Jonathan Haidt Discusses “De-Tot”: Decentralized Totalitarianism

Wokeness is a form of "De-Tot," Decentralized Totalitarianism. Jonathan Haidt discussed this phenomenon with Melissa Chen and Angel Eduardo at FAIR:

So, you know, I, perhaps like many in the audience, have lost money. I was going to say investing in cryptocurrencies, but I'll just say gambling and speculating. And one of the things that's kind of fun about, it's just learning about the blockchain and decentralized finance and realizing that the technology makes it possible to have all kinds of things without anybody in charge.

Many have observed this began in 2015. So I co-founded Heterodox Academy with some other social scientists. Some of our members from Eastern Europe were saying, this is just like what we had in the communist countries: the fear of speaking up the witch trials, the purity spirals.

People ever since then have been using his metaphors like what's happening on campus, what's happening in the world is somehow like the totalitarian countries. But yet, there was no dictator. There was no totalitarian person or authority or office. I think what we have is you might call "De-Tot"  It's decentralized totalitarianism. The difference between totalitarian and a dictator is that a dictator tells you what he wants, and he'll kill you if you don't do it. But totalitarianism means it gets into the totality of your life. "We're going to control how you raise your kids what to think the food you eat, the science, everything, control everything."  That's very hard to do. It's only been tried a few times, certainly the Russians, the Chinese. Only a few countries have been tried to control everything of your life. And in a way this thing that we call wokeness has elements that are totalitarian, but there's no person. There's no authority. So what you have when everybody can record everybody, when everybody can shame everybody, you get human behavior reacting as if you were in a totalitarian country, but yet there's no totalitarian

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Why Tavistock Was Shut Down

This is a brand new insider's account about the closing of the British gender-affirming "treatment" center, Tavistock. Seventeen years after there initial complaints, the authorities finally act. How many hundreds of lawsuits are about to be filed for the damage done to vulnerable children at this "treatment" center in furtherance of gender ideology?

By the way, it's been almost a week since it was announced that Tavistock would be shut down because children are being harmed. Despite the significance of this shut-down and the fact that gender ideology is largely to blame, you won't find one word about the sudden closing of Tavistock in the New York Times, NPR, Washington Post or MSNBC.

Here's horrifying insider account of what has been happening at Tavistock for more than a decade. The article, written by a nurse named Sue Evans, was published at the Substack of Bari Weiss, Common Sense.

How Tavistock Came Tumbling Down. I was a nurse working on a team that recklessly prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to kids. I blew the whistle in 2005. Now the government is finally listening.

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The University Bias Against Working Class Students

At Heterodox Academy, Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education and history at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that universities "need to pay attention to differences of class as well as of race, ethnicity, and gender."  He was recently interviewed on this point at Heterodox Out Loud.. He also wrote on this topic at the HxA blog. Here is an excerpt:

That’s not the kind of tale my student has heard very often in his classes, which focus heavily upon the inequities and bigotries of America. But there’s one bigotry they almost never address: the one against people like him. Immigrant and working-class students who rise up the economic ladder run counter to the dominant narrative about America at elite institutions like my own. So we tend to omit their stories, even as we admit more students who have lived them.

The irony here should be obvious. Our campaigns to diversify the student body aim to make the country more just, fair, and equitable. We want to help students from less advantaged backgrounds participate more fully in the bounty of America. But after they get to America, we tell them that the whole game is an elaborate hoax and that people with “privilege” always win it.

Let’s be clear: America is a radically unequal nation. As a wide swath of research confirms, it has become harder for poor and working-class people to own homes, access higher education, and increase their real wages. But it is not impossible. Suggesting otherwise denies the “lived experience” of our working-class and first-generation students, to quote a favorite academic buzz phrase. It makes them think that they don’t belong here, even though they do.

But don’t expect to hear much about that at your next faculty seminar about diversity, inclusion, and equity. There’s lots of talk about making less advantaged students feel at home, of course. Yet most of it focuses on material issues — like food insecurity and the cost of books — or on raising awareness about microaggressions and other slights racial and ethnic minorities suffer.

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Banning and Pre-Banning Books

Pamela Paul is fearless in her writing. In her newest NYT article, she discusses the books that aren't: "There’s More Than One Way to Ban a Book." Here's an excerpt:

You can understand why the publishing world gets nervous. Consider what has happened to books that have gotten on the wrong side of illiberal scolds. On Goodreads, for example, vicious campaigns have circulated against authors for inadvertent offenses in novels that haven’t even been published yet. Sometimes the outcry doesn’t take place until after a book is in stores. Last year, a bunny in a children’s picture book got soot on his face by sticking his head into an oven to clean it — and the book was deemed racially insensitive by a single blogger. It was reprinted with the illustration redrawn. All this after the book received rave reviews and a New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Book Award.

In another instance, a white academic was denounced for cultural appropriation because trap feminism, the subject of her book “Bad and Boujee,” lay outside her own racial experience. The publisher subsequently withdrew the book. PEN America rightfully denounced the publisher’s decision, noting that it “detracts from public discourse and feeds into a climate where authors, editors and publishers are disincentivized to take risks.”

Books have always contained delicate and challenging material that rubs up against some readers’ sensitivities or deeply held beliefs. But which material upsets which people changes over time; many stories about interracial cooperation that were once hailed for their progressive values (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Help”) are now criticized as “white savior” narratives. Yet these books can still be read, appreciated and debated — not only despite but also because of the offending material. Even if only to better understand where we started and how far we’ve come.

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Self-Imploding Woke-Permeated Organizations

Can Woke people even get along with each other? Apparently not. Aaron Sibarium reports on "Women Against Abuse." 

"One of the largest domestic violence groups in the United States offered to pay "BIPOC" employees more than white ones; asked white staffers to sign a statement affirming their innate racism; and discouraged black abuse victims from calling the cops."

There are many more examples. Woke workplaces tend to destroy the ability to do meaningful work. A recent example is the meltdown at The Washington Post, featuring Felicia Sonmez. Here's what tends to happen when social justice warriors invade the workplace, as reported by Ricki Schlott.  And if you'd like a lot more example of woeness destroying morale, check out this article by Ryan Grimm at The Intercept:

ELEPHANT IN THE ZOOM: Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History. Here is an excerpt:

A Prism reporter reached a widely respected Guttmacher board member, Pamela Merritt, a Black woman and a leading reproductive justice activist, while the Supreme Court oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization were going on last December, a year and a half after the Floyd meeting. She offered the most delicate rebuttal of the staff complaints possible.

“I have been in this movement space long enough to respect how people choose to describe their personal experience and validate that experience, even if I don’t necessarily agree that that’s what they experienced,” Merritt said. “It seems like there’s a conflation between not reaching the conclusion that people want and not doing due diligence on the allegations, which simply is not true.” Boonstra did not respond to a request to talk from either Prism or The Intercept.

The six months since then have only seen a ratcheting up of the tension, with more internal disputes spilling into public and amplified by a well-funded, anonymous operation called ReproJobs, whose Twitter and Instagram feeds have pounded away at the organization’s management. “If your reproductive justice organization isn’t Black and brown it’s white supremacy in heels co-opting a WOC movement,” blared a typical missive submitted to and republished on one of its Instagram stories. The news, in May 2022, that Roe v. Wade would almost certainly be overturned did nothing to temper the raging battle. (ReproJobs told The Intercept its current budget is around $275,000.)

That the institute has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.

In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult. It even reached the National Audubon Society . . .

[More . . . ]

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