Jordan Peterson, in a recent podcast interview with Paul Rossi, wondered aloud about the causes of “wokeness”: “I keep trying to figure it out, because I’ve been concerned about this for a long time and still can’t get to the bottom of it,” mused Dr. Peterson. “I know there’s a resentment element to it, but I can’t understand exactly what’s driving this, and why it’s … making the headway ... [it is].”
If even Jordan Peterson can’t figure out wokeness, that should be an indication of what a choke-pear this issue really is. Nonetheless, I would suggest that Dr. Peterson has at least the beginnings of an answer well at hand, but has for some unaccountable reason been unable to connect the necessary dots. For hasn’t Dr. Peterson noted on at least several occasions that the best measurable predictor of political ideology (or belief) is personality? And didn’t one of Dr. Peterson’s own students, Christine Andary-Brophy, submit a masters thesis related to this issue? From such sources one can at least form initial conjectures on what might be the underlying motivations behind the horrors of wokism. By adding a few other insights drawn from this place or that, I suspect we can begin to develop an intuitive sense of what these motivations might be—or at the very least draw up the very first outlines for a research program into this difficult issue.
Now I have already introduced most of the following proposed conjectures relating to the causes of “wokeness” in my short book The Psychopathology of the Radical Left. So in this blog post I will be merely restating some of the material introduced in that modest tome.
