I Used to be in a Cult Part 2: The Formation of the Cracks

 As I raged in the comment sections with the rest of the world, I saw the news of George Floyd being murdered by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin. While the right scrambled for two weeks to create their own narrative to justify yet another case of extreme police brutality, the left took charge. We started having our own rallies. Even in my very white suburban town we had one, and I was quite happy to attend it. Not just because I was happy to be out doing Social Justice Warrior shit, but because I was able to get outside and be social for the first time in what felt like forever. We were all masked up of course, but at least I got to talk to people. I even met a Facebook friend for the first time who lived just a few towns away.

 

Back online a new idea had emerged on the left. The idea that instead of attacking individual bigots online, we need to be fighting for actual policy changes. We need to actually improve material conditions for people. I liked the idea because despite all my years arguing with idiots, I knew that I had changed nothing. Idiots were still idiots and their numbers seemed to grow the more I argued with them or tried to get their accounts suspended. It felt like for every person I defeated in an argument, five more right wing clowns had taken their place, and after a while it felt like I was just repeating the same facts over and over again, to people that had heard the same facts from other people they argued with before. It was the same shit, different day. Or rather, same shit, different hour. Nobody’s mind was changing. Everyone was just angrier. So the idea that we should actually advocate for real change was an idea I was more than happy to get behind.

 

Unfortunately, that idea was short lived. It died on January 20^th, 2021, and there was no massive change to government policy. A few states had ended qualified immunity for cops, but that was it.

 

A few weeks after Biden got into office, the same liberals who had protested the concentration camps at the border where thousands of migrants were held in some of the worst living conditions our government could provide, changed their minds about them because a Democrat was now running them. I found myself arguing online with liberals for the first time in my life, watching them care nothing for the people suffering in those same camps that they had spent years condemning. And all the fury that we unleashed on the government just eight months prior had vanished. The Black Lives Matter movement wasn’t having too many rallies anymore. And there wasn’t mass demands for policy changes. As soon as a Democrat was in charge, all these mass protest movements went silent.

 

I began to think that all of this “woke talk” was just about partisan politics for most people. It was about getting Trump out of office. But it sure as fuck wasn’t about improving the material conditions for the marginalized.

 

Social media went right back to attacking individual people instead of organizing in the real world for change. I got a TikTok account and started watching people like TizzyEnt and ThatDaneshGuy, who would take videos of people caught saying bigoted shit and put them on blast in the hopes that they’d be identified and punished by their community. At first I liked the videos. It was nice seeing assholes get their comeuppance. However, after watching them for a few months, I started to see a pattern emerge. Nearly all of the people they were putting on blast were powerless themselves. They were working class people who got caught in a moment where they were being assholes and bigots, but calling them out and trying to ruin their lives wasn’t changing the balance of power for anyone, and it certainly wasn’t improving material conditions for the people they were supposedly claiming to help. They could have made a million videos trying to ruin the lives of whomever had crossed their paths, and it wouldn’t make one damn difference. The people they were attacking had privilege, but they sure as shit didn’t have power.

 

At the same time, I was learning a little bit about how social media works. Content creators get paid when they get a large enough following. But in order to keep the money rolling in, they have to keep creating content. And the more they have to make content, the more ridiculous their content becomes. There’s only so many videos or posts one can make that talk about serious issues like rape culture, white privilege, and the like. After that, they have to find things to complain about. And it always has to be something to complain about. It can’t be anything good. People don’t read good news very much, and they’re far less likely to comment on it. They’re more likely to engage when they’re angry. So the content creators start to pretend to be offended at the stupidest shit. Like Steve Martin calling a former lover beautiful, or #chiligate, or ContraPoints having a nine second voice over from Buck Angel. Shit that was so damn dumb and pointless that even my woke ass was wondering why people were mad about it. Content creators might have started with a desire to make a better world, but somewhere along the way they were more concerned with getting likes, reposts, and the money that came with it.

 

And even when the news on social media was good, people were finding a way to tear it down. I remembered the endless tag groups on Facebook with names like, “The Bar for Men is So Low That It’s in Hades”. To be woke meant to insult people even when white people, and especially cisgender white men were found doing the right thing. If anyone spoke up about this, the reply was the same: They don’t deserve praise for doing what they should have been doing in the first place.

 

Saying that people shouldn’t be praised for doing the right thing when it’s in clear violation of social norms (especially when those norms are patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic, and racist) is a complete ignorance of basic psychology. People don’t go where they’re not wanted, and if you’re going to shit on men for doing, say, housework, or shit on white people for being anti-racist, they will not want to do the thing that you said they should be doing all along. There’s an entire group of people more than ready to praise them for upholding those same social norms. But we were supposed to swallow shit and keep fighting for other people, even when they were shitting on us for doing so. I kept at it because improving lives for others meant more to me than my own ego, but damn if that shit didn’t feel demoralizing.

 

I’m not saying this as some “pity the poor white dude” act. I’m saying that if you want allies, you have to actually make them feel like they’re wanted in the movement. I say again: People don’t go where they’re not wanted. And if you’re going to shit on members of the majority population, don’t be surprised when they want no part of the movement. Most won’t show up, and many of those that do will leave.

 

Outside of partisan politics, the way the online left acts has me with a lot of questions and no answers. Even in anarchist forums, there’s too much imagining a perfect utopia where we all get along and don’t disagree on anything. I’m wondering how much of my own political philosophy would hold up in action the moment we have a major philosophical disagreement. Even with capitalism and the state gone, would we free from prejudice? I’m well aware of the history of governments (especially ours) that create bigoted mentalities through legislation, but can we really be sure that we’d be able to eliminate it entirely? If we create an organization to enforce the rules we make, can we prevent them from abusing their power and creating another unjust hierarchy?

Unfortunately, asking questions like that on the internet are more likely to get you dragged than answered. Questioning anything on social media is always assumed to be in bad faith. Cults don’t like it when people ask questions. It leads to trouble. Which also begs the question, how is anarchism, a political philosophy that champions freedom above all, going to give us freedom if we’re not allowed to ask questions? I’m starting to think that Laura Jane Grace from Against Me! Was right when she sang:

I was a teenage anarchist

But the politics were too convenient

In the depths of their humanity, all I saw was bloodless ideology

With freedom as their doctrine, guess who was the new authority?

 

In the world of social media, hating on members of the majority population even when they do good is part of the social media cult. The cult isn’t meant to make positive change. It’s meant to keep you as angry as possible so you stay glued to your screen as much as possible. Enragement equals engagement, and engagement is how content creators and social media networks get their ad money.

 

That’s why I almost titled this series of posts, “I Used to be Woke”. Not because I stopped being anti-racist or pro-LGBTQ+, or a feminist. It’s because I’ve come to realize that the woke movement is a sham. It’s not about improving people’s lives. It’s about keeping people fighting with each other on social media, keeping us enraged as long as possible, all so we keep staring at the screen, scrolling, and commenting.

 

That’s stupid, considering most people, even us cis-hetero white guys want change that will improve material conditions for minorities. The overwhelming majority of Americans want to end the drug war and qualified immunity for police officers. Two new policies that will benefit minorities. Most support letting undocumented immigrants living here and being provided a path to citizenship. The majority of Americans support laws that prevent discrimination against trans people in the workplace, and to make them a protected class in hate crimes. I’m not going to pretend the majority are right on every issue (I was surprised to find most Americans want a border wall), but most of us want more progressive policies than not. We could actually get this shit done if we stopped fighting each other online, stopped worrying about what political party was in charge, and started demanding our government do something right.

 

I think I got ahead of myself a little bit on those last two paragraphs. I hadn’t fully realized that the woke movement was a sham just yet. But the cracks in my social media cult mentality were starting to form, and they would eventually lead me to that conclusion.