honor killings and why celebrities, politicians, and corporations nowadays seem to compete about who is most aware of race and gender issues?

The authors argue that the politically liberal West is under attack, not by bombs and missiles, but by cynical discourses that have taken over large parts of Western academia, from where the destructive ideology then spreads to the rest of society and undermines the foundations of democracy. In other words, Pluckrose and Lindsay argues that the very foundations of the Western world are being undermined.

They list a series of things that we take for granted:

– The legacy of the Enlightenment,

– The belief in science.

– The belief in liberalism as a political and economic system. (modernism)

– The belief in the overall history of Christianity.

In other words:

Everything that is now under attack in the Western world and is being broken down by woke activists who proudly declare that all truths are subjective except their own.

In any case, it is difficult to underestimate the power of the destructive influence that woke and political correctness has. People can end their acquaintance with friends or family members they believe has voted for the “wrong” party and people are called climate deniers, demonized and labeled as extremists if they want to discuss other models of explanation for climate change than human intervention.

Nowadays it has even gone so far that researchers at Chalmers in Gothenburg and the Department of Psychology in Uppsala, Sweden receive research grants to study the character of people who are critical of the official theory of global warming. On Chalmers’ website, we can read that ”climate denial” is ”linked to right-wing nationalism” and that there is a ”connection between conservatism, xenophobia and climate denial”.⁴

In other words:

If you are skeptical of, or question, the official climate theory, you are not only considered conservative, but also xenophobic.

At the same time, climate activists who throw paint on artwork, glue themselves to airports to block airplanes and block the road for drivers, firefighters and ambulances are praised.

Teachers can be fired for believing that there are only two genders or for not wanting to pretend that a child is best treated as ”genderless”.

Hand in hand with the woke mindset goes the so-called cancellation culture, which means, among other things, that researchers and others can be fired or frozen out if they express the ”wrong” opinion on a specific issue.

The much-discussed ”Twitterfiles scandal” about the silencing of dissent during, not least, the pandemic that Musk and journalists like Schellenberg and Taibbi revealed made this frightening clear.³

In 2023, a professorship in design and visual communication was advertised at Linnaeus University. It explained that applicants were expected to work from “norm criticism, decolonialism, feminism, queer theory and theories of post-growth”.

As if that isn’t absurd enough, everyone (regardless of what they do) who applies for research funding from the Research Council for Health, Life and Welfare is now faced with the question:

”In what way is a theoretically grounded gender and diversity perspective important for the research project?” ⁵

There are several examples of how people have been demonized and lives destroyed for not following the Political correct template. According to the same principle, concepts such as conspiracy and conspiracy theorists have been pathologized and are now casually labelled on anyone who is considered controversial. In this way, all “heretics” who disagree with mainstream or woke-activists can be marginalized and dismissed at an early stage.

In the UK people are now being imprisoned for what they write on Facebook, Twitter, instagram and other platforms. At the same time, reports are being written that Tolkien’s ”The Lord of the Rings” and Orwell’s ”1984” risks turning people into right-wing extremists.

This is off course absurd but not surprisingly in a world infected by the woke-mind virus.

The Black Lives Matter movement, whose rise led to riots, looting and damage for millions of dollars in several cities, claimed that the entire American justice system was racist and demanded the dismantling and defunding of the police. And so it was. Police resources were drastically reduced in several cities and the result was an explosive increase in violence. In a short time, a 30 percent increase in deadly violence was noted. In Portland alone, 72 people were killed in 2020, an increase of 83 percent from the previous year.⁶

In their book ”The Coddling of the American Mind”, free speech lawyer Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describe the epidemic of vulnerability and resistance to free speech that is spreading among Western universities. It is not just an academic problem, they explain, and the blame for this misery lies largely with overprotective parents. However, the main responsibility lies with the forces that want to prevent others from speaking.

A scary example was a violent riot that took place at Berkeley University in on February 1, 2017. Shortly after Donald Trump had won the presidential election, Milo Yiannopoulos, a controversial debater and Trump supporter, was invited to give a speech at the university. A 100 students signed a petition to stop the lecture. nad when that failed they gathered outside the premises to prevent Yiannopoulos and the audience from entering.⁷

A group of violent left-wing extremists then attacked with stones and Molotov cocktails and after assaulting the audience and causing damage for over 100 000 dollar they managed to have Yiannopoulos´speech cancelled. Haidt describes these activists as security fanatics, who´s parents have had more time and money than any generation and never dared to their kids out of their sight but instead constantly monitored, serviced and pampered them.

Strong forces have been, and are working to destroy scientifically accepted views and liberal and traditional values ​​that often stem from the Enlightenments ideals of reason and freedom. Unfortunately, this is a mindset that has found its way into almost all sectors of society. Something that has resulted in a confusion of concepts and polarization that ultimately threatens to break the entire foundation on which the Western world rests:

Freedom of expression, democracy and empiricism.

Instead, we risk having a society where only certain opinions are allowed, only one ideology is allowed to prevail and where pre-established theories and philosophical reasoning trump data collection via scientific investigations of reality.

Although the consequences of this spectacle have begun to dawn on more and more politicians (including in terms of voter support), millions of young people, civil servants and cultural workers, among others, have been programmed with this madness for years.

These people will not voluntarily let go of the sandcastle on which they have built their worldview.

Michael Delavante

Sources:

1. Gad Saad, Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common sense, Regnery Publishing , 2021 Se also:  https://canadian-podcasts.com/podcast/full-comment-with-anthony-furey/–wokeness-is-a-mind-disease-but-it-can-be-beaten
2. Christopher Looby, 1996, Voicing America Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States, 1996, University of Chicago Press,(page 20) Se also: How has the meaning of politicaally correct changed? https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/161941/how-has-the-meaning-of-politically-correct-changed
3. När blev vi politiskt korrekta?, Emrah Sütcü, Världens historia, 21.11.22

4. Klimatförnekelse kopplad till högernationalism, chalmers.se, 21 maj 2021

5. Forskningsprojekt/Skiss 2018. Instruktioner till ansökningsformuläret i Prisma, (sidan 3)

6. Brinkemo: Civilisationens fernissa är tunn, Per Brinkemo, Bulletin, 22 april, 2022. Se även: Portland, Oregon, Mayor Proposes Increasing Police Budget, Associates Press, usnews.com, Nov. 3, 2021,

7. Berkeley protests of Yiannopoulos caused $100,000 in damag By Madison Park and Kyung Lah, CNN, February 2, 2017

Michael Delavante, How the woke-mind virus infected the Western world