The Psychology of Critical Social Justice

“Adherents of the Woke worldview disallow this more complex approach to social issues (psychologically, an ambivalent position) and, instead, succumb to the simplistic and often pleasurable permission to demonize entire categories of people according to immutable traits.”

Introduction

The increased popularity of Critical Social Justice Theory (CSJT, commonly referred to as Woke ideology) and the different ways in which it manifests in academia, the media, politics, and private life necessitate not only a historical analysis of its evolution but also a psychological formulation thereof, based on adherents’ behavior, affective states, and what they reveal about their interpretation of the world today. The historical development of Critical Social Justice Theory in its current form has been well established thanks to the research by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian. This developmental map describes the historical moments and philosophical checkpoints that ultimately led to CSJT, as it is applied today. In addition to its purely philosophical roots, there is a psychological structure underlying this worldview that requires certain psychological processes and intrapersonal dynamics on the part of its adherents for the ideology to be maintained, updated, and propagated. This article explores these processes.

Key Features of the Critical Social Justice Worldview

In their 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt categorize social activism into two types of worldviews, namely common-humanity identity politics and common-enemy identity politics. The former describes a type of social religion where the well-being of all humans is prioritized based on shared human values and common goals. It is a “social religion,” where all humans are equally included, and members of society are often referred to in familial terms. Historically, common-humanity identity politics has aimed to unite and harmonize racial, gender, and other strata of American life—and not to destroy, “dismantle,” or “cancel” any cultural artifacts of American heritage. The latter worldview, however, endorses a value system where an ever-growing list of aspects in American society are identified as “problematic” and consequently deserving of destruction. People who live by this worldview are vigilant and alert, ready to identify an enemy: a historical figure, an academic subject, language use, religious doctrine, a specific religion, a tradition, or a demographic based on immutable properties (gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc.).

The common-enemy position has a well-established equivalence in psychology. Dividing people and human artifacts into all-bad or all-good categories is a basic feature of the Woke worldview. By virtue of a person’s immutable features, he is assigned a group-identity and is either classified as belonging to the evil oppressor class, the common enemy that needs to be exposed, humiliated, and cancelled or the virtuous, innocent victim class that deserves emancipation and social justice. To the Woke, the individual gets superseded by the group classification from which he cannot escape. Broadly, the categories carrying historical and current culpability include the categories of male, white, heterosexual, and able-bodied. Alternatively, categories carrying historical and current victimhood and moral innocence include the categories female, black/people of color, LGBTQ+ and disabled. This worldview in which every individual is classed as either all-bad or all-good actualizes a defense called splitting. Splitting is a primitive defence of young infants and in character constellations of some adults according to which people are either seen as purely evil and hostile, or purely innocent and loving.