Whenever a society has a concept of heresy and orthodoxy, orthodoxy becomes a substitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the world, but as long as you are orthodox, you are better than everyone who is not. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to bad people.
Simple Picture
ELI5: imagine a game where you score points not by being good but by catching other people being bad. The rules change every few months, so the only way to stay safe is to spend all your energy watching for rule changes and reporting violators. The people who are best at this game are not the kindest people — they are the most vigilant enforcers. And they need the rules to keep changing, because if the rules ever stabilized, everyone would know them and enforcement would stop being a source of status.
The Mechanism
For orthodoxy to work as a substitute for virtue, it must be difficult. If all you have to do is wear some garment or avoid some word, everyone does it and the only way to seem more virtuous is to actually be virtuous. The shallow, complicated, and frequently changing rules of ideological correctness make it the perfect substitute for actual virtue. The result: a world in which good people who were not up to date on current moral fashions were brought down by people whose characters would make you recoil.
The viral mechanism is precise: zealots invent a new impropriety. Fellow zealots adopt it, eager for new ways to signal virtue. If there are enough of these, a much larger group follows, motivated not by virtue-signaling but by fear. They are not trying to signal anything — they are trying to avoid getting in trouble. At this point the new impropriety is firmly established.
Most people already worry that they might be breaking rules they do not know about. If you tell them they are breaking a rule, their default reaction is to believe you. Especially if multiple people tell them. This is the recipe for exponential growth — and it is Bourdieu’s habitus operating at the moral level: the body sweats, the voice stutters, the person autocensors, not because they believe the accusation but because the nervous system cannot tolerate the social risk of defiance.
Prigs and the Supply of Rules
Prigs are prigs by nature. They need rules to obey and enforce. Now that Darwin has cut off their traditional supply of religious rules, they are constantly hungry for new ones. All they need is someone to meet them halfway by defining a new way to be morally pure.
The aggressively conventional-minded are not always on the rampage. Usually they just enforce whatever random rules are nearest to hand. They only become dangerous when some new ideology gets a lot of them pointed in the same direction at once. That is what happened during the Cultural Revolution.
This is Pirsig’s cultural immune system in attack mode. The immune system cannot distinguish beneficial new understanding from crime — it fights both with equal vigor. The prigs are the immune cells: individually they enforce local order, but when mobilized by ideology they become a coordinated assault on anything that deviates from the current orthodoxy. Arendt saw the same pattern: the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the true believer but the person for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.
Humor as Antibody
Political correctness seemed to burn out in the late 1990s, partly because it literally became a joke. Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against priggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless, cannot respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian prudishness.
This is the Dynamic response to Static overreach: Dynamic Quality does not argue with the immune system — it makes the immune system look ridiculous, which is structurally different from attacking it. The immune system can fight an attack but it cannot fight laughter. impro describes the same: what confounds a society is not serious opposition but the lack of seriousness altogether — the moment warfare appears to be pointless or comical, soldiers find no audience for their prizes.
The Institutional Capture
A new class of bureaucrats pursued the agenda as if their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire people to keep watch for a particular type of problem, they will find it, because otherwise there is no justification for their existence.
This is the managerial class applied to morality: the technocrat who manages “social technology” needs problems to manage. The apparatus of enforcement creates a permanent demand for enforceable infractions. The bureaucracy’s survival depends on the continued existence of the problem it was created to solve — which means the problem must never actually be solved. The Cathedral is the full architecture in which this dynamic lives: academia mints the heresies, prestige media synchronizes the enforcement, and the permanent bureaucracy monetizes the hunt — each wrapped in the founding virtue (truth, transparency, competence) that makes opposition to the mechanism syntactically equivalent to opposition to the good.
The same architecture produces pseudo-diversity: the inclusion bureaucracy has every incentive to redefine its mandate’s object (cultural difference) into something measurable and manageable (phenotypic markers) rather than something that would threaten its own existence (actual distinctness, with friction).
The Conscious Bias
The best way to protect against future outbreaks: have a conscious bias against defining new forms of heresy. Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something previously permitted, the initial assumption should be that they are wrong. If they can prove you should stop saying it, then stop. But the burden of proof is on them.
We already have established customs for dealing with religion within organizations: you can express your own identity and explain your beliefs, but you cannot call your coworkers infidels for disagreeing, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict your doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion. Apply these same customs to ideological orthodoxy and most of the problem resolves itself.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “wokeness is just people being too sensitive — toughen up.”
The midwit take is “this is a right-wing critique that ignores the real injustices the movement was responding to.”
The better take is that the pattern Paul Graham describes is not unique to any ideology — it is a recurring feature of human social organization wherever orthodoxy exists. The pattern has three parts: zealots define new heresy, fear-driven conformists amplify it, and institutional capture makes it self-sustaining. Moralism trains liars and produces the jail of the mind. The specific content of the orthodoxy — Victorian prudishness, religious fundamentalism, political correctness — changes every generation. The mechanism does not.
Main Payoff
There will always be prigs. There will always be the aggressively conventional-minded. Every society has them. The question is not how to eliminate them but how to keep them bottled up. The answer is not counter-orthodoxy (which just creates a new immune response) but the cultivation of a culture where the concept of heresy itself is suspect — where humor, not enforcement, is the default response to moral claims, and where the burden of proof rests permanently on those who would restrict rather than those who would speak.
References:
- Paul Graham, The Woke Moment