Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity--and Why This Harms Everybody

a book by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay

(our site's book review)

Wokeists Foolishly Say Science and Reason Are Tools of Oppression, but Most of Us Know Better

The Amazon blurb says that Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller!

Times, Sunday Times, and Financial Times Book-of-the-Year Selection!

Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn't practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society?

In this probing and intrepid volume, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous. As Pluckrose and Lindsay warn, the unchecked proliferation of these anti-Enlightenment beliefs present a threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself.

Wokeism Is Full of Foolish and Erroneous Ideas Like Only Men Can Be Sexist and Only White People Can Be Racist and Critical Race Theory Foolishness

While acknowledging the need to challenge the complacency of those who think a just society has been fully achieved, Pluckrose and Lindsay break down how this often-radical activist scholarship does far more harm than good, not least to those marginalized communities it claims to champion. They also detail its alarmingly inconsistent and illiberal ethics. Only through a proper understanding of the evolution of these ideas, they conclude, can those who value science, reason, and consistently liberal ethics successfully challenge this harmful and authoritarian orthodoxy—in the academy, in culture, and beyond.

Schools across the country have already adopted the ugly, racist New York Times’ radical wokeist revision of history (in The 1619 Project) that the woke deem TRUTH)

As authors Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay see it, "We can see its impact on the world in their attacks on science and reason. It is also evident in their assertions that society is simplistically divided into dominant and marginalized identities and underpinned by invisible systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, hetero- normativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia. We find ourselves faced with the continuing dismantlement of categories like knowledge and belief, reason and emotion, and men and women, and with increasing pressures to censor our language in accordance with The Truth According to Social Justice.

Wokeism advocates are so brainwashed with Wokeism ideas that it feels fair to them to cancel anyone who doesn't agree with them, like Nazi fascists did in the 1930s and 1940s and like Mao's commie supporters did in China

"We see radical relativism in the form of double standards, such as assertions that only men can be sexist and only white people can be racist, and in the wholesale rejection of consistent principles of nondiscrimination. In the face of this, it grows increasingly difficult and even dangerous to argue that people should be treated as individuals or to urge recognition of our shared humanity in the face of divisive and constraining identity politics. Although many of us now recognize these problems and intuitively feel that such ideas are unreasonable and illiberal, it can be difficult to articulate responses to them, since objections to irrationality and illiberalism are often misunderstood or misinterpreted as objections to genuine social justice—a legitimate philosophy that advocates a fairer sociaty. This dissuades too many well-intentioned people from even trying. This is not a book that seeks to undermine liberal feminism, activism against racism, or campaigns for LGBT equality. On the contrary, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity--and Why This Harms Everybody is born of our commitment to gender, racial and LGBT equality and our concern that the validity and importance of these are currently being alarmingly undermined by "Social Justice" approaches [from the wokeists]."

Social Justice approaches from the wokeists involve being RIGHT and proving it with violence, being RIGHT and proving it with canceling the party with unwoke views, or being RIGHT and proving it with blackmailing corporations into adopting your views

Karl Marx Should Have Left His Ivory Tower Occasionally and Found Out How Real People Act

The authors prove beyond any doubt to the readers that the goals of social justice and equality are not being furthered by their woke ideas and actions. In fact, quite the reverse is happening. The more one climbs out of the ivory towers of theory and intentionality and examines the actual empirical effects of the liberal activists' woke ideas and actions, the more one sees how these ideas and actions are similar to the results of 1960s-1990s liberal social programs.

Most of them cost a lot and had great intentions behind them, but they had mostly unfortunate results. Conservatives kept pointing out their bad results, but the liberal program designers and implementers didn't listen. Instead, they kept focus on their great intentions. These, to liberals, made everything all right, so they kept funding these failures indefinitely. And this rewarding of failure is what kept this whole farce going. They asked for money based upon intentions and not on results. They pulled the wool over everyone's eyes by their obsessive focus on intentions, in the process ripping off the taxpayers for millions of dollars.

Failures of 1960s-1990s liberal social programs proved endlessly that the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions

Marxism had a similar dynamic at play. Marx had great intentions regarding creating a utopian society that was all about equality. Yet what Russian and Chinese Marxist communism achieved was a two-tiered society composed of hungry, poor workers and a communist party elite that was anything but utopian for workers but quite nice for the communist officials in charge who got all the perks. This is not how Marx designed it. But once the greedy elites redesigned the system so they won and the worker bees lost, the ideas of Marx were lost in the shuffle. Did anyone really think that those in charge wouldn't simply use Marxism as a cover while they exploited it for their own ends? It didn't really matter in the long run, however, since Marxism had a big problem even if implemented as originally designed: IT DID'T WORK. Marxism works on paper, but not in real life.

Karl Marx should have left his ivory tower occasionally and found out how real people act. His socialist theories worked great on paper, but not so good in real life. Scientific fact #1: people work better if they get rewarded (i.e., capitalism)

When the commies tried socialism, which involved people motivated to work hard for the good of the collective, it turned out that rather than working hard, comrades began hardly working. The problem turned out to be motivation—you didn't get more if you worked harder or less if you worked less hard. So it was only suckers that worked hard. Karl Marx should have left his ivory tower occasionally and found out how real people act. His socialist theories worked great on paper, but not so good in real life. Marxism was designed to fight inequality and result in a classless utopia of equals. Scientific fact #1: people work better if they get rewarded (i.e., capitalism), and being part of a collective that is working at something is simply too abstract a motive to push anyone to work hard.

This dog has gotten so many treats as roll-over rewards he simply won't stop doing it

In Behaviorism and Factories, Motivation Is Best Created Via Reward

In behaviorism, motivation is best created via reward. Tell a dog to roll over, and you'll get a yawn. Reward him when he does it and you'll get a rolling over dog. In wokeism, motivation is best created via conformity. Conformists are rewarded by not being canceled, nonconformists are punished via cancelation. Security comes from obsessive conformity, not arguing or debating or thinking for yourself. Parroting the woke lies that get indoctrinated into you, rather than using your brain to look at things objectively, gets you the security of a cancelation-free life. This is how it went in fascism as well as communism. Do not think—just parrot the party line when asked. Be a conformist. Do not stick out. Don't get the bosses' attention. This is the sad, brainless life communists and fascists live. This is the sad, brainless life wokeists live. They walk around in a brainwashed, mindless fog—the opposite of any sane person's idea of being awakened or woke up.

Rightly understood, the wokeists' Critical Race Theory is a reinvention of an older, terrible idea, Marxism, using race 'as the central construct for understanding inequality' in place of economic class

This Book Exposes the Surprisingly Shallow Intellectual Roots of the Wokeism Movements That Appear to Be Engulfing Our Culture

"Many people are nonplussed by the surge of wokery, social justice warfare, intersectionality, and identity politics that has spilled out of academia and inundated other spheres of life. Where did it come from? What ideas are behind it? This book exposes the surprisingly shallow intellectual roots of the movements that appear to be engulfing our culture."—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Enlightenment Now

"Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity--and Why This Harms Everybody is a brilliant book, offering an incisive and much needed critique of the cult of social justice. The authors painstakingly trace its origins in postmodernism and, in doing so, expose the ways in which a once fashionable coterie of theorists infiltrated the mainstream with catastrophic consequences for liberalism, equality, and free speech."—Andrew Doyle, creator of Titania McGrath

Struggles for Social Justice Are Strongest When They Are Founded on Respect for Evidence, Reason, and Free and Open Debate

"In this important and timely book, Pluckrose and Lindsay trace the intellectual origins of today's Social Justice crusaders. With clear prose and a fair-minded spirit, they argue forcefully that struggles for social justice are strongest when they are founded on respect for evidence, reason, and free and open debate. They deplore the harm that closed-minded Social Justice ideologues are doing to the cause of social justice (lower-case), and they offer practical strategies for doing better."—Alan Sokal, Professor of Mathematics, University College London, and coauthor of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science

This lady is in a PC debate and her competitor has just disagreed with her—oops!

"A fascinating and mandatory guide to understanding the culture war. Meticulously researched and impeccably written, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity--and Why This Harms Everybody offers explanations as to how we got here and the best solutions going forward."—Debra Soh, PhD, sex neuroscientist and author of The End of Gender

"If you want to know the philosophy behind cancel culture and why it is so creepy, get this book. Then, give it to your friends and family."—Ayaan Hirsi Ali, human rights activist

"Is there a school of thought so empty, so vacuous, so pretentious, so wantonly obscurantist, so stupefyingly boring that even a full-frontal attack on it cannot be read without an exasperated yawn? Yes. It is called postmodernism. If you sincerely want to understand what postmodernism is, read this exceptionally well-informed book by two noble heroes of the enlightenment project. If you have better uses for your neurons and your time, stick to science. It’s the real deal."—Richard Dawkins, emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford

Let's all thank these Enlightenment philosophers—the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked (the conservatives always knew this, but the liberal wokeists are trying to replace it with all things woke)

The Remaining Vestiges of Reason and Individualism Are Now Systematically Targeted for Final Eradication by 20th and 21st Century American and French Intellectuals

The most obvious assessment about “critical Theory” is that it is a modern-day continuation of academia’s denigration of reason that began centuries ago. Just as The Enlightenment’s most important products, reason and individualism, were systematically attacked by 19th century European intellectuals, so the remaining vestiges of reason and individualism are now systematically targeted for final eradication by 20th and 21st century American and French intellectuals — the Post Modernists with their various and infamous “critical Theories.”

In a world where young people are being misled, misinformed, and misguided by political correctness scripture based on entirely erroneous ideas and principles, The Coddling of the American Mind is a godsend that not only brilliantly diagnoses the problem but also explains its origin as well as its cure.

If the leftists are terrified of a point of view that is not CW and PC-police approved, it means they secretly fear that their positions are shaky at best or nonsense at worst

Enlightenment Now concludes with three chapters defending what Pinker sees as Enlightenment values: reason, science, and humanism. Pinker argues that these values are under threat from modern trends such as religious fundamentalism, political correctness, and postmodernism. In an interview about the book published in Scientific American, Pinker has clarified that his book is not merely an expression of hope—it is a documentation of how much we have gained as a result of Enlightenment values, and how much we have to lose if those values are abandoned.

College students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like, wrongly believing that they are so fragile that hearing the wrong words or concepts will shatter them


Most students are not fragile, they are not 'snowflakes,' and they are not afraid of ideas, but the PC-loving hypersensitive hyperliberal safetyists are all these things

The Authors:

Helen Pluckrose is a liberal political and cultural writer and speaker. She is the editor of Areo Magazine and the author of many popular essays on postmodernism, critical theory, liberalism, secularism, and feminism. A participant in the Grievance Studies Affair probe, which highlighted problems in social justice scholarship, she is today an exile from the humanities, where she researched late medieval and early modern religious writing by and for women. She lives in England.

James Lindsay is a mathematician with a background in physics. He is interested in the psychology of religion, authoritarianism, and extremism and is the author of Everybody is Wrong about God. His other books include Life in Light of Death and How to Have Impossible Conversations. His essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Philosophers’ Magazine, Scientific American, and Time. He led the Grievance Studies Affair probe that made international headlines in 2018, including the front page of the New York Times. He lives in Tennessee.