> Fortunately when the aggressively conventional-minded go on the rampage they always do one thing that gives them away: they define new heresies to punish people for

If the "conventional-minded" define new heresies, against a new creed, how are they conventional? What gives Paul Graham away is what he doesn't mention and may be what bothers him more: the old heresies that the surprisingly innovative and even rebellious "conventional-minded" abolish. (Actually, they do neither, but those who believe the former also believe the latter)

As with the myth of the "cancel culture" that Graham mentions (or the similar myth of "the war on Christmas"), the problem isn't the truth of certain events that do occur. It is the exaggeration of magnitude and ignorance of context. Clearly, at no stage in human history were more people not only free but also able to widely disseminate a wider range of views as they are today. Specifically, far fewer people are "silenced" at universities today than were, say, in the 1950s (except, maybe, in super-woke Florida).

> College students larp. It's their nature. It's usually harmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous combination.

Yeah, larping in a world of Jewish cabals and weather/mind control has turned out to be far more poisonous.

Anyway, for a more interesting and astute perspective on wokeness, see https://samkriss.substack.com/p/wokeness-is-not-a-politics Kriss shows why comparing wokeness to socialism or Christianity -- as Graham does -- is a category error:

> [I]t’s not a politics, or an ideology, or a religion. If you’ve ever spent any time in a political movement, or a religious one—even a philosophical one—you’ll have noticed that these things always have sects. Small differences in doctrine turn into antagonistic little groups. There are dozens of denominations that all claim to be the universal catholic church. Put two Marxists in a room and you’ll get three different ideological schisms. ... But it’s hard to see any such thing happening in any of the movements that get described as woke. Black Lives Matter did not have a ‘left’ or a ‘right’ wing; the different rainbow flags did not belong to rival queer militia ... The spaces these movements produce might be the sites of constant churning mutual animosity and backstabbing, but the faultlines are always interpersonal and never substantive. This is very, very unusual. Of course, there’s always the possibility that the woke mind virus is so perfectly bioengineered that it’s left all its victims without any capacity for dissent whatsoever, permanently trapped in a zombielike groupthink daze. This is the kind of possibility that a lot of antiwoke types like to entertain. Let me sketch out an alternative view.

> ... Wokeness is an etiquette. There are no sects within wokeness for the same reason that there are no sects on whether you should hold a wine glass by the bowl or by the stem. It’s not really about dogmas or beliefs, in the same way that table manners are not the belief that you should only hold a fork with your left hand.

> ... What makes something woke is a very simple operation: the transmutation of political demands into basically arbitrary standards of interpersonal conduct. The goal is never to actually overcome any existing injustices; political issues are just a way to conspicuously present yourself as the right kind of person.

> ... Unlike wokeness, the word antiwokeness is still used as a self-descriptor. The antiwoke will announce themselves to you. They won’t deny that antiwokeness exists. But since there’s no fixed and generally agreed-upon account of what the object of this apophatic doctrine actually is, you could be forgiven for wondering whether it is, in fact, particularly real. Wokeness is not a politics. And antiwokeness is not a politics either. It’s a shew-stone

> Every day, the antiwoke are busy producing wokeness, catching visions of incorporeal powers, desperately willing this thing into colder and denser form. What does this look like? Hysteria over uncouth material in entertainment media. Pseudo-sociological dogshit jargon. Endless smug performances of wholesome trad virtue. To be antiwoke is to be just another type of person who mistakes etiquette for politics, putting all your energies into the terrain of gesture and appearance, obsessed with images, frothing at every new indecency, horrified, appalled. We must protect the children from harm! I’m sure that some day very soon, the antiwoke will have their own miserable cultural hegemony. Big companies organising compulsory free-speech training for their workers. An informal network of censors scrubbing the mass media of anything that smacks too much of progressive tyranny.