Over the last few years my perspective has changed… a lot.
Like most non-Americans I wasn’t particularly ‘woke’ (American leftist ideas) prior to 2020. I was lifelong leftist but when 2020 came along I learned it was not enough to just be on the left, you had to be subscribed to a particular brand of American far left politics- regardless of the fact that I’m an Indian immigrant who lives in Britain.
These political ideas- which only really seem to have relevance in North America- have been rapidly adopted by all of the anglosphere and beyond. They have a vice-like grip on global culture.
What happens in America impacts what happens everywhere else, and this is reflected starkly in culture. One of the mechanisms for this is social media. Social media has no borders, and over the last few years it has become mainstream for these political ideas to become the moral orthodoxy.
Rapidly I noticed something was very wrong. Thought policing, cancel culture, cruelty, and harassment were rife. There was a cult-like expectation of obedience and allegiance and these were enforced with the threat of punishment.
I started to question these ideas and push back against the authoritarian nature by which they were enforced. That didn’t go well. I was immediately labelled a bigot (mostly by a group of North American white women) and have been harassed for the last two and a half years. Fun times.
I started questioning these ideas in the summer of 2020 during covid lockdown, and there was nowhere to go but online, so I went to twitter. There I followed a wide range of voices, from different backgrounds, races, classes, countries, political beliefs, who all felt the way I did.
This group (in 2020) wasn’t just refreshing, there was something kind of sacred about it. What made it sacred was that despite all of our differences in belief or perspective, everyone made an attempt to be respectful of each other. There was an unspoken sense of, ‘I may not agree with your opinion but I respect your right to have it.’
I’d never experienced anything quite like that before. Similar, but not the same.
It was as if everyone made a conscious effort to not be like what we were criticising: cruel, thought policing, demanding agreement, and making enemies out of people who didn’t agree with us.
Sadly, it didn’t last. This sense of ‘I respect your right to have your opinion’ shifted into subtly enforced in-group thinking and many have been excommunicated for wrong think by this group of wrong thinkers.
This group of ‘anti-woke’ people soon descended into similar in-fighting and fracturing as any other group. And while I initially described myself as ‘anti-woke’ I realised that didn’t fit either- because I’m not blindly ‘anti’ anything.
I don’t want to describe myself based on what I am against. I’d rather focus on what I believe in: reason, rationality, fairness, truth, and (healthy) individualism amid this culture of forcing everyone to pick a group.
I heard the term politically homeless, and it really resonated with me… for a while.
Till it didn’t.
‘Politically homeless’ suggests I might be looking for a ‘home’ and cannot find one that fits. Tribelessness is not wanting one at all.
I don’t want a ‘group’ and I don’t want to pick a side. I want to