Wokeism Negatively Affects Mental Wellbeing

Everyone agrees with the dictionary definition of 'woke' - "Being aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)". Just kidding, of course - ironically, you have to be pretty woke to swallow that definition - where woke really means something like; a narcissistic appropriation of post-modern clichés, driven by toxic, leftist, entitled identity politics.

Being woke basically means seeing/looking for offence/injustice/outrage when there's no good reason to perceive things that way, and virtue signalling to court favour with over-sensitive people who might bond with you or buy what you're selling (goods, services, education, political propaganda) if you pander to their whims. We can all hopefully agree that being aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues surrounding justice is a good thing, but only when there are genuine injustices going on. If you're trying to define woke as noble challenges to social injustices, then you're probably in denial about what woke really is. If you see racism, sexism, unfair prejudice, economic injustice, oppression and phobias when there are better explanations on offer, and you're eager to express your offence and outage, then you are what we mean by 'woke'.

I've said before that I believe there is probably a link between wokeness and psychological disorders, and I've recently learned that in their book The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have arrived at a similar viewpoint. It’s difficult to deny that if you look at the people (especially young people) associated with extreme social justice groups, climate groups, trans-rights groups and other radical identitarian groups, the majority of them appear to have high levels of anxiety, and/or mental health issues that probably haven't yet been diagnosed or addressed sufficiently.

It must have struck you as strange that you can never ever convince a woke person that they are wrong about the grievance they claim to have. It might have struck you as equally strange that there is a dichotomous personality trait attached to wokeness; absolute conviction in the thing they believe, but at the same time, a severe lack of conviction in themselves as individual beings. Perceived certainty without the ability or willingness to partake in rational engagement is one of the most predictable indicators of a disorder of the mind. You can see this by considering in contrast the opposite kind of person; one who willingly partakes in rational engagement while all the time displaying the kind of humility with which openness to correction is apparent in dialogue.

Naturally, mental health is a complex issue, and each individual can only be assessed on a case by case basis. But irrespective of what's driving wokeness, it is easy to observe the symptoms being played out in society - black and white thinking, attention-seeking, proneness to ill-examined outrage, a feelings-over-facts kind of entitlement, an exaggerated sense of foreboding, a victim-mentality, envy towards successful people, that sort of thing. The more of these you can tick off in a game of woke bingo, the more you woke you probably are. 

And this should come with severe warnings, because whereas these traits are all things that those who bring healthy influences in your life will help you eradicate, woke culture actively encourages and celebrates these traits - creating waves of anxiety, insecurity, paranoia and resentment - and as a consequence, almost immeasurable societal harm, of which we haven't even begun to see the peak costs yet. 

And what's worse is that because so many citizens have rolled over and let woke walk all over our nation, the UK is now infected with a top down woke-driven power structure, where we now have political woke, institutional woke, establishment woke, corporate woke, academic woke, media woke and entertainment woke - with most of the population disliking what British society has turned into, but unsure what to do about it. 

An Initial Absurdity That Becomes Interesting

 

Sometimes economist logic takes us to funny places. Here’s an example. Consider this question: Why do we think it’s fine for a couple to choose not to have children, but not fine for them to have children and periodically treat them badly? It’s quite easy to elicit an intuitive response, something along the lines of: “The two situations are very different. If you choose not to have children, that’s your right. But once you have a child, your responsibilities change, and you are compelled to look after that child and treat them well.”

Everyone can relate to that answer, and I do think it’s right. But it doesn’t entirely settle the matter – because, given the astronomically low probability of any individual being born, I assume most children would prefer to be born and be periodically treated badly than not be born at all. Suppose there is a 14 year old boy called Tom, who is quite unhappy at being mistreated by his parents, Jack and Jill, but still glad he has been born, compared with the alternative of never having been born. Given Tom’s preference, it would be worse for him to have never been born, and Jack and Jill remained childless, than it would to be born and treated badly by Jack and Jill. Yet a childless Jack and Jill would receive no criticism, even though not having Tom is worse for potential Tom than having him and mistreating him.

It’s quite easy to elicit a further intuitive response, something along the lines of: “Yes, but a childless Jack and Jill face no moral charge, because they don’t know about the hypothetical Tom that never got born – so no situation where it’s a worse option for Tom actually exists”.

This is also true – Tom’s non-existence isn’t a worse option for him if he’s not alive to recognise it thus. But it’s not a wholly satisfactory closure either, and does show a strange paradoxical nature (although not quite a paradox in this case), whereby a negative moral judgement is conferred upon a less bad outcome for an agent, and a neutral judgement is conferred upon a worse outcome for an agent, even though we can all follow both logical paths very easily.

This isn’t really one of those linguistic peculiarities, such that I covered in this blog How To Make Sense Of Language Paradoxes; I think it’s more in keeping with the kind of economic considerations that are fun to explore in blog posts like The Absurdity Of Quota-Based Discrimination. 

Steer Clear Of Low Rent Atheism

It doesn't take the majority of Christians long to realise that debating faith with most online atheist commentators is an ill-advised use of our time and effort. There's a good reason for this, and it's a subtle one that not everyone might have picked up on. It's to do with the type of atheist that these people are, because experience shows that they are the most difficult kind when it comes to having fruitful dialogue. Here's why I think this.

There are roughly four kinds of atheist - two implicit types and two explicit types. Implicit atheism means those who do not hold a belief in God but also do not actively speak out atheist tropes, and those who simply haven't given much thought to the subject, but would say they do not believe if asked (we'll leave this latter group aside in this article). Explicit atheism means openly rejecting the existence of God, speaking out against God's existence, and in some cases going further in trying to influence the faithful in the world to turn away from God.

Now, there have been some brilliant minds who just happen to be implicit atheists or agnostics; people like Henri Poincaré, Paul Dirac, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Alan Turing and Richard Feynman. They all made prodigious contributions to the world, but they just happened to have professed no belief in God. Then there are explicit atheists who've made impressive contributions in their specialised field, but who've also been overt in their professed atheism; people like Bertrand Russell, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking and Douglas Adams. There are also the very vocal explicit atheists with less distinguished CVs, but who've risen to fame and have come to be defined by their atheism more than anything else; people like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, PZ Myers, Michael Shermer and Lawrence Krauss.

And then we have the last kind - the explicitly atheist online commentators - who make up the majority of the explicit atheists, and who regularly descend upon Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and Twitter to parrot the views of their more well-known secular icons, and try to seek superficial confidence and self-aggrandisement by dismissing all belief in God as foolish, irrational, uneducated, unenlightened nonsense. Scour the comments sections of articles about the Christian faith, or in Facebook groups created to debate God's existence, and you'll get hit with a morass of the rude, the dismissive, the confused, the spiteful and the hateful - thousands of attention-seeking atheist provocateurs, zealots and trolls getting a kick out of being dismissive of religious faith, in a vain attempt to puff up their own egos and make themselves feel better by insulting and deriding believers.

I'm not suggesting that every one of these individuals is deeply unpleasant - but I do think that in virtually all their cases, there is an insuperable barrier that prevents the flourishing of good conversation and honest enquiry. They pay a hidden price for a visible deceit, if only they could realise it. And it remains one of the sad ironies, in my view, that these are many of the people who most urgently need the gospel, yet are doing more than most to push it away.

A more in-depth psychological analysis of why debating with them is a waste of time is beyond the scope of this article. But I think the primary reason is that as much as they show willingness to discuss these matters, they want to do so only to sneer and scoff, not to engage, consider the topics deeply and seek edification. If you like, they call forth the birds of the sky, only to raise their gun and shoot them away again. With such people, the likelihood of heat is greater than the likelihood of light - which is why it's so often wise not to get involved. 

Recently I heard a great line in If Beale Street Could Talk: “Fonny liked me so much that it didn't occur to him that he loved me". Perhaps, for these atheists, the opposite sentiment is being expressed, that they dislike religious faith so much that it doesn't occur to them how much they hate it, and are no longer open to discussing it honestly and giving it the depth of attention it deserves. As D.H. Lawrence once said, “An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer" - and that is the reward of giving things the attention they deserve.

Further reading: New-New-Wave-Atheism: The Rise of Promethean Ego Apostates