Understanding Woke Tactics pt.2: Poisoning the well.
The woke use a particular type of character attack which is very difficult to deal with. Let's analyze it and learn how to defeat it.
One of the more common tricks used by woke Social Justice activists is to de-legitimize criticism by attacking the character of the person who is criticizing them.
Typically an attack on someone’s character has at least 3 goals:
-have people to turn up their skeptical dials toward the ideas of the person being attacked
-view the person under attack with suspicion and mistrust so that person loses social standing and moral authority within the conversation
-have the audience stop giving the “benefit of the doubt” to the person under attack
I am sure everyone reading this understands how this works in normal situations, after all character assassination is a tactic as old as time. However, when postmodern social justice activists (AKA ‘woke’ activists) use this tactics they have a very specific way of implementing it and that is what I would like to focus on today.
When the woke activist attacks a person they will generally use CYNICISM as their weapon of choice. They will attempt to leverage cynicism against that speaker in order to render the speaker ineffective. Let’s take a look at how this works.
Stated simply, the woke version of character assassination is to attribute bad motives to anyone who disagrees with wokeness in order undercut the moral authority, credibility, and social standing of the person who opposes woke vision of “social justice.”
When a woke activists goes about attacking the character of a person they disagree with, they focus on the *motives* of the person they are attacking. They usually will not straight up accuse someone of a crime, rather, they will use subtle insinuations to accuse the person of having selfish, underhanded motives and “being in it only for themselves.” The activist who implements this tactic will attempt to undercut a non-woke speaker by suggesting, implying or insinuating that the non-woke speaker is not being fully honest about what they really want. They will typically imply, suggest, or insinuate that the non-woke speaker is not coming to the conversation in good faith but is rather making bad faith arguments in order to get an outcome that benefits themselves or their group.
The suggestion will be that a person opposes wokeness because they benefit from the current social system and they don’t want to give up all the unfair benefits that they are receiving from the current system. The woke activist might say something like “Your opposition to wokeness is not due to legitimate concerns about real problems in woke ideology. You don’t really care about that. You only oppose wokeness because us woke activists will make things fair; and right now you non-woke people have an unfair advantage in society, and you want to keep your unfair advantage in society. Your afraid of losing all your unearned, unfair benefits. That is why you oppose wokeness.” It might not be as blunt as that (although it may) but that is the type of cynical reasoning that will be used against non-woke speakers.
The underlying mechanics of this tactic have to do with how cynicism is leveraged to hijack the way a non-woke persons arguments are analyzed. What this tactics does is try to have people stop analyzing what a non-woke person says in terms of arguments, reasons, evidence, and truth, and instead have people analyze what a non-woke person says as though the arguments they make are really just covering up a power move or dominance play. In other words, the point is get get people to stop analyzing arguments in terms of what is true and false, and instead have people analyze the argument in terms of other peoples interests. The woke person wants to get you to stop asking “is this idea true?” and to start asking “whose interests are in play here and who stands to benefit from this idea?”
By attacking a non-woke speakers motives the woke activists can both discredit them while also getting the audience to raise their level of skepticism towards the arguments the non-woke speaker uses. This sort of impugning the motives of other people through sociological power analysis is a way to poison the well by calling into question the motives of someone while maintaining the appearance of intellectual rigor. This can make the tactic very difficult to deal with.
If this tactic is deployed against you the response to this tactic is not to defend yourself. When someone calls your motives into question the correct thing to do is point out that they are doing this, then move the conversation away from speculation about motives and back to the question we ought to be asking: is the view in question true? The solution to this tactic is clarity. You must respond in a way that makes the tactic completely obvious to the point where the fact that the woke activist is employing this tactic should be as obvious as the nose on your face or the sun in the sky. It must be painfully obvious. Once you have made the tactic completely obvious, so obvious that no person could deny it, then you can move the conversation back to asking about what is true.
People can be cynical by nature, and this particular type of poisoning of the well is leveraging that natural cynicism as a way of discrediting non-woke speakers so the audience will dismiss their ideas. However, people also like truth, and you can leverage that desire for truth by pointing out that poisoning the well moves the conversation away from truth and toward speculation about motives. Once people see that the conversation has moved away from truth their natural desire for truth will help them to adjust accordingly. After that happens, you can further leverage people’s natural inclination toward truth seeking by providing truthful, careful, rigorous arguments bolstered by sound reasoning and strong evidence.
Don’t get sucked into fights about your motives because that only derails the conversation further. Diffuse attempts to poison the well by making them obvious, then move the conversation back to the question of truth.
Thanks for reading
Sincerely,
Wokal_distance
They’ll often play an ace card which is in fact a joker. To illustrate, I voiced an opinion on LinkedIn that pro-choice activists should avoid defiant, strident language about their own abortion history so as not to alienate people in the middle on the issue. I was quickly piled on for being a man telling women what to do.
As an argument ‘having an opinion on pro-life persuasion techniques while not in possession of a uterus’ has no epistemic weight. But it isn’t meant to. It is intended to shame and exclude. I wrote about it, should anyone fancy taking a look.
“You need to check your privilege” “your white fragility is showing” and “ you are afraid to lose your white privilege” are some of the lines associated with this tactic. I don’t always talk about my racial/ethic identity in these conversations (an argument should stand on its own without resorting to identity, as the woke do) but it is effective when I bring up the fact that I am an immigrant woman with brown skin. Some appear to be very baffled by the notion that liberals/registered democrats and/or individuals of diverse racial/ethnic identities may oppose this ideology. It is effective to bring up specific examples of how Asian families have disagreed with and spoken against woke curricula in both SF and Loudoun county, and they were very quickly dismissed as “white supremacists” or “white adjacent”.