I want to say a few words about the Woke war on merit and where it comes from. It's actually a part of their broader war on equality, which is the thing they actually hate. Why? Equality creates circumstances where there are winners and losers, partially determined by merit.

Our systems aren't truly equal because people aren't perfectly fair. We have limited knowledge, trust what we already know more than something we don't, favor our friends and family, are susceptible to corruption, etc. The more equal a system gets, the more relevant merit gets.

This equality, which raises the relevance of merit, is what the Woke ideology hates, even more than it hates the corruption in the system (clearly: they're proposing one of the most gameable, cronyist, blatantly favortist systems possible to replace liberal equality).

I won't speculate on the really obvious reasons (like envious incompetence) that they are so angry about equality and how it increases the relevance of merit. But I want to give a few examples of equality that we have figured out and that they hate.

They hate capitalism. They say it all the time. What is capitalism? It's the freedom to use one's property to one's own profit as one will, ultimately. We use a currency that becomes a neutral and universal form of capital, i.e., equal. It's called money. That's intolerable.

Money doesn't care who you are, white, black, brown, gay, straight, trans, whatever. It just doesn't care, and much genuine progress toward fairness, equality, and justice has occurred (though imperfectly, obviously) because of this. Neutral currency is genuinely anti-racist.

It's quite clear that there's some attempt here to replace a neutral currency with a social currency, right now through cancellation. This could get quite grim with banks refusing to carry you or even with heavy social-credit scores and payment through web apps hooked up to them.

They hate science. They don't often say this directly, but they do say it about objectivity and sometimes science itself. Why? Because science doesn't seek to resolve conflicts socially. It asks the utterly indifferent world what the facts are and tries to understand them.

No one's pet theory is special in science, and so merit counts for A LOT. It's a very equal program, literally espousing "universality" of the experimental results as a core pillar that holds up its validity. This is intolerable because it "isn't fair" to people whose ideas lose.

They hate truth. They don't say this directly, but they say that what's considered true is a political decision made by and designed to favor those with privilege and power, usually outside of their awareness of this "bias." Why? The truth doesn't care who you are.

The truth is the truth is the truth, and the narratives we spin around the truth (sometimes called "the record," which we need to correct constantly as a matter of routine and principle) aren't always so politically useful when they're genuinely true. This is a corruption.

One type of truth is an objective standard, like test scores, demonstrated competence, having the money, producing results, or "reasonable person" standards in law. They really don't like this stuff because it creates equality, not their preferred system of favortism.

They rail on these ideas constantly. Test scores aren't equal so the tests are racist, not everyone has money because reasons (some good), productivity and results are "white supremacy," "misogyny/noir," and "ableism." There is no "reasonable person" because "bias."

I think it's very important for people to understand what's going on here. The Woke ideology (Critical Social Justice Theory) hates equality partly because it foregrounds merit. It isn't interested in equality. It's interested in its form of favortism, which it's bullying us into

The history of humanity, but especially that of the last 100 years, is abundantly clear that a proliferation of favortism that you're not allowed to criticize isn't a good solution to the imperfections or even fair but unequal outcomes in the system.

Part of fairness, in fact, is differential outcomes because we know, very deeply, that merit counts for something. Trying, a little, but succeeding, a lot. We are very sensitive to corruptions of this and frown upon them quite intensely.

The core to equality, though, is that there's no predetermined story about who gets the upside of the stick in terms of those differential outcomes, and merit becomes increasingly determinant as equality improves.

Trying to flip the script away from the relevance of merit and value of equality is an experiment we've tried before, and it's always a disaster. One cannot achieve equality by proliferating new kinds of inequality except in the fakest, most superficial sense.

I'll close this with an anecdote. On Rogan, I said it's like wallpapering over the hole in your wall. When I was a kid, though, my dad used a different expression.

I hated making my bed and wouldn't do it properly; I'd just try to smooth the blanket on top and leave it a mess underneath. One day, my dad came to check my work and called me out. "You've just put frosting on shit," he said. That's what I see the Woke ideology doing.

To the degree that there's shit, we need to know what it is and how to fix it. Just like you can learn how to make a bed properly and do it, we can learn more about society and get it right too. Putting frosting on shit only obscures it and looks bad. The shit's still there.