Woke Leftists Are Power-Hungry Narcissists

In our timeline, the Left are a bunch of radical individualist who just want to win power and status by any means necessary. The culture as a whole is shifting toward individualism, thinking Leftism is the winning side. But individualists aren’t equipped to deal with a populist backlash, which is their greatest and eternal fear.

Professor Edward Dutton wrote about it in a book called Sent Before Their Time. In it, he aptly dissects the Woke Leftists and warns of a reactionary backlash:

If you feel negative feelings strongly, then you have low self-esteem, you are envious, you perceive yourself as weak, unfairly treated and under threat, and you identify with others whom you perceive as weak, such as women or ethnic minorities, meaning you promote their interests.

Perceiving yourself as weak, you cannot risk overtly playing for status — by signaling your power — as you will fear being harmed. Thus, you must ‘disguise’ your attempts to attain status; only playing for it covertly.

Virtue-signaling is a covert competitive strategy. It is less likely to provoke direct conflict than signaling bravery or toughness, as it will make you seem kind. …

Indeed, it has been argued that precisely because the conservative cares about all five moral foundations [(1) harm/care, (2) fairness/reciprocity, (3) ingroup/loyalty, (4) authority/respect, and (5) purity/sanctity], but the liberal cares about two [(1) & (2)], there exists a kind of asymmetrical empathy whereby conservatives will cede ground to liberals, at least until society ignores binding foundations to such an extent that there is chaos and a sense of dysphoria. Then there will be a conservative backlash (Dutton & Rayner-Hilles, In Press).

… No matter how much power you attain, you will never feel powerful, and you will always feel persecuted due to your low self-esteem and paranoia, so the fight against those whom you regard as truly having power — the traditionalists and the imaginary or very weak counter- revolutionaries — will be eternal.

Desiring power, you will tend to imitate those in positions of power, but also try to morally outdo them. And, having low self-esteem, you will be utterly intolerant of those who disagree with you, as leftists are to a greater extent than conservatives (Graham et al., 2012). Indeed, liberals are more dogmatic than conservatives (Conway et al., 2012). …

Interestingly, it could be argued that Woke hysteria over ‘racism’ is entirely a matter of projection. Left-wing people are, compared to conservatives, more Machiavellian and Narcissistic (Ok et al., 2020), meaning that they are obsessed with their individual status, with liberal-signaling potentially providing you with power and admiration in a broadly liberal society. It follows that they will want to feel that they are part of a group that has high status; this will make them feel good (Storr, 2021). Hence, they insist that ‘Whiteness’ is inherently high status, they claim that any other races that attain high status (such as Northeast Asians) are ‘white-aligned,’ and they play-down historical evidence of Whites having low-status, such as their having been enslaved in the Islamic world (Webb, 2020).

But, having convinced themselves that they possess this high group status, they need to compete within the group. How can they do this? They can argue that Whites are not just ‘powerful’ but also ‘inherently evil,’ but they (the ‘anti-racists’) are the ‘good whites’ who realize this — who understand that many whites are guilty of ‘nice racism’ — and who want to help the ‘disempowered’ non-whites who would be equal to whites were it not for ‘racism.’

But the point is that liberal Whites don’t really believe what they’re saying, as evidenced by the fact that ‘liberals’ are just as likely to search on the internet for ‘racist jokes’ as are conservatives (Stephens-Davidowitz, 2017), and more likely to patronise black people — assume they have low competence and alter how they speak accordingly — than are conservatives (Dupree & Fiske, 2019).

The ‘racist jokes’ issue implies that white liberals don’t really like black people, which makes sense as liberals are obsessed with personal status (Ok et al., 2020) and it is low status to be black. Indeed, liberals are only very slightly more likely than conservatives to have a non-white friend (Kaufmann, 2019), implying that, no matter what they say, they prefer being around ‘high status’ white people and, naturally, like being around those who are genetically similar to themselves, as we generally do (Rushton, 2005).

However, it may be that (status-driven, individualistic) liberals like being around whites simply because they regard whites as being of high status. … [Liberals], having possibly persuaded themselves that ‘whites are evil,’ liberals can then project their own self-loathing onto other whites who are prepared to contradict the idea that supposed ‘racial injustice’ is entirely the fault of whites. And they do so with great fervor as a further means of elevating their own status among whites. Liberals are, then, extreme individualists.

Under conditions of weakened selection, there would be a dramatic rise in individualistic people like this and, as experiments have shown, once they reached about 20% of the population, people would start to migrate towards what they would see as the winning side, brimming with confidence (Centola et al., 2018).

Thus, the culture would tip from ‘group-oriented’ foundations to ‘individualistic’ foundations very quickly, and then people would start to compete to signal their individualistic values by signaling their concern with ‘equality’ and ‘harm avoidance.’

… This would lead to runaway individualism in which truth itself is less important than these individualizing foundations, foundations which would become central to a kind of new religion of ‘Wokeness.’

However, there may also be a top-down aspect to this change. English sociologist Noah Carl (22nd July 2021) has argued that, together with these processes, ‘Wokeness’ has been deliberately promoted by corporate entities in order to draw leftists away from campaigns for economic equality that interfered with corporate financial interests, such as ‘Occupy Wall Street.’