I’m a humanistic weirdo, and as such I’m not sure where I belong in this modern culture war. I love truth and reason — I’ve built a career on them — but I belong to a humanistic tradition that refuses to stop at the head and leave the heart out of it. And these days there aren’t many of us. So when I look at the people we’ve come to call “anti-woke intellectuals”—many of whom have written for Skeptic or appeared as guests on The Michael Shermer Show podcast—I don’t see them the way either side wants me to.
I see two very different people wearing the same coat. One wants to make the world more reasonable. The other is settling a score. As a humanistic psychologist who studies narcissism, I’ve come to think the difference between them is stark, and that telling them apart matters more than almost anything else in our culture war.
How did this come about?
A Brief History of Anti-Woke Intellectuals
In 2018, the journalist Bari Weiss wrote an essay in The New York Times introducing readers to what the mathematician Eric Weinstein had half-jokingly named the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW): a loose constellation of thinkers who had either been pushed out of mainstream institutions or had walked away from them, because they would not go along with what they saw as a tightening orthodoxy on race, gender, and identity. The roster was eclectic and included Eric Weinstein, of course, along with his brother Bret and his biologist wife Heather Heying, but also the neuroscientist Sam Harris, the psychologist Jordan Peterson, the political commentators Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, and Douglas Murray, the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers, the Quillette publisher Claire Lehmann, and Skeptic’s own Michael Shermer. Joe Rogan handed many of them their largest microphones. Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Debra Soh, Maajid Nawaz, Gad Saad, and others orbited nearby.
So what is an anti-woke intellectual? It isn’t simply someone who disagrees with progressive politics. Plenty of people hold conservative or classical-liberal views without building a vocation around them. The anti-woke intellectual makes the critique of progressive social ideology the central, organizing feature of their public work. The argument, in its strongest form, goes like this: a movement that began as a genuine response to real injustices has, in places, curdled into something illiberal—a secular religion complete with heretics, blasphemy, and excommunication; a hostility to open inquiry; a habit of treating disagreement itself as a kind of violence, in which words become a form of violence, or even saying nothing when others think you should, as in the activist phrase “silence is violence.”
The first type of anti-woke intellectual criticizes ideas; the second type is consumed by them.
And here’s the thing worth saying up front before anyone reaches for the comment box: A lot of that critique is correct. The grievance studies affair, in which James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian managed to get absurd hoax papers (one rewriting a chunk of Mein Kampf in intersectional jargon, another about dog park “rape culture” … by dogs) accepted by peer-reviewed journals, exposed something real about the collapse of standards in certain corners of the academy. Gad Saad’s notion of “idea pathogens” names a phenomenon many of us have watched spread. Steven Pinker’s Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard responded to a genuine chilling of speech on campus. I am not here to defend the excesses of the movement these thinkers criticize. I’ve seen those excesses up close, and some of them are indefensible.
I would like to make a different observation. Watch these intellectuals long enough and you notice they don’t all have the same vibe. There are, I argue here, two distinct types—and the difference between them has almost nothing to do with their stated positions, which often overlap, and almost everything to do with what’s driving the engine underneath.
The Two Vibes
The first type of anti-woke intellectual criticizes ideas; the second type is consumed by them.
The first type can tell you, specifically, which policy or claim or practice they object to and why—and they can also tell you, without choking on the words, what the other side gets right. This is the critic who goes after a practice (a mandatory diversity statement, the erosion of institutional neutrality) rather than after the souls of the people who hold it; the scholar who writes a whole book arguing that left and right are each tracking real moral goods the other is half-blind to, which is not a book you write if your aim is to humiliate anyone. You can imagine this person being talked out of a position by a better argument.
The second type is different, and you sense it before you can name it. The fight isn’t part of their work; the fight is the work—and you can watch the arc unfold in public. There’s the scholar who raised a reasonable campus objection, was treated abominably for it, left academia over it, and whose public thinking has since widened into a steadily more totalizing suspicion of nearly every mainstream institution. There’s the writer who genuinely named something real about the culture and then built a combative public identity around an enemy that only ever expands—because naming a real problem and being consumed by it are not mutually exclusive. There’s the public figure for whom a private grief and a civilizational crusade have fused into a single object, so that one enemy now explains even a death. In each case, a suspicion that began aimed at one bad idea has metastasized into a distrust of whole institutions, whole classes of people, anyone who won’t agree that the virus is everywhere.
You’ll notice I’m not naming names, and that’s deliberate. I’m a psychologist, not a mind reader: I can’t diagnose anyone I haven’t personally assessed, and I’m describing publicly observable behavior, not pronouncing on anyone’s character or sorting real people onto a permanent list. (I surely wouldn’t want that done to me.) Since you likely know who you’d put in each camp, I’d rather you fill in the names yourself than hand you a roster to argue with.
Also, I’d like to add that these camps are fluid—in fact, that’s the part I most want to stress. A first-type thinker can have a second-type week and find his way back; a second-type crusader can cool into a first-type critic once the wound finally heals. Nobody is fixed. But the behavior sorts cleanly, and once you can see the tells, you can’t unsee them—including, if you’re honest, in yourself.
The Tells
How do you know which vibe you’re dealing with, including when the intellectual in question is you?
The first tell is the object of attack. The grounded critic goes after a claim, a policy, a specific bad argument. The consumed critic goes after a people: an enemy class, vaguely defined and infinitely expandable, into which any new opponent can be folded.
The second tell is revisability. Ask yourself: what would it take for this person to say “I was wrong about that one”? For the first type, you can imagine an answer. For the second, the question is almost unintelligible; being wrong isn’t a possibility they’re holding open, because the position isn’t really a hypothesis. It’s an identity.
The third tell—and this is the one I most want to flag—is reflexive cynicism about compassion. The consumed anti-woke critic has come to treat every expression of care as a cover story. Someone advocates for the vulnerable? Status-jockeying. Someone expresses concern for a marginalized group? A bid for moral superiority. Everything kind is secretly a maneuver. Now, sometimes there is a hit there. Performative compassion is real; moral grandstanding is real; some people absolutely do weaponize the language of care for advantage. A good skeptic keeps that possibility on the table.
The crusade is the bandage that never comes off because the cut is never allowed to heal.
But there’s a vast difference between calibrated suspicion, applied where the evidence warrants it, and a blanket presumption that all compassion is fraud. The second isn’t insight. It’s a worldview in which goodness has been defined out of existence, and that’s not reason. It’s a kind of paranoia wearing reason’s clothes.
Which brings us to the fourth tell: the totalizing frame. One enemy explains everything. The virus is everywhere. Every disappointment, every institutional failure, and every personal grievance flows back to the same source. That’s not a theory anymore; it’s the structure of a conspiracy theory, or worse an all-consuming worldview, and it has the airless quality of one.
What’s Actually Running the Engine
Here’s where my own research comes in, because I think there’s a real psychological mechanism underneath the second vibe of the anti-woke intellectual, and it’s not the one people might expect.
When we hear “narcissism,” we picture the grandiose type: the swaggering, self-promoting, attention-hungry performer. But in a study with Joshua Miller, W. Keith Campbell, and Brandon Weiss, my colleagues and I mapped how narcissism actually breaks apart into different faces. There’s grandiose narcissism: antagonistic, dominant, status-seeking. And there’s vulnerable narcissism: neurotic, hypersensitive, easily wounded, perpetually aggrieved, convinced the world has failed to grant the recognition it owes. The antagonism is the thread the two share.
Both feed the second anti-woke intellectual, but in different ways. Grandiose narcissism builds the brand: the crusader who discovers that being The Person Who Fights This Thing brings a following, a revenue stream, a standing ovation, and who needs the enemy to stay enormous because the enemy is now load-bearing for the self. Vulnerable narcissismsupplies the wound: the person who was genuinely humiliated—fired, mobbed, exiled, betrayed—and for whom the critique is no longer about the world at all but about settling a score that never closes. A real injury becomes a permanent organizing principle. The crusade is the bandage that never comes off because the cut is never allowed to heal.
And when this goes collective, it gets its own engine. The work of Agnieszka Golec de Zavala on collective narcissism describes groups built around the belief that we are exceptional, that we are not sufficiently recognized, and shows that such groups reliably turn hostile toward whoever they cast as the threat to the in-group’s image. An anti-woke movement organized around shared grievance, rather than shared inquiry, will behave exactly this way: ever-vigilant, ever-aggrieved, retaliating against perceived insults to its own greatness. The truth-seeking recedes; the score-settling takes over.
That’s the distinction I’d draw, and I’d put it as a question anyone in this fight can ask themselves: Am I doing this to make society better, or to repair a narcissistic injury? The two can look identical from the outside. They have very different effects on the world.
The Mega-Irony of the Narcissist
And here is the part I find mega-ironic: the second camp talks, almost without exception, from a place of pure victim mindset. The very thing they are most likely to mock in their opponents (the grievance gang, the victimhood culture, the perpetual woundedness group, the “everyone is out to get us” cohort) is the thing they have most thoroughly become. Their accusation becomes a mirror of themselves.
The woke didn’t take your life from you. Make them the smallest possible part of your story, not the largest, and the crusade loses its grip.
I spent an entire book, Rise Above, on the victim mindset, and its final chapter is about what happens when that mindset goes collective. The research is unsettlingly precise here. The psychologist Rahav Gabay and her colleagues identified a stable personality trait they call the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood, with four signature marks: (1) an incessant need for recognition, (2) moral elitism, (3) a lack of empathy for the suffering of others, and (4) frequent rumination about one’s own victimization. Read that list slowly and ask yourself whether it describes the obsessed anti-woke crusader any less exactly than it describes the “wokester” campus activist he can’t stop ranting about. It describes both, and that’s the point. As I put it in Rise Above:
To the extent that real wounds have been incurred, we need to acknowledge that, metabolize it, and move on. But our current society does not allow that. Instead, it encourages perpetual victimhood, where emphasizing wounds nets societal rewards.
That incentive structure does not check anyone’s politics at the door. It rewards the aggrieved progressive and the aggrieved anti-progressive in exactly the same language.
At the group level, the wound becomes a flag. Collective victimhood confers real psychological benefits: entitlement and moral superiority, the sympathy and support of onlookers, and a powerful sense of group cohesion, because nothing unites people like a shared grievance. Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner’s work on moral typecasting shows that we instinctively sort the world into weak-but-moral victims and strong-but-immoral perpetrators, and once a group has cast itself as the victim, it tends to grant itself a moral pass on the harms it does to the designated perpetrator class, a phenomenon researchers have called the “egoism of victimhood.” “It’s all the fault of the woke” is precisely this move: a chosen trauma installed at the center of an identity, reactivated whenever the world feels threatening, and used to license whatever comes next. It is the same machinery as collective narcissism, just flying a different flag.
Why I’ve Never Called Myself Woke or Anti-Woke
I should be honest about where I stand, because it shapes how I see all this. I love truth and reason. I’ve spent my career insisting that psychology earn its claims, that we follow the evidence, that we not flinch from uncomfortable findings. By temperament and training, my head belongs in the reason camp.
But as a humanistic psychologist, I don’t stop at truth and reason. I’m a particular kind of creature in this debate, and there aren’t many of us: the humanist who loves truth as much as the skeptics do but won’t amputate the heart to prove it.
Which is to say that the two camps I’ve just described don’t actually have a slot for me, and I’ve stopped expecting one. Both are organized around the same false choice: rigor or compassion, truth or justice, the cold eye or the warm one. I refuse it.
And that refusal isn’t a gap in the taxonomy I haven’t gotten around to filling. It is the position. The whole argument of humanistic psychology, going back to its founders, is that a fully developed human being holds both at once. According to the field’s founder, Abraham Maslow, the transcending self-actualizing person is the one who can do “dichotomy-transcendence.”
I’m also interested in prosocial motivation, in humanitarianism, in actually improving the lives of the downtrodden that are, not incidentally, the very things the progressive movement cares about when it’s at its best. Even though politically, I feel like I’m most accurately described as a left-leaning libertarian (but I’m politically fluid, so chill).
So I’ve never been able to plant my flag in the anti-woke camp, even as I’ve watched and named plenty of foolishness and failures of reason on the woke progressive side. Because beneath that foolishness I can usually still see the compassion that started it, a real moral impulse toward people who’ve been hurt. I’m not willing to throw that out. The error I want to correct is the abandonment of reason and the hyper-cynicism of the anti-woke obsessed. It is not the presence of care.
A Better Way Forward
Here is what I would like to offer the anti-woke intellectuals I admire, as well as the ones I worry about: The goal is integration, not demolition. You don’t have to choose between rigor and compassion; the whole humanistic tradition is an argument that a fully developed person holds both. And the first move is the one I prescribe for any victim mindset, individual or collective: as I wrote in Rise Above, it requires “moving victimhood from the center of a group’s identity to the periphery.”
A critique launched from faith in humanity, aimed at making things better, can self-correct … A crusade launched from a narcissistic wound, aimed at vindication, never arrives, because the wound is the point and the wound is bottomless.
The woke didn’t take your life from you. Make them the smallest possible part of your story, not the largest, and the crusade loses its grip. In our research on the lighter side of human nature, my colleagues and I described a “Light Triad,” and one of its facets is faith in humanity, a basic willingness to believe in people’s fundamental decency. I’d argue that faith in humanity, not reflexive cynicism, is the sounder default from which to criticize a movement, with appropriate cynicism deployed where the evidence actually warrants it. Not naïveté. Calibration. Trust as the baseline; suspicion as the targeted tool, not the air you breathe.
Because here’s the asymmetry that should worry anyone in this fight: A critique launched from faith in humanity, aimed at making things better, can self-correct. It has somewhere to land. A crusade launched from a narcissistic wound, aimed at vindication, never arrives, because the wound is the point and the wound is bottomless.
Criticize the ideology. Please. Some of it deserves it, and reason is precisely what’s been missing. But do it as the first type, not the second. Go after the bad argument, stay open to being wrong, keep the compassion you’re tempted to mock, and check, every so often, whether you’re trying to repair the world or just your wounded self.
The difference won’t always show in your conclusions. It will show in whether, years from now, you’ve helped make the world a better place—or just devoted your life feeding a virus of your own.
