When ideology meets industry

No, "wokeness" is not a cult. It’s the product of a subversive industry that uses well-meaning people as workers and customers.

"I feel like I'm leaving a cult!" I sighed, once again singing the red pill blues on a Marco Polo to my best friend. Her patient, compassionate, and wise company has been a literal Godsend over the past few years, as I've worked to reclaim my judgment and my values from the logical distortions I'd absorbed in the left-leaning activist spaces I used to inhabit.

I felt a pang of discomfort at my use of the word cult, though. Yes, there are some psychological and social parallels (Indoctrination by emotional manipulation? Check. Cutting off friends and family who don't conform to every ideological dictate? Check). It's also true that the self-serving (im)morality embedded in this kind of activism replaces many aspects of genuine religion for its participants, my former self included.

But I've never actually been in a cult. And by then I'd grown increasingly frustrated with people (myself again included) claiming they know what it feels like to be a kind of person they've never been or have experiences they've never had. Fortunately, I was moments away from a more accurate metaphor.

I had just ended an absurd Zoom call that helped bring a few years' worth of deep yet vague misgivings into sharp focus. I was working with a coalition that is supposedly dedicated to challenging disinformation in a variety of public policy debates. Supposedly. Yet when I shared my concerns about the flimsy evidence base supporting their chosen side of one such debate -- should states allow, and make taxpayers fund, drugs and surgeries that interrupt puberty and permanently damage children's bodies? -- I discovered that no one else I was working with was actually bothering to verify whether the affiliated organizations' stances are rooted in solid ethics or evidence.

Instead, they operate as if whatever -- or rather, whomever -- they agree with must be right. As I observed over and over again, within "counter-disinformation" networks, ideological conformity typically preempts the pursuit of evidence. By pausing to flag the absence of evidence for the claims they were making, I slowed down a process built upon an presumption of agreement. And by being unwilling to help defend ideas and policies that were in some respects unproven -- and in others, demonstrably untrue and harmful -- I had become A Problem.

As a result, I had spent several days in tense conversations about basic biological facts with people who fully admitted they'd thought very little about such things. Still, they readily chastised me for being "out of step" with the official positions of organizations that receive millions of dollars annually to promote and/or provide off-label drugs and surgeries to vulnerable young people (most of whom, research shows, will outgrow their discomfort with their sex if allowed to mature in peace). They were so caught off-guard by my nonconformity that they completely overlooked the deeper issue: they, as paid participants in a "counter-disinformation" effort, were helping their partner organizations spread misleading information.

In this field, people who gain money and power by spreading misleading information are known as bad actors.

"This group is something like four years old, with hundreds of organizations in their orbit!" I cry-laughed into my phone. "But apparently I am the first person to ever question any of the issues they address. They didn't even know what to do! There have been multiple meetings and conversations behind my back to figure out what to do about me raising very basic questions and concerns in a Google Doc. And it dawned on me: I am working for Groupthink, Inc."

Over the following months, nicknaming this industry became a massively helpful analogy as I continued distinguishing the self-deceptive mischief exemplified by that former client from the beneficial advocacy I originally set out to support. It also crystallized an important factor that distinguishes the ideology animating this industry from the cult metaphor I and countless others had wrapped it in: the under-examined financial incentives and power dynamics that made us far more responsible for our circumstances -- and our negative impact on society -- than duped cult members.

The mistaken metaphor isn't just a rhetorical problem, it's a strategic one. Recognizing the industrial character and incentives of this ideology is essential for reclaiming the useful elements of ideologically-captured professions, institutions, and organizations from the elements that undermine our rights to life, liberty, and property. At their best, people within the "social impact" space corrupted by Groupthink, Inc. make important contributions to society. They provide tangible support and representation to people experiencing crisis situations, abuse, and discrimination. They diligently follow evidence and rigorously hold public officials and other powerful interests accountable, regardless of personal preferences or political (in)convenience. They contribute to human knowledge and flourishing by uncovering important information that promotes public health and safety, helping us better understand and adapt to material reality.

By contrast, the ideologically-rigid "experts," activists, politicians, political operatives, bureaucrats, and media professionals who populate Groupthink, Inc. reject material reality in favor of their preferred luxury beliefs. They enrich themselves by manufacturing, marketing, and enforcing a social and political consensus that flatters their self-perceptions while exalting them into positions of undeserved power. Acting as self-appointed representatives of certain politicized demographics, they co-opt the language and tactics of real civil and human rights movements to make often-intrusive demands on the rest of society. When people object to those demands, they demonize those people and reframe the conflict they provoked as "an attack on [y]our rights!" They capitalize on the resulting fear and anger to manipulate well-meaning members and "allies" of these demographics into supplying the un(der)paid labor, donations, votes, and taxpayer dollars their industry-within-an-industry needs to survive.

It's true that America's enemies have waged subversive hostile influence operations and "active measures" against us at various points in our history, some of which seeded and fertilized corrosive ideas in academia that are now bearing rotten fruit in the rest of our political and cultural institutions. But most of the rot we're experiencing isn't cult influence or foreign interference. It's the product of ideologically-captured people doing their jobs. It's someone's job to launder unproven ideas until they become the kind of "expert consensus" ideologues and special interest groups can profit from. It's someone's job to project the political polarization among college-educated elites onto everyday citizens, and sell them simplistic narratives about Team Blue versus Team Red so they keep donating and voting accordingly. It's someone's job to reframe the consequences of irresponsible personal and cultural choices as "systemic injustice" so they can convert people’s outrage into financial support for their organization or bureaucracy.

And, I should add, most of them are not doing this intentionally or maliciously. When it's your job to "make a difference" in any of the previously mentioned positive ways, but you work with colleagues who feel they have a moral and intellectual mandate to demand a certain ideological approach to that work, it is tempting to either adopt their viewpoint (particularly if they're skilled communicators, have significant social power, or possess intimidating credentials), to quietly go along for fear of being or looking "problematic" (and potentially losing your job), or to leave when the internal drama gets to be more than you can bear. Over time, that dynamic creates an echo chamber in which this kind of groupthink thrives.

(To be clear, this is true among people of any political persuasion. I'm talking mostly, though not exclusively, about the way this plays out on the Left because that's the space I'm most familiar with, because there are already countless books, blogs, and other content dedicated to how messed up the Right is, and because of the Left's disproportionate influence over academia, the nonprofit sector, the media, and many government bureaucracies.)

If this way of thinking and working were merely a cult phenomenon, then the problem would be contained to the individual friends and families affected by the loss of a loved one to its weird beliefs. But Groupthink, Inc's impact goes way beyond that. Its negative externalities include exacerbating existing political polarization and declining mental health -- to say nothing of the opportunity cost of wasting our time, energy and money fighting political elites' "red versus blue" turf wars instead of coming together to address critical threats to our liberty, health, and national security.

Our system of governance was designed to resist tyranny by distributing power amongst all of We the People and our chosen representatives, not concentrating it among a tiny hivemind of unelected and unaccountable special interest groups, political professionals, or bureaucrats. Some of the organizations and campaigns within this industry simply should not exist. We need to relearn how to recognize opportunistic groups and individuals so we can stop giving them our money and labor, while lovingly challenging friends and family influenced by them to rethink their assumptions. Other institutions, professions, and organizations must deeply reckon with their purpose and function, repairing the dysfunctional dynamics that give rise to groupthink so they can change course and serve society instead of bad actors' selfish interests. People working within them must cultivate the humility, self-awareness, and courage to think for themselves, listen to divergent viewpoints, and take action when they realize their collective conduct is undermining people’s rights, safety, and/or public trust.

In Dr. Solomon Asch's classic studies on conformity, the majority of participants conformed at least once to objectively incorrect observations of line length because they were surrounded by actors who confidently asserted the wrong answers. Yet it frequently took just one other person sharing the right answer to strengthen study participants' willingness to challenge the group's false consensus. It's time for all of us to be that person.

We've inherited a beautiful framework for governance, one that works best when we let sound moral principles, logic, and evidence guide our decision-making instead of industrial-scale social pressure. My intention for all of the stories, conversations, and resources I'll share here are to encourage, embolden, and equip those of us who are fed up with groupthink undermining our individual and collective well-being. If someone like me -- who was once completely bought into leftist groupthink -- can re-open my mind and think differently, anyone can. It is possible for even hardened partisans to change course, and it's also possible for the exasperated majority to sidestep extreme voices across the political spectrum to get stuff done. I'm looking forward to exploring how together.

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