Cognitive Distortion as Radical Social Justice

Extending the idea of "woke psychopathology" from Cluster B personality disorders to the insights around cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and mood disorders.

“Woke Psychopathology: A Taxonomy” is inspired by the traits that characterize what the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM-V) calls “Cluster B personality disorders.” There are four of these personality disorders: narcissistic, anti-social (previously psychopathy), histrionic, and borderline. The traits, which run horizontally across the top of the Taxonomy, are Attention-Seeking, Grandiosity, Emotional Dysregulation, Excess of Empathy, Victimhood Ideology, Impaired Reality Testing, Lack of Empathy, and Splitting. Together, the traits form an easy-to-remember acronym: AGE-EVILS. — Michael Shellenberger

My gag reflex activates now when I see or hear the word “woke,” like I’ve drunk my fourteenth consecutive cup of buttermilk. But over at Public the team has assembled a “Taxonomy of Woke Psychopathology” that deserves consideration.

After their “Taxonomy of Woke Religion” came out in 2021, Michael Shellenberger felt that something was missing. I, too, thought the religion trope was apt but inadequate—only my mind didn’t take me to personality disorders. It took me to mood disorders and then to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

Looking at the symptoms of personality disorders is brilliant, but I have always been struck by how closely the hyperventilation and hysteria of radical social justice advocates resembled the “cognitive distortions” of CBT. So, I’d like to append Shellenberger and Co.’s Cluster B taxonomy with CBT insights.

Cognitive Distortions + Examples

1. Polarized Thinking

   Viewing things in black-and-white terms, with no middle ground. Such extreme thinking leads to feelings of perfection or complete failure.

   America is a white-supremacist patriarchy! Republicans are Nazis!

2. Mental Filtering

   • Negative Mental Filtering
     Fixating on negatives while filtering out positives, leading to a darkened view of reality.
     Color blindness isn’t progress; it’s veiled racism and white privilege!

   • Disqualifying the Positive
     Recognizing but rejecting positive experiences, attributing them to luck or other external factors.
     The success of minorities in sports or music is just a form of minstrelsy!
     The success of women in medicine or marketing hasn’t given us a female POTUS!

3. Overgeneralization
   Drawing broad conclusions from a single event.
   The killing of George Floyd means racist cops are hunting blacks everywhere!

4. Jumping to Conclusions

   • Mind Reading
     Assuming we know others' thoughts without evidence.
     Your “concerns” about pornographic books mean you want to erase trans lives!

   • Fortune Telling
     Predicting negative outcomes without evidence.
     Overturning affirmative action will create the New Jim Crow!

5. Catastrophizing

   • Magnification
     Exaggerating issues, making them seem bigger than they are.
     No LGBTQ+ person can ever feel safe!

   • Minimization
     Downplaying positive achievements or experiences.
     Gay marriage is a figleaf they use to cover their disgust for trans rights!

6. Personalization
   Taking external events personally, leading to feelings of guilt or exclusion.
   That hurricane was a direct result of my meat and fossil fuel consumption!

7. Blaming
   Assigning blame externally and evading personal responsibility.

   That hurricane was a direct result of your meat and fossil fuel consumption!

8. Labeling
   Assigning judgments based on a single incident.
   All cops are violent racist pigs!

9. Always Being Right
   Prioritizing one's own opinion over facts, leading to conflict.
   Municipal recycling is a net environmental good. Net zero now is both necessary and possible!

10. Should Statements
    Imposing unrealistic expectations, leading to guilt and frustration.
    I should just be quiet and give my speaking time to a BIPOC.

When we are no longer able to change a situation…we are challenged to change ourselves.
—Viktor Frankl, from Man’s Search for Meaning

11. Emotional Reasoning
    Believing emotions reflect reality without logical analysis.
    I feel like a __, so identify as a __, which means I am a __. Trans women are women!

12. Control Fallacies

    • External Control
      Feeling life is governed by external factors and fate.
      Marginalized groups in this country have no hope of overcoming systemic and structural racism!

    • Internal Control
      Assuming responsibility for others' emotions or outcomes.
      Without admitting our privilege, dedicating our allyship, and building safe spaces, the BIPOC community will remain traumatized!

13. Fallacy of Change
    Expecting others to change for your personal happiness.

    I will never feel accepted in this disgusting world until everyone learns to respect my pronouns, which are fae and faeself!

14. Fallacy of Fairness
    Expecting life to be always fair and equal.
    We don’t just demand equality. We demand equity!

15. Heaven’s Reward Fallacy
    Anticipating fair rewards for hard work and feeling disappointed when expectations aren't met.

    My multi-year effort to get my sociology BA and gender studies MA is being rewarded with a job at Starbucks? Dismantle capitalism! Student loan forgiveness now!

I can’t say whether they’re crazy, calculated, or both, but radical social justice is a way of pathologizing people for political ends. The trouble is the consequence has been a “transmutation of means to ends”—back and forth. Indeed, movement vacillates between pathology and practice, dark affect and dark activism, in a vicious cycle that creates a victimhood vortex.

Whole generations are getting sucked into it.

We need less Frankfurt School and more Frankl:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.