In an excerpt from his forthcoming Elon Musk biography published in The Wall Street Journal Thursday, Walter Isaacson offers details of Musk’s decision to buy Twitter. The main reason he decided to do this was to combat the so-called ‘woke mind virus’ that “is taking over America.”

His sentiments were partly triggered by the decision of his oldest child to transition to Jenna and then became a fervent Marxist and broke relations with his father. Musk blamed the ideology that Jenna imbibed at Crossroads, the progressive school she attended in Los Angeles. Twitter, he felt, had become infected by a similar mindset.

Elon Musk is not alone in feeling betrayed. Every school has instituted a woke indoctrination program, according to Andrew Gutmann⁽¹⁾

Our nation’s K-12 schools, and especially its elite private schools, have in recent years utterly changed their missions. They have abandoned academic excellence and classical liberalism, become hostile to free speech and open discourse and adopted a political education of training progressive activists.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, that’s for sure:

Confidence in American higher education is sinking faster than for any other institution, with barely half of Americans believing it has a positive effect on the country.

No small part in this disenchantment is the impression that universities are repressing differences of opinion, like the inquisitions and purges of centuries past. It has been stoked by viral videos of professors being mobbed, cursed, heckled into silence, and sometimes assaulted, and it is vindicated by some alarming numbers.

It’s no better for the students, a majority of whom say that the campus climate prevents them from saying things they believe.

This is part of the statement written by Steven Pinker and Bertha Madras to announce a new Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, a faculty-led organization dedicated to promoting free inquiry, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse at Harvard University, with more than 120 faculty members.

According to a 2017 poll, nearly three‐​fourths (71%) of Americans believe that political correctness has done more to silence important discussions our society needs to have.

However, increasing prominence in news media of so-called wokeness terminology is a global phenomenon starting early post-2010 in pioneering countries yet mostly worldwide ubiquitous post-2015. What’s happening?

One of the best diagnosis on increasing political polarisation I have recently read is the one offered by Michael Narberhaus in “Switching off the autopilot”

A dogmatic version of social justice activism makes things worse

The transition to a sustainable society cannot happen inside the progressive ideological bubble. While the current political situation is certainly a strong motivator for activists, intersectionality movements are themselves contributing to the rise of the far right.

Intersectionality bears the assumption that all hierarchies and inequalities are the consequence of persisting systems of oppression. The proponents of intersectionality seem to be deeply influenced by critical theory, which maintains that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation.

Critical theory underpins most thinking in today’s gender, feminist and race studies. Intersectional theory argues that the systems we live in were shaped and are still controlled by Western white men, by systems of patriarchy, systems that continue to oppress women, people of colour and other marginalised groups. Another source of influence on intersectional thinking stems from postmodernism, according to which science is a socially constructed ideology of the dominant classes,

The problem with intersectionality is not its original concept of overlapping discriminations. There is value in this concept, when applied with rigour. Nor is the problem that critical theory is wrong per se. No doubt, dominant narratives shape how we see the world and can control the world. The problem is that intersectional activism rarely applies these concepts with scientific rigour to identify true discriminations and their causes.

The phenomenon is rather a dogmatic construct that contains a sophisticated mythology, similar to a religion. Intersectionality is not receptive to open debate. It’s an us-versus-them approach that sends us down a spiral of polarisation and tribalism, and humans are biologically hardwired for tribalism.

Intersectionality is all about power. Class is one of the dimensions of intersectional theory, and of all the contradictions intersectional theory makes, class is what makes the whole concept implode.

Micha curently lives in Barcelona and he is very aware of Spanish Podemos and local progressive platforms like Barcelona en Comú, which raised with the Indignados Movement. In Spain we have enjoyed over the last 5-10 years the recipes of this simplistic progressive bubble, which clearly shows that the new 21st-century activism will have to deal with complex challenges in very different ways.

We need to understand why moral indignation works at the scale of a village, why it doesn’t work at the scale of the global village, and how it can be made to work with the implementation of the appropriate social controls.

Let me remind you something that we still do not understand as a society.

Society becomes frustrated as repeated attacks on deficiencies in social systems lead only to worse symptoms. Legislation is debated and passed with great hope, but many programs prove to be ineffective. Results are often far short of expectations. Because dynamic behaviour of social systems is not understood, government programs often cause exactly the reverse of desired results.

It is by Jay Forrester⁽²⁾. He used to explain it in an even simpler and more provocative way (via Donella Meadows)

People know intuitively where leverage points are. Time after time I’ve done an analysis of a company, and I’ve figured out a leverage point—in inventory policy, maybe, or in the relationship between sales force and productive force, or in personnel policy. Then I’ve gone to the company and discovered that there’s already a lot of attention to that point. Everyone is trying very hard to push it in the wrong direction!

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(1) Republican congressional candidate for Florida’s 22nd district.

(2) Forrester, J.W. Counterintuitive behavior of social systems. Theor Decis 2, 109–140 (1971). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00148991 (Updated 1995)

Featured Image: @rothian Midjourney