Most people are opinionated. But many don’t really have any opinions of their own, rather, they adopt those opinions that they derive utility from. In politics, it often means that people vote for those politicians whose policies they will benefit from, economically or otherwise, though they will convince themselves – and try to convince others – that their motivations are very different. But of course, people are extremely passionate about topics in which they are not necessarily personally invested (or at least, they are unaware that they are); like immigration, transsexual rights or the survival of the polar bear. Where do those views, often held with such genuine passion, actually come from?
It is easy to establish that many widely held opinions are so superficial that they have obviously not been critically related to by the masses who hold them. As an example, the fashionable idiom “lives over money,” popular in these Covid-19 times, is an obvious false dichotomy to anyone who considers how economic progress and advances in quality and length of life are linked. But, alongside many other simplistic left-wing sound-bites, people use it as an argument in itself, as if it holds within it some basic truth. And while it is easy to logically dismantle opinions like these, it is almost impossible in practice, for the very reason that critical analysis is missing from so many people’s process when adopting opinions. They are genuinely not interested in understanding the basis for the views they hold: for many, what they would like to be true is uncritically treated as fact.
One way to think about how ideas spread through society is by considering Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation model, primarily used to understand how new products become established in the market. Rogers divides adopters into five categories: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards, and we can use his insights to think of the intellectual innovators of new causes, who rely on the early adopters among political activists and high profile influencers to spread the message to the majority, who in turn adopt the opinions without much thought, specifically because they are held by high-status leaders. It is of course also evident that many opinions are ideally placed to comfort the narcissism of (especially young) people with little purpose in life, perhaps no more prevalent than in the climate change movement, where extreme doomsday prophecies are welcomed by those who find both status and solace in joining the imagined task of saving humanity from itself, and where camaraderie is formed in the trenches of a made-up war against progress.
But while many therefore form their opinions to join up and fit in, others hold their political views as a means of standing out. These are the innovators; the people who rely on having extreme opinions to maintain their status as leaders, and they are especially prevalent on the social justice obsessed left, where reasonable demands for equality of basic civil rights have been supplanted by wacky wokism.
On a fundamental level, the progressive left is philosophically bound to constantly identify new societal conflicts which must be reckoned with, because of their dialectic view of history. As set out by Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel in the late 18th and early 19th century, a dialectic process identifies contradictions in an idea and seeks to resolve those to arrive at a new idea, upon which the process repeats. Karl Marx proposed that the defining conflict which determines historical development is between the material conditions of the classes, in his contemporary Europe specifically between capitalists and workers. The revolution comes when the oppressed class is awakened to their suffering and rises up to overturn injustice. Marxian dialectics can be traced to all contemporary progressive politics, which requires “marginalised” and “oppressed” groups to be awakened (woke) to their suffering so they will revolt but, importantly, once the contradictions presented by one societal circumstance have been worked out, the dialectic process repeats by finding new contradictions. As such, the politics becomes ever more extreme.
On a more practical level, the continuous move towards ever more extreme social justice activism can also be understood in context of the status associated with extremely woke opinions. Status symbols are peculiar goods: they lose value when other people acquire them too. In other words, status symbols are inherently scarce goods whose utility is specifically linked to the fact that not everyone can have them, and as more people seek the status of an extreme opinion, the status associated with the opinion simply disappears. Extreme opinion makers become victims of their own success. The American economist Thorstein Veblen described the hunt for status symbols as a zero-sum game, and when we think of high-status political opinions in this context, it is not difficult to understand phenomena such as first wave feminism’s reasonable demands for gender equality being replaced by third wave feminism craziness like intersectionality, vegetarian ecofeminism or transfeminism. Of course, it also fits perfectly with the demands of the dialectic to continuously find new conflicts to settle.
As extreme opinions therefore work their way from status-seeking innovators through to being adopted by swathes of the population without critical thought, they influence politics, education, boardrooms and media, as our institutions yield to the pressure of crowds assembled in passionate agitation for action only their leaders actually understand. And there is no equilibrium where “social justice” has been achieved, because the very adoption of today’s extreme opinions fertilises the ground for ever more extremism by status seeking innovators. This extreme social justice movement is a small, but vocal minority – but it is in them being vocal that their power lies: it allows them to build a movement of uncritical followers, to shame dissidents into silence and to influence the direction of society in a massively disproportionate way, before moving on to even more extreme positions. Some seek comfort in the fact that there is a silent majority who oppose the wackiness, but just like there is power in being vocal, there is weakness in being silent. The majority may win elections but when they are silent, they leave the influence on policy to the vocal minority. The world is dominated by those with high status opinions, and it is in this culture war for the values that underpin our society that the direction of travel is decided.