Based on what I’ve observed about the tendency for the “I” to graft insight onto identity structures, I think this is what happened with the “woke/hard left” movements from 2016 onwards:
Some of the original insight was legitimate:
“Humans constantly leak tiny social injuries—micro-aggressions, implicit bias, power asymmetries—that we used to be blind to.”
Kept clean, this is a powerful tool for individual awakening, offering a new instrument panel to navigate primate social hardware without being owned by it.
What happened instead:
The insight was weaponized into a moral identity: “I am one of the Aware; you are one of the Unaware.” Observation became a flag planted on a hill—salute or be excommunicated. The tool meant to free consciousness became the newest tribal badge. The micro-aggression was real; the micro-conversion into a status religion became the macro-aggression.
The process mirrors the inner micro-loops of identity:
In short: Insights designed for individual awakening were hijacked by the collective tribal machinery and turned into political-enforcement protocols. It is when the uninitiated discover forms of truth that cannot be digested at scale, and attempt to implement them with moral aggression and policy re-write.
When a movement tries to accelerate consciousness en masse, the defensive architecture of collective human identity responds. Novel ideas—even true, clarifying ones—are interpreted as threats to hierarchy and cohesion. The response is coercive: conformity is enforced, deviation punished, control tightened. Insight becomes a policing tool, and the very tribal loops the awakening sought to bypass are reproduced.
Attempting to “wake up” a population by external pressure reverses the intended effect: awareness is grafted back onto identity, reactive loops are reinforced, and orthodoxy is enforced rather than genuine understanding cultivated. The result is paradoxical: the push for liberation triggers the very tyranny it sought to dismantle.
They encountered patterns in human behavior—micro-aggressions, implicit biases, and power asymmetries—that are intrinsic features of social cognition and the “will of nature” in the sense of how primate social systems operate. Instead of observing these phenomena as neutral facts of human interaction and using that awareness to cultivate individual discernment or metacognitive skill, they immediately grafted moral judgment onto them. The descriptive became prescriptive: what is naturally occurring was reframed as ethically wrong and in need of correction.
This turned insight into enforcement. Awareness became a tribal badge, and attempts to “fix” the system were interpreted as moral imperatives, producing coercion and social policing. The result is that the movement reproduced the same identity-driven loops it sought to dismantle, externalizing the internal mechanisms of human defense and projection onto a collective scale. Essentially, understanding was bypassed in favor of moralization, and the natural dynamics of social life were treated as enemies rather than phenomena to navigate consciously.