For at least three or four years now, I have, together with my closest colleagues, been recognized as something of an authority of the ideology most of us just refer to now as “Wokeness.” Spanning that time, certainly at least as far back as early 2018, I have frequently faced the challenging question of “how did this Woke stuff escape the university and go mainstream?” While we were doing the Grievance Studies Affair, in fact, we ended up in an epic argument about the issue that led to us giving a kind of quirky name to the difficulty we had in answering this question. We called it “crossing the Tim Pool Gap.”
This challenge in communications gained this name for us in February of 2018, when Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose, Mike Nayna, Tim Pool, and I all met at Peter’s house, rather by chance, to have a discussion about this exact topic. In a heated discussion that went on for hours, we hit a major impasse in which we could not satisfactorily convince Tim of our thesis, and neither could Tim convince us of his. Tim argued that activists, especially in media, were the primary agents of change in Wokifying everything. We insisted that, while this may be, there was a significant university component as well and, further, that it was the root of the activist mentality. “Ideas like ‘hegemonic masculinity’ didn’t come out of the sky! They came out of academia!” I still remember Peter yelling in frustration. The thing is, Tim wasn’t wrong, and neither were we (there’s something like a revolving door of bad ideas between these groups, who all fancy themselves activists in the same causes). We were so alarmed and frustrated by our inability to communicate the university-to-culture pipeline
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