Since the recent explosion of Critical Social Justice into the mainstream, I have been astounded at the speed at which what is essentially a minority secular religion has become so powerful. Why are so many in academia, the media and now public institutions so enthralled by it, and why have large sections of the public so enthusiastically embraced what appears to be a post-modernist take on Marxism? How does a seemingly rational person suddenly decide that the world they are living in is actually racist to the core, without noticing it until a black man in America is killed by an incompetent policeman? What motivates large groups of people to adopt a new ideology based on the deification of victimhood, hastily thrust upon them by the media? And how has the idea that men can be women, with no evidence beyond their own declaration, ended up being accepted as fact by major institutions, government departments, and the National Health Service?
My initial thinking on Critical Race Theory and gender ideology naturally followed the same course as my previous thinking on religion. There are many obvious parallels, not least among them the suspension of reason and the apparent utter conviction of the convert, often in the face of ovewhelming contradictory evidence. You only need to try and discuss something rationally with a social justice warrior on Twitter to realise that reason is not in their toolbox. However, there is an important difference between woke ideology and religion. Although religion has been abused and distorted ever since it’s inception, it’s initial premise or purpose was not necessarily to subvert and manipulate behaviour; that has come about due to power being such a strong motivator of human behaviour. On the contrary, CRT struck me straight away as software designed with malicious intent. It is basically malware.
Although an atheist, I have read many religious texts in an attempt to discern exactly what is it that has grabbed such a hold on the the human psyche for so long, in every part of the world, among so many different peoples? While growing up to be a Christian, Muslim, Jew or Buddhist can be seen as social indoctrination, taking advantage of the malleability of a child’s mind, I have always wanted to understand what happens in the mind of a previously non-religious adult that makes them adopt a faith. I have actually witnessed this first-hand, when a close friend of mine found Jesus while I was sharing a flat with him in Cape Town in the early 1980’s. The experience led me to write a short story about it, Born Again, which is published on my website. I watched with fascination as a hedonistic, enthusiastic and opinionated young man turned into a dogmatic, well-behaved and totally committed Christian right in front of me, within a week. At the time, it appeared as though a previously dormant part of his mind had been activated, after he became close to a mutual friend’s mother, whom he’d previously referred to as a “happy clappy Christian”. It was as if a switch had been flipped. I called it the God Switch. His eyes developed a brightness and clarity not there previously. He stopped smoking weed, popping pills and snorting coke. He stopped drinking, and started taking more care over his appearance; he also stopped swearing. Everything indicated that this transformation was beneficial. The only thing he didn’t give up was tobacco, which I found very interesting at the time. The only serious negative I noticed was the apparent suspension of reason when discussing his new faith. “Jesus said…” is not a coherent proof in my thinking, especially considering the New Testament was written long after Jesus’ death. Was this suppression of reason a prerequisite for being religious, I wondered? How then did deeply religious people become great scientists? Evidently, the capacity for reason is only affected when it is related to faith; it is selective. While reading Eugene Marais’ book Soul of the Ape, I found some clues. Could the mechanism responsible for this be hard-wired into the human mind by evolution? An inhibit on reason when pondering the meaning of life would obviously have some evolutionary advantages. Why struggle through life when it all appears totally pointless? As an atheist, I came to suspect that I was suffering from a deficiency, rather than an advantage. Evolution has favoured the faithful. Faith gives an easy option for accepting our own mortality, and frees up the conscious mind for more practical pursuits. The suspension of reason required in the adoption of faith seems to be a fail-safe, and in my opinion must reside in what Eugene Marais calls phyletic memory. I would not be surprised if one day it is discovered that some form of faith exists in other primates. The arrival of woke inspired me to reread both of Eugene Marais’ books, Soul of the Ape, and Soul of the White Ant.
In the Waterberg area of the Northern Transvaal of South Africa, Marais, a poet and amateur zoologist, spent three years living with and studying chacma baboons. Previously, baboons had only been studied in captivity, and many of Marais findings proved that studying captive animals was not relevant to their behaviour in the wild. What made his study unique at the time was that the Boer War had just finished, the Boers had been largely disarmed, and the men had all been away at war for some time. As a result of this, the younger generation of baboons had never been exposed to the danger of humans with firearms, whereas the older ones had, and still had a healthy fear of men. This helped him to study their behaviour in the context of instinctual (referred to in his book as phyletic) memory, vs learning-based (causal) memory, by comparing the behaviour of different generations. The observation that the younger baboons had to learn about this new threat, by watching their companions being shot, proved that they had no inbuilt phyletic response to humans. In contrast, the older baboons fled at the first sight of humans carrying guns. Marais’ studies with baboons led him to conclude that the structure of their society was built entirely on learned behaviour, which accounted for their great adaptability to different environments. Unfortunately, his work was not recognised until long after his tragic death by suicide, 10 years after his other great work, Soul of the White Ant (which is actually about termites), had been totally plagiarized by Maurice Maeterlinck, a Nobel Laureate. Marais considered baboons to be the lowest form of primate where causal memory had overwhelmingly displaced phyletic memory in ordering their lives; in fact he considered baboons to be the living animal approximating most closely the earliest sentient humans. Marais is now considered by many to be the founder of ethology, years before it became an established science. For the purpose of this essay, I will use Marais’ terms, phyletic memory and causal memory, rather than unconscious/conscious or instinctive/learned behaviours. Reason plays no part in phyletic memory, as Marais himself proved by experimenting with ants (this experiment is described in detail in Soul of the Ape). A creature with a purely phyletic memory is incapable of learning, and any changes in behaviour are purely the result of natural selection.
I often imagine the human mind as a biological computer, so I will use analogies from computing to illustrate my theory. I am well aware that this analogy is overly simplistic, but, for the purposes here, it will help illustrate my ideas. A computer consists of the hardware, the operating system, ROM, and RAM. The brain is the hardware. The human mind has three levels, the unconscious, the subconscious, and the conscious. The operating system, the unconscious, contains rules which are hard-wired, the rules around which the system operates. This operating system is provided by evolution, and is essentially the same for all humans. The ROM, or subconscious, is the hard drive, where memories/experiences are stored, and on which the RAM, or conscious mind, depends for information when formulating a response to internal or external stimuli. Some hard-wired evolutionary responses have the capacity to by-pass the entire system and govern behaviour independently, for example the fight or flight response. We perceive a threat, and very rapidly all non-essential programs are temporarily suspended, along with the primacy of causal memory. This response is far older than our present evolutionary state, and was developed before reason even existed. Other phyletic responses are more subtle, acting to moderate rather than control our behaviour. One such response is empathy. Many of our evolutionary responses are modified or inhibited by causal memory; if this did not happen, we would not be able to walk on a pavement next to a busy road, or manoeuvre our way through a crowd without panicking. We are always rewriting our own software, an ability which has allowed us to flourish as a species. It is this continual over-writing or modification of software that gives rise to ideologies. Sometimes it goes wrong, with terrible results.
So how does CRT and it’s simplified “woke” version work, and what does this have to do with Eugene Marais’ ideas? Purely by observation, I came to the conclusion that somehow woke ideology infected it’s host through the processes in the human mind relating to empathy. The most common accusations I see on Twitter, from the woke against anyone that they don’t agree with, is that they are a heartless fascist/racist/homophobe/misogynist with no compassion. Empathy, and it’s emotional counterpart compassion, are held as the highest attainable virtues in woke ideology, for anyone who cannot claim the blessed virtue of victimhood. Strangely, the white middle classes are among those most prone to infection by woke ideology. So how exactly do they get infected?
When a human child is born, it is only equipped with instinctual, phyletic memory. A baby instinctively knows to cry when it is first born, to clear the lungs. It know instinctively how to suckle, and how to tell it’s mother that it is hungry. If you hold a baby up, with it’s feet touching the floor, it will instinctively move it’s feet in a walking motion. These responses fade then disappear as the baby develops into a toddler, and causal memory takes over behaviour. Other phyletic memories in humans remain into adulthood. This includes the aggressive response, which is moderated and largely suppressed by causal memory as socialisation occurs. Aggression has obviously been inherited from our ancestors, and normally remains dormant until there is a threat or it is required in hunting. It can be triggered by fear, anger or hunger. Anger is an evolutionary response that has been essential to our success as a species, and will surface in any normal adult if a threat is made against them, their home, or a loved one. This aggressive response remains essentially intact in it’s phyletic form, but requires a suppressive mechanism, which socialisation installs through learning. When someone “snaps”, they have reached the point where the causal inhibiting mechanism has been overridden. Fear is also a phyletic response, but it requires extensive modification by causal memory in humans; if not, we would never get in a car, or attend a crowded concert.
There is still some debate over whether empathy is phyletic or causal in origin; is it innate, or is it learned? All the evidence suggests that empathy is an evolutionary adaptation that was at least partly responsible for the growth of large societies. It has it’s roots in emotional contagion, an ancient evolutionary response now known to be found in rodents as well as primates (1,2). Experiments have shown that newborn babies will cry when they hear another baby crying, but not when they hear a recording of themselves crying. This indicates that empathy is innate, ie phyletic in origin. (3) Unlike other phyletic memories, empathy, and by extension it’s emotional response of compassion, do not require either modification or suppression in modern humans. Empathy works “straight out of the box” as it were, and subsequent causal memory merely builds on the phyletic memory already inherited from your ancestors. Empathy alone, of the instinctive behaviours, has survived pretty much unscathed through human evolution due to our social nature. It is a very useful tool, and likely an essential one for living in the large communities we now inhabit. It requires no suppression in a normally socialised individual, but is subject to top-down modification, primarily by socialisation. That makes it relatively easy to manipulate. The added advantage in the case of CRT is that empathy is considered especially virtuous in a permissive world, making it’s manipulation far easier than at any time in history. With the post-modern canonization of victim-hood, empathy is considered a noble trait, whereas in previous generations it may have been considered “soft” or “feminine”, especially when exhibited by men. The application of reason is not necessary to modify or manipulate empathy, partly because reason was never a foundation of it in the first place, and partly because a lack of empathy is considered deviant and anti-social. Empathy’s root, emotional contagion, is also useful for social cohesion, but can also facilitate rapid collective mobilisation against an outside threat. Eugene Marais observed this in baboons threatened by leopards. Emotional contagion has been used by politicians throughout history to whip up the mob. Our primal fear or suspicion of those different from us can very quickly be transformed into nationalism or fascism, as has been repeatedly proven throughout known history.
Unlike previous revolutions and wars, the woke revolution solely targets empathy (prior to woke, Stockholm Syndrome is the only other example of contagion based on empathetic response that I am aware of). No-one wants to appear to lack empathy. By using selective dissemination of information (propaganda), the infection starts by encouraging the host to associate particular events and people with powerful trigger words (racist, transphobe, homophobe etc). In the hosts previous experience, these words are associated with bigotry and injustice. With the overwhelming onslaught enabled by modern technology and the collusion of the media and social media, any causal inhibitions on empathetic response quickly become overwhelmed. The susceptible individual’s emotional responses are rapidly modified in a top-down approach. Before long, many of them are gibbering complete nonsense on TikTok. Small wonder that the woke are obsessed with “trigger warnings” on anything they may find offensive. These trigger words precipitate a loss of emotional control.
Normal responses to a perceived lack of empathy include anger, disgust and hatred, all primal, phyletic responses. To elicit these responses in an infected individual, it is not necessary to modify them in the slightest; this is all achieved solely by altering the hosts empathetic response, and maintaining it at a high level of sensitivity. In an individual with an already artificially heightened response to empathy, just an idea associated with a trigger word can be enough to stimulate other phyletic responses. For example, saying that you don’t believe that a woman can have a penis immediately brings up the trigger word “transphobe” in the mind of the infected individual. This then relaxes or removes the inhibitions on other phyletic responses, especially anger (anger can also be causal in origin, but the mechanism is hard-wired). This explains the apparent contradiction of the extreme bile and hatred that individuals who claim to be compassionate are capable of on Twitter. Interestingly, these emotional responses also temporarily disable empathy. This explains how the woke can be so vindictive on Twitter; get them riled, and all traces of compassion are very quickly stripped away as their mind is overpowered by essentially primitive responses.
Unlike previous revolutions, the social justice revolution does not need a debilitating emotion like rage or a constant state of anger to sustain it. It is far easier to maintain a heightened state of empathy than of rage. That is why we’re probably in this for the long haul. Empathy itself is not restricted by being particularly energy intensive. That is why, 18 months into what started with the George Floyd riots, the social justice movement still doesn’t look like running out of steam any time soon. Eventually, however, emotional fatigue will surely incapacitate the mob, and we can then take stock of what’s left. Meanwhile, what can we do to resist woke ideology, and slow it’s spread, if not halt it completely? That’s a question I’ll explore in another essay.
References
Pingback:Trigger Warnings- The Infantilisation of Education. – Aliengrove
This was a delight to read. You show an impressive grasp on this subject! I specialize about Data Mining and you can see my posts here at my blog Webemail24 Keep up the incredible work!