In the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, authoritarianism is almost entirely attributed to the political fascist Right or totalitarian regimes that govern the masses under oppressive social conditions.  Little is said about Left-wing authoritarian offensives despite their conspicuous prevalence in history manifested in more subtle forms.  Today this is not so subtle, as evinced in the rise of cancel culture.  Repression of thought also transpires on equally insidious grounds that take the form of public repudiation, shaming, and vilification of others through free speech, whether on social media platforms or on university campuses where institutional captures, protests, and cancel campaigns masquerade as ethics.  We may call this the psychopathology of popular culture.  Nowadays, every subjective disagreement, whim, personal criticism or slight related to race or gender is addressed as a racist or heterosexist affront to social justice, which is construed as universal virtue, when it is merely the politicization of illiberal group ideology.  

  Yet social justice warriors rarely engage in critique, dialogue, and mutual recognition when they practice brazen ethical relativism under the guise of moral absolutism, hence claiming that only their values have merits while others transgress against the universal notion of right.  The resulting tribalism on social media and university campuses often turns ugly, like some crass adolescent acting-out against their parents replete with temper tantrums, verbal outbursts, and ominous threats—even wielding baseball bats at campus protests like at Evergreen State, forcing resignations by top administrators, getting good professors fired, and so on.  What is salient here is an intolerance for different opinions and public debate in education conditioned on an interpellation of woke ethics that is weaponized against any opposing viewpoints, which is an anathema to liberal education and the free exchange of ideas.    

    Everyone has become so vigilant in looking for insults in the most trivial things, sniffing out the slightest odor of political incorrectness (at the expense of honesty) in order to take offense, only to unleash their contempt and condemnation with moral outrage, indignation, and entitlement.  In today’s popular culture, when it comes to personal identity, judgment, and moral values, anything goes—as if this is beyond debate or the need for dialogue.  But when others question their values, the Other is cast into an abyss of immorality as a dehumanized object for simply being different or for challenging the primacy of their ideals and principles.  

The need to create or maintain external enemies in order to justify or explain one’s own identity always diminishes the possibility of mutual recognition, hospitality, and civil dialogue.   Here the question of alterity subverts all critique for the emphatic self-certainty and subjective caprice to impose one’s own values onto others without acknowledging our emotional prejudice in doing so, only to reverberate in social media echo-chambers lending credibility and justification for contempt of difference. When moral self-justification is sustained through a one-sided philosophy of right, then the othering of otherness will always remain a blame-game of stalemate mired in self-righteous fury at the expense of genuine listening, understanding, validation, and empathy for others.      

When each side proclaims they are done wrong to or by the Other, binary sides remain estranged with no grey areas entertained, no dialectical mediation encountered, and with no tolerance for ambiguity, complexity, contingency, and nuance: the proverbial mantra is “Either you are for us or against us.”  It is comforting to know that the most convoluted and thorny dilemmas governing human relations can be reduced to an ontic category of the all that is not-all.   Only some are worthy of occupying the moral high-ground, which is often taken as self-evident truisms at the expense of reason, intersubjective negotiation, and compromise.  When subjective identifications or in-group identity politics dominate social discourse as a demand the other is obliged to affirm and uphold, then no one really has any accountability or pressure to defend the legitimacy of their ethics, as if they transcend the plea for arguments, logical coherence, or the need to demonstrate validity.  The self-assertion of value should simply be taken at face value; others have no right to question or denounce: “I am right! I can say whatever I want with impunity but you can’t!” Taken to extremes, here we may observe an inverse form of ethical totalitarianism, the perversion and fetishization of one’s so-called cherished values while devaluing others.

On a more minor but equally visible level, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) movement in woke capitalism and university administrations, itself a multibillion-dollar industry, is fast becoming the new totalitariansim.  Everything from diversity statements in business and professional organizations to hiring quotas, promotion criteria, where visible minorities such as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) populations demand representation across the board with or without merit, and university acceptance rates are now based on race, the new affirmative action.  Of course, some group is always left out, such as Asian applicants who had to sue Harvard for reverse discrimination barring their entrance because their grades and test scores are too high over other applicants.  With the decry of inequity and exclusion due to structural and systemic racism, sexism, ableism, ageism and so forth at the hands of cisgender, heterosexual white males in power, DEI becomes a so-called “corrective” as a self-legitimizing administrative bureaucracy rectifying the corrupt system installed by rich old white men.  Here we have the new administered society—the system of bureaucracy that attempts to rule from above, an ideologically manipulated and regulated officialdom that is completely out of control.  

Recent examples of this are Diversity Managers and consultants making obscene amounts of money telling their workforce they suffer from white fragility, are closet racists, and engage in unconscious implicit biases that keep people of color down and other minority identities disenfranchised.  This not only means identifying and educating the workforce or university staff of their white privilege, including enforcing content changes to course curriculums to make the material more diverse, something outside the scope of their competence or expertise to impose, corporate administrators and university hierarchies buy into such nonsense by issuing memorandums, directives, policy changes, and public statements that give the appearance of a socially just and equitable organization, when this is nothing but good ol’ politically fashioned, virtue-signaling optics. 

More recently is the suspension of requiring college entrance exams (such as the ACT, SAT, and GRE) by many leading universities as a precursor to the application process, hence claiming they are culturally bias when by all objective standards they are not.  When students do not have the proper requisites to successfully enter college, their likelihood of success is encumbered regardless of what racial demographic they comprise.  If people do not have the knowledge, skills, and talent to excel in school or complete university, failure does not discriminate based on the color of your skin. When a lack of representation in certain professions, such as STEM fields, is blamed on systemic racism, not to mention that “professionalism” in general is attributed to recalcitrant white supremacy in education, business, and corporate culture, administrators are more than willing to drink the Kool Aid.      

And people just go along with it: not wanting to rock the boat over fear of reprisal or losing their jobs, they are willing to be compliant despite the buzz of an incessant whine claiming that DEI propaganda and policies are themselves idiotic and discriminatory—if not outright racist, hence toxic.  And those who are recognized or promoted only for their skin color, sexual or gender orientation, disability, or diversity status feel resentment for the tokenism motivating their inclusion to begin with rather than acknowledging their unique talents, skills, and accomplishments that have nothing to do with race or equity.

Liberal multiculturalism seems to be oblivious to the insulting fact that all these groups are not the same, especially given the intersectionality in identity that includes ethnicity, culture, nationality, language, historicity, religion, gender, ability, and personal identifications that psychologically mediate social reality, just to name an obvious few.  And every white person is now automatically accused of being a racist and white supremacist by virtue of being white.  Even more inanely, white babies are supposedly born that way—hence innately racist falling from the womb!  When questioning the rationale for such extreme views, antiracism and privilege theory appears to be beyond critique for their so-called self-evident truisms.  If you are White you are asked to check your privilege, get down on one knee with fist high in the sky, admit your racism, grovel in self-contempt through some public confessional, show remorse and shame, and apologize for the color of your skin. 

Of course, this forecloses any critique of class struggle, disparities, imbalances in the economy, equal opportunity, and the economic structural system itself since the exploits of late capitalism.  Despite the fact that none of these socio-politico-ethical issues are above critique, we are witnessing with glowing dismay how afraid people are to speak their minds honestly and to encourage and engage in free debate when the terror of a Twitter mob, Internet trolls, and your own superiors and co-workers will turn on you like a snake.  Resistance against illiberal ideology is reduced by self-censorship, silence, fear of ostracism, or simply being cancelled—even getting canned.  Here we may observe a widespread failure of nerve among the intelligentsia and public alike.   The only way to counter such illiberal woke culture is to speak up. 

Jon Mills is a Canadian philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is Honorary Professor, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, UK, and author of over 30 books in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies.