I propose that maybe the civil rights movement post-World War II, which brought increased equality among different groups—what we call the civil rights movement—ultimately paved the way, laid the moral foundation, for what woke would do to seize power. Weaponizing the accusation of bigotry only makes sense in a context where bigotry is already considered wrong. So, I wonder if it’s the case that wokeness is an aspect of civilizational suicide and it just uses the vectors of bigotry and kindness because those are the cultural values it latched onto. What does that say about our society? How can we analyze this phenomenon of wokeness from a more behavioral point of view?
From my perspective, wokeness, if you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, is manipulative reproductive suppression. Reproductive suppression is just what it sounds like—suppressing individuals’ reproductive output, how many babies they get to have. Manipulative implies that it’s one individual or group of individuals doing it to someone else. It’s not voluntary; it’s not something you’re necessarily choosing to do yourself. It’s manipulative. So, this is a malicious evolutionary strategy. Woke leverages whatever cultural artifacts are lying around at the time.
You can see that the trans thing—not in Australia because we’re just slow—but you can see the trans thing is running out of steam. Different countries are beginning to ban puberty blockers, they’re beginning to ban surgeries on minors, and the world is waking up to this slowly, starting to produce actual concrete research into the overall effects. We’re seeing lawsuits, and the house of cards is beginning to tumble down. Not in Australia—we just brought in sex self-ID, so that gives you an idea of where we are on this journey. But these individual woke things, because you can’t stave off reality forever, right? Men are not women. There’s only so long you can put a six-foot bloke built like a brick house in the women’s event and everyone pretends that’s a woman. That’s only going to last for so long.
This nonsense is not going to persist in perpetuity. Eventually, it reaches a point where people just can’t sustain it anymore. It’s too obvious; it becomes too well-known what’s going on. Too many people are like, “Hang on a minute. That’s bullshit.” Just like the land acknowledgments. It was a nice idea, a gesture for reconciliation, but it’s gone well beyond that. It’s now enforced. You can lose your job if you ask why we need to do this. It’s heavily culturally policed, and it’s obviously now being used for other purposes. Many of the welcome-to-country speeches are no longer nice and welcoming; they’re opportunities for various people to push other agendas.
All of these individual woke things will wax and wane because they’re unsustainable. But we will keep getting more ridiculous, reproductively suppressing, culturally degrading ideologies coming through because the circumstances breeding them haven’t changed. The cultural circumstances that are breeding this reproductive suppression are not going anywhere. So yes, it’s great that gender ideology, for all the harm it causes, is hopefully beginning to recede. That’s a big win, but the next thing is on the horizon. When people celebrate the end of woke, I think it’s a little shortsighted. The next woke is coming because what we currently have across the West is suffocating levels of reproductive suppression, and that’s the circumstance that breeds these woke ideals.
According to some analyses, the slippery slope begins with women getting the vote or the liberal project of expanding the franchise. Certain liberal priors are, for some people, the predecessor to woke. What I hear you saying, and I’ll push you a bit further, is that it has something to do with the amount of wealth unlocked after World War II in the West, which is breeding the conditions for this so-called reproductive suppression.
I was having a chat the other day with Ed Dutton, who’s pretty clear on this. He’s firmly convinced, though less so than I am, that this is cyclical and civilizational, not specific to the West. Every civilization that has previously fallen goes through the same stages and ends up extinct. That’s what’s happening to the West now. There’s nothing special about the West, which is why there’s nothing special about it being caused by the civil rights movement or post-World War II wealth. This is just how human civilizations work. He’s quite convinced that what’s happening is cyclical, but we differ on the details. I don’t think either of us convinced the other of those differences.
I think intra-sexual competition, particularly among women, is what’s causing the breakdown of Western civilization. When civilizations are growing and populations are expanding, male intra-sexual competition is the fundamental organizing force. You reach a tipping point where female intra-sexual competition becomes the fundamental organizing force, and the civilization goes downhill and begins to die. This is the pattern that repeats. But before I strongly say this is cyclical, I need to know more about civilizations’ rise and fall. Falling civilizations have things in common, regardless of the cause, so I’m not as confident as Ed that what I’m hypothesizing is definitely cyclical. But I do lean that way.
There’s nothing special about the West. It’s profoundly sad that it’s breaking down, but I don’t think the mechanism breaking us down is unique to us in any way. It’s a fundamental trait of being human, a property of human civilizations. Men build infrastructure, wealth, and knowledge. Civilizations accrue institutions and resources on the back of men’s hard work. They reach a point where the mortality rate, particularly infant mortality, goes down. In response, women start having fewer babies. If very few of your babies will survive, you’ll have ten in the hope that two survive. If all your babies are likely to survive, you don’t need ten because you can’t invest properly in ten children. So, the optimum number to have is lower.
As society gets wealthier, women have fewer babies, but because mortality rates are down, the population doesn’t necessarily decrease. The women at the top, who used to have a reproductive advantage due to their wealth, lose that advantage because women lower down the ladder also have their babies survive. This creates an evolutionarily unstable situation where elite women have extra wealth but no reproductive advantage. They’re selected to regain their reproductive advantage, not by having more children, but by suppressing the reproduction of others. They start denigrating motherhood, saying it’s oppressive, and push for women to work and vote. This sounds like equality, but it’s manipulative reproductive suppression.
Women are the reproductive limit of a society. If you take their capacity and channel it into what men traditionally did, you burn your society’s reproductive capacity. This isn’t an accident; it’s by design to lower the background reproductive rate so elite women regain their advantage. This doesn’t have to be conscious. Women promoting abortion rights, for example, might think they’re doing the right thing, but their actions serve an evolutionary purpose.
Women high on the dark triad—narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy—are often the ones driving these movements. They don’t necessarily need to convince themselves they’re doing the right thing, but the movement must be socially palatable to gain broader support. Women feel immense social pressure to conform because ostracism by other women can cost access to society. This makes women signal allegiance to the group, like embracing feminism.
Female social groups are complex. Women cooperate to keep other women out but compete within the group for men. This creates tension and concepts like “frenemies.” Elite women, with social influence, can push ideologies that others follow out of fear of ostracism. There’s also a tension between signaling support for a cause, like pro-abortion rallies, and embodying it. The women winning this intra-sexual competition promote these causes without embodying them themselves.
My theory is largely silent on consciousness. Behavior is driven by evolved mechanisms, not conscious choices. Consciousness is more about post-rationalization. Women give reproductively inhibiting advice to other women, even friends, without being aware of the evolutionary motivation. Research shows women advise friends to avoid relationships, consider abortion, or have fewer children, while they themselves would act differently.
Consciousness is probably not necessary for adaptive behavior. I think it’s primarily about perception, like processing visual and auditory information. Consciousness helps with perception, but not necessarily decision-making. People learn a lot without consciousness, like picking up language grammar. So, while consciousness plays a role, it’s not the driving force behind these behaviors.
The body positivity movement is another example. In the past, women were pushed to be extremely thin, limiting fertility. When people got heavier, the competition shifted to promoting obesity, which also carries reproductive risks. This pushes women away from male preferences, just like promoting unattractive traits as attractive. The recent controversy around an attractive woman in an ad, like Sydney Sweeney, being called “white supremacy” shows how this suppresses reproductive competition.
Conservatives want functional sexuality, not suppression, but something that contributes to a thriving society. Progressives push ideologies that lead to civilizational decline. Women often know they must lie about what’s attractive, like with Lizzo, but feel social pressure to conform. This is all part of manipulative reproductive suppression.
You can find me on X and Substack under the name Dr. Danny S. I haven’t written on Substack for an embarrassingly long time, but I plan to start copying my long X posts there with extra explanation. Those are the places where I say interesting things, so that’s where you can find me.
