Who's drinking the Kool-Aid?

Addressing my critics

In celebration of reaching a thousand subscribers, I’m addressing the three most frequent criticisms from you all. The cultural views I’ve rejected are simplistic explanations for the world, and we should know intuitively that such ideas can’t explain the endless complexity of our society. These views also become excuses for chasing desire over wisdom. I want a life of spiritual fulfillment over that of desire, but this is not how American liberal culture is oriented, so my writing makes some people angry.

The three buckets of critiques from readers:

First, I’ve been drinking the anti-woke Kool-Aid. Second, I’m a closet conservative or Republican. The third is that I’m so far in the anti-liberal feminist camp that I’m a contrarian, which I guess means I’m a closet traditionalist who wants women to return to the kitchen.

This is my id, Hegel

Am I drinking anti-woke Kool-Aid?

First, let’s parse the idea of drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid. For anyone unfamiliar, this term originated when the members of the People’s Temple, a cult, committed mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana. It is a little-known fact that the leader, Jim Jones, was a liberal close to the Democrat leaders of San Francisco: Milk, Moscone, and Feinstein. Jonestown was meant to be a multicultural, post-racial utopia. The irony is profound.

I once upheld the narrative driving DEI efforts and unquestioningly supported affirmative action based on race alone. I was once a diversity recruiter at Google (on the inaugural team) and created an employee resource group at another prominent tech company for ‘Asians.’ This group encompassed those descended from parents who emigrated from any country in East, South, or Southeast Asia, as well as recent immigrants from these countries, not to mention employees in Japan, Singapore, and India who never set foot in the U.S. These groups were bundled together in a single group, showing the DEI apparatus's intellectual poverty and American-centric orientation. I also was an eager participant in DEI workshops back when I thought white people were the Problem With Everything, including my career not going where I wanted. I remember having many conversations with the director of DEI at a previous company about how she was essentially hampered from doing anything because she wasn’t respected as an equal. That’s when I was actually drinking the Kool-Aid.

The general sense among commenters seems to be that if you argue vehemently against a phenomenon, you also participate in a cult. At the very least, your mental faculties are impaired unless you are absolutely dispassionate about the subject. I find this to be prima facie absurd. Passion doesn’t negate objectivity.

People who leave cults wonder how they could have joined in the first place. I lament that I stopped thinking critically about the world for over a decade. It took me embarrassingly long to realize this ideology prevented me from digging myself out of an endless depressive fog in which I also contemplated suicide many times. Nothing seemed to be making my life better. I was in therapy, have been on several medications, and even took a break from working in 2015 to attend nine hours of group therapy a week so I could function at the bare minimum. Social justice ideology was a significant force that prevented me from functioning because it encouraged me to look outward instead of within for solutions. Everything terrible in my life seemed like it was coming from white people. That was a literally insane way of looking at the world.

Suppose you accept the premise that the modern leftist set of views is cultish. In that case, you should also understand that people who’ve left a cult are some of the most critical about it because they finally rejected a power structure that was trying to control their minds and actions.¹ That should make anyone angry. I am fucking livid. I don’t usually curse, but it should drive home that I’m writing about this cult from a place of deep anger at myself and the people who uphold it. My rage is even more intense because the people imposing it on society claim that they’re more intelligent than the rest of us because they have credentials. That should anger anyone, especially people of color who have emerged from this insanity. 

Nathalie Martinek PhD

has written at length about cults, narcissism, and social justice ideology in her excellent publication. Her characterization of cults qualifies the ideology I rejected:

You are special. You are unique because of the gifts that you bring to the community - healing prowess, research funding, credentials, subject matter expertise or advantageous connections.

You are superior. Belonging to a community that so few can access, gaining esoteric and exclusive knowledge makes you feel important and on a higher plane of consciousness than most of humanity.

You are powerful. You get to do things to help others with the advanced technologies/state of the art support system/connections that other communities lack.

You have an important purpose. You have very important work to do to save the planet/awaken humanity/heal humanity/save lives that can best (only) be accomplished here.

You are chosen. It’s no accident you encountered the individual/community. You were hand-picked from many candidates who didn’t have what you have to truly benefit from the community’s offerings. Only those who embody the desired attributes are chosen and a select few advance further.

But have I joined another cult? That would require some kind of power structure akin to the one I left and that it meet the above criteria. In the woke cult, there were sacred victims and their saviors - women of color and white women, respectively. Several writers argue against the tenets of critical social justice, but they don’t constitute a power structure. I’m not deferring to others in my thinking. I have read many books before concluding that I was in a cult, and I didn’t simply accept those arguments at face value. I left an authoritarian ideology to think for myself. I don’t submit to an authority today. I can actually think deeply again after over a decade of not doing so while I was addicted to leftist social media. 

I’ve written before that women of color let themselves be used by credentialed white people (women) to uphold bankrupt politics that insist on the symbolic over the material. There are a lot of white men who are their useful idiots, some believers and some not. Some of my most fervent critics are also white men, woke leftists and not. Many of these men see themselves as Eminently Reasonable People, especially otherwise liberal men who may not have fallen prey to the ideology itself. A person who is used for nefarious ends would be angry when they come from the brain fog. I don’t expect men who have never been thus duped to understand why I’m so furious at both myself and the people who used me— experience matters in this case.

Am I closet conservative or Republican?

I’m hardly the first person to point out that making an argument that a Republican has made doesn’t mean the speaker has become one. It’s way too easy to dismiss people by calling them a conservative or Republican. It means you don’t have to engage with the argument's substance. The subtext is that because you’re making an argument made by the other side, you’re a terrible person, and thus the argument inherently lacks merit. This happens because tribalism leaves no room for internal disagreement. It’s the same with the other side; they destroy people who dare to criticize them from within. We should be better than that. We claim to be intelligent, critical thinkers. But intellect is not the same as wisdom. We lack the latter.

I often critique the actions and beliefs of Democrats from the socialist perspective. Socialism has come to mean many things, so let me specify that I mean materialist socialism, not whatever the social justice left claims to be. They, too, have claimed the socialist label, but their concerns are the opposite of material. They are more collectivist authoritarians who are intent on keeping people separated by their various identity labels. I want to build a society where people without degrees can live with dignity and decent living standards. The upper middle class and above have pulled away from everyone else with the spoils. It is fundamentally unjust. I want a society in which race is not the dividing line between people because that gets in the way of class consciousness needed to resist the center-left neoliberal consensus that deems the working class unworthy of dignity.

Why don’t I ever write about Republicans? It’s boring. I don’t care. I did enough of it when I was younger. Republican neoliberalism is out of style. If my ‘own’ people (though I’m not sure how much they still are) can’t offer a superior alternative to the working class they claim to care about, why am I not allowed to call it out? Why do people who want Democrats to be better get branded traitors? That is the reasoning of a simpleton.

Like it or not, Republicans are the party of the working class. They shouldn’t be, and Democrats are responsible for letting them become so. I’m from working-class parentage, and my very first identity was Democrat. I’m furious that they’ve relinquished their duty to people without degrees, who are still the majority. How the fuck are you going to win elections with a coalition that weak? You can win the Electoral College with a few thousand votes in key states, but the victory won’t be considered legitimate. Anything short of a Harris blowout will be contested. It’s ridiculous that a victory would be contested in the first place, but it should be a wake-up call to us that our coalition is weak. 

Democrats shouldn’t be in a position that weak to begin with.

Criticism from a person outside the fold doesn’t affect that group’s internal dynamics. Why exactly waste time yelling about Trump? Will they change because we criticized them? Aren’t you all sick of the constant outrage we’ve been fed by the ‘journalists’ claiming to hold truth to power? Is there nothing else to think about? 

Coming up with a counterargument for things I say may take effort. So, several people have accused me of ‘using right-wing tropes,’ as though the right has a monopoly on an argument once someone has uttered it. A right winger saying something doesn’t make the argument incorrect. This is intellectual laziness. It doesn’t pass as reasoning. Calling someone names in response to an argument is a logical fallacy. ‘Right-wing’ and ‘Republican’ are ad hominem.

Generally, people seem to think that if someone pushes back too vehemently against leftist identity ideology, they’ve become the thing they’re criticizing: members of another cult. This is perhaps an easy thing to notice on Substack, which has a thriving network of ‘heterodox’ writers who see themselves as classical liberals fighting for free thought amid a censorious culture. They are also not a cult.

My words sting because of their directness, and they’ve attracted hate readers - perhaps this should be a point of pride. Writers should inspire disagreement, or they’re not being provocative. Some of these heterodox writers are seen as ‘conservatives’ in the Republican sense. But we’ve mistakenly conflated liberals and conservatives with political parties. Beliefs and commitments are too multi-dimensional to assign to an x-axis of liberal versus conservative. When we can’t categorize someone as a liberal with commitments to a set of beliefs recognizable as those of the Democratic Party, we put them in the conservative bucket by default. This is one reason the ‘discourse’ online is so poor.

I suspect that we turn people who see themselves as liberals into conservatives in our minds to avoid engaging with their often uncomfortable arguments. This is because conservatives are (gasp) not always incorrect about their diagnoses or remedies. No one can always be correct, but Democratic loyalists seem to think they always are. That is the height of arrogance. Agreeing with anything a Republican might say, even if the conclusion is independently reached, is treasonous. When you charge a person with being a closet Republican, you are succumbing to tribalism, which is a basic human instinct that ostensibly intelligent people should fight. Be better.

Contrarian Radha, the origin story of a anti-feminist supervillain

I was a feminist and Democrat before I had any consciousness of being ‘Indian.’ It was my default mode because I felt so oppressed in my conservative Hindu household. I wasn’t allowed to wear tank tops or even speak to boys, let alone have a boyfriend. I was jealous of my American girlfriends because they could seemingly live without constraint. I was known as the ur-feminist among my college friends, so much so that I had a reputation for hating men. I had good reason to distrust men because my father was unreliable. My ultimate aim in life was to study and succeed so that I never would have to depend financially on a man. My mother was always the breadwinner, and I saw the toll it took on her to keep the household afloat, basically alone, with my father just along for the ride. I never wanted to struggle like that, but I also felt that men weren’t reliable because of the terrible example my father set. 

My mother broke gender stereotypes, and I wanted to emulate her. I was even more independent than her, so she once told me it scared her. I especially bristled at being told what to think or to accept that girls must do x like she often tried to say to me. For all her smashing of stereotypes, she wanted her daughter to uphold them, perhaps because she had been unable to please her own mother. As you can see, I didn’t. 

I have never once thought or written in favor of women needing their rights or independence curtailed. I value my ability to make enough to live independently if I am alone tomorrow. I will never give up working because I don’t want to be dependent, even if my partner makes enough for me to stop. It would feel wrong. I’m an intentionally childless cat lady.

However, feminism has become an ideology of excess, an excuse to do whatever you want in the name of personal liberation, morality be damned. Everyone has a dharma toward society, friends, and family. There are universal moral principles we ought to respect, the most important being discipline. In all areas of life, discipline is paramount. Just because you can do something you desire doesn’t mean you should. American culture is all about chasing your desires and maximizing pleasure at the expense of even your health, both physical and psychological. 

Feminism and therapy culture together have become an excuse to do anything, even if it means negatively affecting others. I’ve written a lot about the importance of discipline in a life well-lived. A life of chasing unbridled desire is not a deep one. I know it seems like it should be, but Americans have a strange view of freedom as minimizing individual constraints. For me, true freedom requires exercising discipline and stopping yourself from blindly chasing pleasure. Desire fulfillment isn’t the path to lasting contentment. I can’t prove this empirically, as it’s a metaphysical concept. Take it or leave it.

Here are some examples of how I have let desire take me to my detriment: cannabis addiction, casual sex, letting emotions carry me away to the point of hurting others, and social media addiction. I could go on. It was a miserable period of my life. I was in therapy, on a ton of medications, and not treating others well. The idea that I should be able to do whatever I want was behind these activities. I wasn’t hurting anyone other than myself for some of these examples. That doesn’t mean I should have indulged. If anyone can give me a definition of feminism that doesn’t have to do with exercising unrestricted choice, I will gladly engage and admit I’m wrong. Even abortion is fundamentally about having sex without consequences and preserving one’s ability to do what one wants, being unburdened by a child.

I’m not advocating taking away women’s freedom to self-determine, but I reject feminism because of the above issues. I also don’t think women need to behave according to gender norms, but we shouldn’t criticize those who decide to. I believe abortion should be legal, but you should be able to determine within twelve weeks if you want to keep it. I believe in the concept of a soul, so abortion, in general, makes me uncomfortable. If I got pregnant tomorrow, I probably would have the kid. But abortion should still be legal. I think liberals need to accept, however, that there are biological differences between men and women and that simply wishing it were not so is a waste of time. Men are never going to get pregnant, and I have to worry about it as a woman. It’s a fact of life. Get over it. Complaining about it won’t change the cold, empirical facts. 

True ‘equality’ in every area of life cannot come about because women will have to worry about their relative lack of physical strength and their ability to become pregnant. I must stress that this does not mean that I think women should be paid less or behave a certain way. I’m just accepting something I can’t change. Liberals seem to be allergic to biological reality and the concerns that come with it. Saying, ‘Well, men can’t get pregnant’ in response to any of this is a waste of breath. As a woman, I’ve accepted that certain aspects of life will be different and more complex. I can still be for legal equality and self-determination while accepting those facts.

The one thing I will grant is that I’m so emotionally affected by my negative experiences as a former feminist and social justice leftist that my analyses are infused with feeling. You can sense it. I don’t know how one can write about culture without being animated by emotion. I don’t think, however, that this emotion is blinding me. I attempt to steelman my arguments. The steel man for these critiques is that I cannot be objective about the people I write about with such intensity. But, neither can the people I argue against prove their points because they’re largely unfalsifiable. I interpret the world differently now, leading me to make specific arguments. Some are provable, but others are based on intuition and pattern recognition. I’ll never be able to prove all of my intuitions as empirically valid, but intuition is still a legitimate source of information processing. It is intuition and pattern recognition that lead us to make hypotheses. The scientific process determines if intuited patterns can be replicated under observation.

I’ve gotten to the point at which it’s too time-consuming to respond to every single comment, but I do read them all. If you’re an asshole, I will block you (and there have been enough to have to state this). If you have an argument in good faith, I will do my best to respond, even it takes a few days. I am grateful to all of you for the encouragement and kind words, and especially for those who have spread my work. I’ve met many kind and thoughtful people here, and look forward to your engagement.

1. See Hacking Narcissism by

Nathalie Martinek PhD

for deep analysis of cults.