Each month, Everyday Anaysis publishes an online article on a recent topic of political or cultural relevance. Essays should be 1000-3000 words in legnth and submissions can be sent to the editors via the contact form at the link above. Recent articles can be found below.
Each month, Everyday Anaysis publishes an online article on a recent topic of political or cultural relevance. Essays should be 1000-3000 words in legnth and submissions can be sent to the editors via the contact form at the link above. Recent articles can be found below.
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee
November 2025
The irony is inscribed in his very name. Diogenes (Διογένης) means “born of Zeus,” a marker of divine lineage, yet he was known to his contemporaries as the Dog (κύων, kyōn), and his followers as the Cynics (kynikoi—literally “dog-like”). What should have signified noble descent became the emblem of shameless simplicity. Diogenes embraced the insult, transforming the dog into a philosophical figure of freedom: faithful to the earth, unashamed of the body, indifferent to hierarchy. The dog lives directly, without mediation or possession; it barks, eats, sleeps, and desires without apology. In this animal openness, Diogenes found the condition of actual thought: philosophy not as mastery, but as exposure to light.
Aaron Schuster, in How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science, an original reading of Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” retrieves this Cynic inheritance. As he notes, “it was Plato who established the dog as the ‘philosophical animal par excellence’” (Schuster, 2024, p. 8). In the Republic, Plato praises the dog’s ability to discern friend from foe through knowledge rather than appearance, a trait he calls “truly philosophical,” for “how could the dog be anything but a lover of learning if it distinguishes what is its own and what is alien in terms of knowledge and ignorance?” Schuster goes on to trace how this Platonic lineage continues in the Cynics, those self-styled “dogs” who, led by Diogenes of Sinope, turned shamelessness and simplicity into philosophical virtues.
Whether their name came from the Cynosarges, the “White Dog” gymnasium, or from mockery of Diogenes’s scandalous behaviour, they embraced the dog as a symbol of honesty and natural life. As Schuster recalls, the first philosophical talking dog appeared only centuries later, in Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, where Cerberus praises the Cynics for entering Hades “laughing and cursing at everyone,” the true mark of fearless philosophy. Schuster brings Diogenes and Kafka’s dog together to show that the philosophical dogsurvives from antiquity to modernity, but its freedom has changed form: from public defiance to private endurance, from rejecting the master to obsessively seeking him.
In this sense, Kafka’s dog, endlessly questioning the origins of nourishment and the habits of its own species, becomes for Schuster a modern figure of the philosopher: solitary, obsessive, ridiculous, yet animated by a stubborn freedom to inquire. Like Diogenes, the dog in Kafka’s story lives in radical proximity to the world, thinking not from transcendence but from hunger, habit, and vulnerability. Its philosophising is not noble or transcendent but canine, an inquiry sustained by need, perplexity, and the refusal to stop asking.
Diogenes’ command to Alexander, “stand out of my sunlight,” thus echoes through Kafka’s burrowing dog. Both claim the right to think outside sovereignty: to expose thought to the immediacy of existence. In Diogenes, this freedom is solar and public; in Kafka’s dog, it is subterranean and anxious. Yet two distinct modes of freedom give form to what Schuster calls “the dog’s new science of freedom,” a freedom that lies not in domination but in persistence, in the capacity to live and reflect without privilege or protection (Schuster 2024, p. 216). To philosophise, in this lineage, is to inhabit the world as a dog in the sun or under the ground, i.e., faithful not to power, but to the restless movement of thought itself.
This gesture of the dogged philosopher confronting the shadow of Alexander frames Schuster’s book, in which Kafka’s canine investigator inherits Diogenes’ defiance. Schuster’s “new science” resists the sovereignty of abstract knowledge and defends the poetic moment of life as the ground of genuine inquiry. He asks what it would mean to philosophise “like a dog,” treating Kafka’s canine narrator as an unlikely theorist and experimental scientist.
The author argues that Kafka’s story is more than a parable: it outlines a speculative “system of science.” The dog’s investigations into music, nourishment, fasting, and community raise deeper questions about knowledge, language, institutions, and freedom. The “new science” here is a canine philosophy that parallels, and at times anticipates, phenomenology (Husserl) and psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan). For Schuster, the dog embodies theory’s eccentric hero: maladjusted, melancholic, yet radically committed to truth.
Schuster regards Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog” as a seemingly minor literature and treats the dog’s inquiries not as curiosities but as the basis of a speculative system: “a cynological system of science” that parodies academic disciplines and reveals philosophy’s persistence in neurotic failure and maladjustment (p. 240). Food science, musicology, ritual, and freedom form the eccentric departments of this canine university. Like Diogenes’s dog, Kafka’s dog insists on the right to investigate outside the grandeur of institutions, embracing the comic dignity of errancy.
While reading Schuster’s book, not surprisingly, the work that came to mind was Vico’s New Science. Vico’s project, like Schuster’s reading of Kafka’s “dog philosopher,” belongs to the same counter-tradition that resists the purification of reason. Two authors defend what might be called the Baroque imagination, a thought that moves through images, bodies, and affects rather than through abstraction or clarity. Vico’s new science is a poetics of knowledge, a philosophy that insists the origins of reason lie in the passions and fictions of human collectives. “Poetry,” he writes, “constituted the first common language of all the ancient nations” (Vico, 1984, p. 151).
The earliest humans, seized by fear and wonder, invented gods, myths, and rituals that shaped the world into intelligible form. Against the Cartesian separation of mind and matter, Vico affirms the continuity of imagination and law, myth and knowledge, body and truth. He claims that “the study of metaphysics and of poetry are naturally opposed to each other: one purges the mind of prejudices, while the other immerses and subverts it in them” (Vico, 1984, p. 183). What metaphysics purges, in his view, the Baroque restores—the flesh of thought.
For Vico, this poetic wisdom is not a deviation from science but its primordial condition, a first science that precedes modern epistemology. It is a science of figures, gestures, and passions: what Deleuze would later call a “logic of sense” rather than of identity. Vico’s world is baroque in its refusal of linearity or transparency; it is made of folds, repetitions, and metamorphoses, where divine and human, nature and artifice, intertwine. Knowledge does not unfold from a pure principle but curls back upon the opacity of life.
For Schuster, Kafka’s dog is not merely an allegory of modern anxiety but a figure of philosophy itself, a creature that thinks from within its own hunger, perplexity, and absurdity. Like Vico’s primitive poets, the dog’s inquiry begins in need and sensation. Its thought is not transcendental but corporeal, not systematic but obsessive and circular. In my terms, this embodies the Baroque spirit of immanent thinking, operating from within the conditions it attempts to comprehend. The mind doesn’t observe from above but rather burrows through its reality, treating its own line of inquiry as a subterranean fold emerging from thought’s very ground.
Thus, the affinity between Vico and Schuster lies in their shared resistance to the metaphysical demand for detachment. They imagine a thinking that is incarnate and curved, a thought that bends toward its object rather than distancing itself. Vico’s poetic science generates reason from the depths of imagination, while Schuster’s dog philosophy engenders reflection out of appetite. Each defends philosophy as an activity inseparable from life’s conditions, i.e., its hungers, absurdities, and affections. Two figures, the Vichian poet and Kafka’s dog, think with the world rather than about it.
Deleuze provides the conceptual topology that binds these two gestures. The Baroque fold is his name for this very curvature of thought: a world in which matter and mind, inside and outside, form an infinite series of inflexions (Deleuze, 1993, p. 24). The fold is both a metaphysical and ethical principle: thought’s refusal to be purified, its insistence on remaining implicated. To philosophise, in this sense, is to inhabit the fold of the world, not to escape it; to think as the dog does, exposed to light and noise, faithful to the confusion of existence.
Suppose Diogenes’s freedom consists in saying “stand out of my sunlight,” and Kafka’s dog’s freedom consists in persisting in its questions. In that case, Deleuze shows that this same freedom belongs to the imagination itself: the freedom of thought to remain folded in the world it contemplates. The Baroque imagination thus becomes the space where poetic wisdom, canine curiosity, and philosophical creation coincide. Thought is not a geometry of clear ideas but an art of folds, a practice of immersion and emergence.
Vico’s divine poet and Schuster’s philosophical dog all resist the Cartesian sun that blinds rather than illuminates. They teach that philosophy’s true light is not transcendence but immanence, the sunlight that touches the dog’s body, the myth that shapes a people, the fold that turns reflection back into life. The resonance with Schuster is clear. Kafka’s dog laments the absence of the “true word” and conducts bizarre experiments in search of it. Still, Schuster reads this as philosophy’s condition itself: “What if Kafka’s dog were an unlikely hero of theory for untheoretical times? What would it mean to philosophise with Kafka’s dog?” (Schuster, 2024, p. 3). Just as Vico insists that human institutions can only be understood through the poetic imagination that produced them, Schuster insists that philosophy survives only through its maladjusted, parabolic form. Their projects reject the sovereignty of abstraction and affirm the necessity of parable, fable, and imagination in the constitution of knowledge.
The figure of Diogenes allows us to see the alignment more vividly. In defending Kafka’s dog, Schuster resists the Alexandrian authority of modern bureaucratic institutions. He returns philosophy to the dog, whether in the myth-making “poetic animals” of the First Nations or the neurotic canine researcher of Kafka. Each transforms what seems marginal, absurd, or irrational into the very foundation of a new science. I would say that Schuster’s contribution is not only a playful rereading of Kafka but also a contemporary continuation of Vico’s gesture. If Vico’s New Science founded the modern human sciences on the recognition of poetic imagination, Schuster’s “new science” preserves philosophy’s future by defending its right to failure, eccentricity, and maladjustment.
The lesson of “new sciences” is that truth cannot be secured by abstraction alone. It must be defended in the poetic, parabolic, and eccentric gestures that sustain life. Whether in Vico’s cycles of nations or Schuster’s canine university, philosophy remains, like Diogenes, a dog before Alexander, claiming nothing but the singularity of life. The dog, then, is anything but incidental. For Schuster, Kafka’s dog extends the lineage of the poetic animal, one that persists stubbornly in its parabolic inquiry, undeterred by institutional neglect. And for Diogenes, the dog was philosophy itself: shameless, faithful to nature, defiant of power.
In the landscape of contemporary philosophy, Schuster’s work stands as a singular effort to think after the exhaustion of critique. Writing through figures like Kafka and Diogenes, Schuster reclaims philosophy’s right to be minor, comic, and errant in the face of institutionalised reason. His project refuses both the transcendental ambitions of theory and the moral sobriety of critique, exploring instead the residual vitality of thought that persists amid failure. Against the procedural rationality that now governs knowledge, from academic bureaucracy to algorithmic mediation, Schuster’s humour and perversity mark a counter-conduct: an insistence that philosophy’s dignity lies precisely in its maladjustment.
Schuster’s thought begins where the humanist confidence of Vico ends. For Vico, poetic imagination founded the world; for Schuster, that world has already decayed into its own commentary. Through Kafka, he locates philosophy not in the recovery of myth but in the refusal of coherence, the right to remain unfinished, maladjusted, and exposed. His writing insists that philosophy’s task is no longer to explain or to found, but to endure its own failure with precision and humour. Vico still believed that the imagination could shape institutions; Schuster inhabits the ruins of that belief. What he calls philosophy survives only as a gesture, i.e., dog-like, minor, obstinate, faithful not to system but to life’s residue. The sunlight that once illuminated the genesis of meaning in Vico now burns in Schuster as irony: a brightness too harsh for reconciliation, a light under which every order shows its cracks.
To read Schuster, then, is to encounter the end of the “new science” itself: philosophy after its institutions, thinking as scavenging, truth as the persistence of error. His kinship with Diogenes lies not in rebellion but in style, a fidelity to the low, the comic, the shameless, against the empire of authority that still calls itself reason. Schuster’s philosophical stance resonates with what might be termed the post-critical moment: the exhaustion of critique as a mode of mastery and its transformation into an art of survival.
Yet where these projects often retain a metaphysical ambition to reconstruct forms of worldhood, negativity, or relation, Schuster’s intervention is more ironic and ascetic. He refuses the consolation of restoration. His philosophy inhabits the point at which critique itself becomes comic: where the philosopher, stripped of institutional authority, must learn again to think from the gutter, in laughter, embarrassment, and persistence. In this, Schuster stands less as a theorist of renewal than as a practitioner of philosophical degradation, a thinker of the remainder that thought cannot sublate. His Diogenes is not an allegory of resistance but of exposure: the insistence that, after the collapse of systems, what endures of philosophy is its capacity to blush and to bark, to live without mastery.
In this light, Schuster’s philosophy reads as a diagnosis of the academy’s own terminal farce. The institutional forms that once guaranteed philosophy’s legitimacy, i.e., peer review, editorial mediation, and disciplinary consensus, now persist only as automated rituals within the algorithmic economy of publication. Artificial intelligence has completed what managerial reason began: the substitution of thought by procedure, critique by compliance. Yet Schuster’s ironic fidelity to failure grants this exhaustion a strange dignity. His laughter is not cynical but diagnostic, exposing the empty core of the academic illusio. In an age when machines can simulate the gestures of reflection, Schuster’s insistence on maladjustment becomes an ethical stance: to think as that which resists optimisation, to remain human not by mastery but by error. Philosophy, in his hands, survives precisely where its institutional body collapses: barking, embarrassed, and alive.
REFERENCES
Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (T. Conley, Trans.). The Anthlone Press.
Schuster, A. (2024). How to research like a dog: Kafka’s new science. MIT Press.
Vico, G. (1984). The first new science (L. Pompa, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.
Darragh Sheehan
August 2025
Darragh Sheehan is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist. Her primary post-graduate training is in a neo-Reichian somatically oriented psychodynamic psychotherapy (one of the earlier clinical attempts to integrate the political, the body, and subjectivity). She is a co-founder of the Center for Critical and Clinical Analysis. To find out more visit cccacommunity.com
The "left" of the global North may not have firing squads, but it certainly has created psychological ones. In place of robust progressive coalitions, class-based movements, and political parties, we presently have what is referred to as wokeness[1], a groupthink mentality in which the implicit threat of social ostracism serves as a powerful force of conformity. It ironically reflects some of the left’s most historically self-defeating and sadistic tendencies, without necessarily embodying substantive leftist politics at all[2].
The definition of wokeness in brief is what Christian Parenti calls “politics as etiquette” and what Vivek Chibber describes as “social justice politics with class taken out.” Catherine Liu prefers to use the word “irrational.”
While I will use the term woke, I am not as interested in the label as much as what it represents: the current expression, practices, and ideological framework through which progressive movements and dissent have been become compatible with capitalist logic and ruling-class interests.
Wokeness is the residue of once-progressive politics, reconfigured into moral discourses and lifestyle practices suited to the aspirations of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC). It is, in short, the consequence of the systematic dismantling of the left in the Global North. A process that wasn’t solely the result of overt state repression like McCarthyism or COINTELPRO, but rather unfolded over time through more subtle and persistent forms of co-optation and cultural containment, shaped by the depoliticizing effects of consumer culture (lifestyle capitalism), advertising, media, academic (identitarian) specializations, careerism, professional co-optation, and the non-profit industrial complex (all of which has been intersecting with the rise of digital technologies)[3].
This is hardly surprising: capitalism does not merely repress dissent, it absorbs and repurposes it. Herbert Marcuse (1964) referred to “repressive desublimation” to describe the process where instinctual drives, like sexuality, are “liberated” in capitalism (via subcultural acceptance, specialty marketing, etc.) but as a means of control. Building on this, expressions of rebellion (rage, identity, non-normative sexuality or gender, dissent) are permitted when they can be aestheticized, thus easily commodified.
Mark Fisher (2009) argues similarly that because it is difficult to imagine alternatives to capitalism, it becomes hard to challenge it meaningfully. As a consequence, “anti-capitalist” efforts often end up diffusing capitalism’s harms through what he called “gestural anti-capitalism.” A telling example is a consultant I encountered on LinkedIn who described themselves as an “anti-capitalist business coach,” which felt akin to a self-identified “vegan butcher.” Beyond the irony, Fisher argues that these types of gestures serve to reinforce capitalism by managing its image, much like a PR campaign.
“Gestural anti-capitalism” hints at the reassuring idea that you can “live your social justice values” within the system. This may explain why “decolonization” has become a heavily marketed genre within wokeness in education, therapy, and beyond. Stripped of context as a political project, commodified, and used as a metaphor for our social problems (Tuck and Yang, 2012), the symbolism seems to provide us with a psychological fantasy of moral purity, allowing consumers of lifestyle politics to imagine themselves removed from structures of harm, reducing feelings of complicity.
But the central feature of any socio-economic system (including ours) is that we cannot exist outside the power structures that shape our subjectivities and daily lives. Simply put, we cannot live “social justice” values; from paying taxes that fund war machines, to the reliance on fossil fuels, to the consumption of essential goods produced through exploitation, the systems we participate in implicate us in harm.
Within such a context, the cultivation of a ‘good,’ ‘ethical,’ and ‘polite’ persona functions as a class-based mode of professional development and identity. And this is precisely why commodified ‘ethical’ lifestyles and ideological practices are particularly appealing to the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC)— a class that happens to include much of this readership and myself. This social class lacks ownership of capital, but its relationship to capital is to reproduce ideology through institutions, discourse, and culture. And many progressives (curiously enough, even self-identified “radicals”) remain strangely “class-blind” and unable or unwilling to recognize the tension between their political ideals and their class privilege and/or career incentives/aspirations.
But this isn’t a ‘moral’ or personal failure so much as a structural contradiction, one not only inevitable, but necessary to address for political and ethical growth. Engaging with these contradictions forces us to confront the limits and illusions of self-contained lifestyles and private solutions and recognize the need to strategize for change at a structural level. But in woke culture, the intense demand for moral purity or “cleanliness” (Parenti, 2024) leaves little room for contradiction and ambiguity as a site of development.
In “The Mass Psychology of Fascism,” Wilhelm Reich (1933) argues that the ‘working’ and middle classes (the latter, whom he states resist change despite their precarity) are torn between revolutionary potential shaped by social conditions and reactionary influences from authoritarian society. And this contradiction or tension between progressive and reactionary impulses is key to understanding the psychological realities of political allegiance and class consciousness that influence social and political movements.
In the same vein, in “Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Classes” (1989), Barbara Ehrenreich argues that feelings of economic insecurity in the U.S. among the professional-managerial middle class (whose status comes from education, expertise, and professional credentials, rather than solely inherited wealth) generate deep anxiety. The “fear of falling,” she argues, has shaped political and cultural behavior, fostering the adoption of progressive rhetoric while shifting towards conservatism as a defensive posture. This has led to a distancing from the working classes and the poor to maintain status.
In this context, woke culture may serve to help define ‘class boundaries,’ where amid instability, its framework provides psychological comfort with clear in-group and out-group boundaries, easing ambiguity and reinforcing status. Expanding on this, wokeness may be symptomatic of the contemporary (social media-driven) iteration of aforementioned contradictions and tensions in the middle classes. The desire for justice and equality (often animated by moral urgency) is entangled with performative displays of virtue and authoritarian modes of policing discourse and behaviour, which in practice function in reactionary ways to stabilize existing power relations.
Rather than confronting these contradictions and anxieties as sites for growth or collective praxis, the frameworks and practices of woke culture promote and reinforce their disavowal (a psychological mechanism where one distances oneself from truths that are recognized but felt to be unacceptable). Unlike denial, disavowal allows individuals to both know and not know at once, creating psychic tension.
This dissonance or tension is managed through symbolic acts, i.e., the building blocks of wokeness: hypercorrect language, curated consumption, identitarianism, lifestyle capitalism, social media performance, ritualized call-outs, and (micro or larger acts of) shaming of those who fail to conform or who are deemed ‘morally deviant,’ etc.
This interplay of intrapsychic conflict (i.e., anxiety) and group-level conformity helps explain Chibber’s description of wokeness as a “hyperactive and hypervigilant social justice ethos.” This accounts for why, in practice, woke culture functions as a closed system with rigid boundaries (sociologically and psychologically speaking) where members enforce conformity to preserve order and reduce anxiety, resulting in its “strong authoritarian” tendencies.
Within this framework, disagreement is not merely considered incorrect but inherently oppressive. Those who dissent are not ‘mistaken,’ but are ‘morally compromised,’ or, as Chibber notes, even considered “oppressors.” Consequently, dissent is treated less as an opportunity for debate or collective growth than as a threat needing to be silenced, excluded, or “cancelled.”
CANCEL CULTURE: DISCIPLINE FOR THE LESS POWERFUL, BUT IMMUNITY FOR THE POWERFUL
Though “cancel culture” may have peaked years ago, the threat of public condemnation still looms. As the right openly embraces authoritarianism and engineers massive wealth transfers, people are somehow still fixated on some Love Island contestant's racist comments.
The fear and threat of being branded a “harm-doer” continues to haunt everyday people (most of whom have little institutional power) while those with actual economic and political influence consolidate wealth (in unprecedented ways) and increasingly engage in serious civil and human rights abuses with impunity: including a genocide in Gaza the whole world is watching in real time.
That ‘progressives’ and/or liberals would remain concerned with individual behavior and etiquette or ideological and linguistic infractions during a time like this says more about a “left” more fluent in social punishment and self-optimization audits than in resisting authoritarianism and creating political power or concrete structural change.
In addition, I have yet to observe or encounter evidence showing that an increase in social anxiety or “cancel culture” has meaningfully transformed our structural or daily social realities. What I have seen, on the contrary, is that the fear of being “cancelled” generates intense anxiety (particularly among progressives or those with a conscience) about being labeled “racist,” “misogynist,” “transphobic,” or otherwise “morally deviant.” At its worst, the weaponizing of stated labels resembles a tool of social control akin to Scientology’s designation of “Suppressive Persons,” and at best, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) etiquette, where surface politeness masks and suppresses genuine emotional expression and conflict[4].
Meanwhile, those with real institutional power and wealth (who are proudly racist, Islamophobic, transphobic, genocidal, anti-social, or otherwise hateful and sadistic) remain untouched by these labels, as they actively pursue regressive, authoritarian, and punitive political agendas. Many now wear these labels as badges of honor, framing them as acts of dissent against the ‘moral norms’ imposed by the professional-managerial class. This reactionary interpretation of “resistance” has gained traction among segments of the working classes, who increasingly experience the predominantly liberal professional-managerial class (not oligarchs) as the more immediate and overbearing authority in their daily lives.
In this context, the failure of a “left” to engage materially leaves a vacuum, where emotional and psychological energies are hijacked by regressive movements. As Wilhelm Reich states: “Fascist rebelliousness always accrues where a revolutionary emotion, out of fear of the truth, is distorted into illusion” (Pg. 4, 1933).
PERFORMING PROGRESS: HOW MANAGERIALISM AND THERAPEUTIC CULTURE SHIFT POLITICS INTO PRIVATE SPHERE
In woke culture, the focus on policing racism, sexism, and microaggressions in our daily lives and in the workplaces, along with the looming threat of public shaming, has clearly failed to challenge deeper power structures. Instead, it undermines the possibility of building a transformative left by fostering self-censorship, conformity, and the absorption of “social justice” into capitalist performance and lifestyle norms.
Consider how “anti-racism” (among other progressive values), was just so recently embraced by corporations. For more see Jennifer Pan’s recently published book “Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism” (2025).
Furthermore, therapeutic culture reinforces this trend by reframing structural problems as matters of individual healing: as biomedical disorders, emotional hygiene, nervous system regulation, or trauma recovery. This managerial focus on the self— through language policing, behavioral norms, and wellness discourses, and the bootstrapping of your trauma recovery— aligns neatly with neoliberalism, managerialism, and institutional control.
This shift also parallels the broader containment of activism through the rise of “career activists:” DEI consultants, non-profit community organizers, professional (anti-racist, etc.) workshop facilitators, trauma-informed workplace trainers, social media “healers,” nonprofit-sector professionals, identity-based leadership consultants, community organizers, non-profits promising us “new social justice models mental health” and now even an increase in “liberatory” private practice therapists. However well-intentioned, these positions operate within profit motives, branding pressures, and compliance culture. In short, they function more (even if unwillingly) to manage political discontent rather than disrupt it.
This inward turn (toward self-monitoring, therapeutic culture, moral hygiene, and performative virtue) stems not only from institutional, economic, and cultural pressures but is also reproduced by the internalization of woke social codes and expectations influenced by the risk of being shamed.
And in an emotional climate like this, the threat of public shaming can feel like a form of symbolic death or social exclusion. And in an already increasingly alienating existence, this can trigger anxieties, feelings of unworthiness, defensive safety-seeking behaviors, and annihilation anxieties (fears that threaten the stability of the self in relation to the group).
Rather than cultivating autonomy and cooperation, key to collective organizing, these dynamics enforce conformity. People comply, moralize, or withdraw to reduce anxiety, preserve psychic survival, and maintain moral standing; a dynamic that echoes Ehrenreich’s insight into how pervasive anxiety, especially in precarious social climates, drives people toward self-protection rather than solidarity.
In this environment, it is not surprising that therapy has come to be seen as an appropriate space to confront one’s inner “badness” or “isms,” reframed as a kind of social activism of becoming a ‘better person,’ in the context of “doing the work” (Parenti, 2024). This framing helps explain the rise of commercialized “liberatory” or identitarian approaches (mostly tailored to the middle classes) that package political growth as private self-work, further shifting activism from the public sphere into lifestyle experiences that are empathically holding or individualized, less anxiety-provoking gestures[5].
With people’s reputations and livelihoods (even their families’ health insurance) on the line, many choose to withdraw or opt out of progressive spaces or comply by adopting woke language and frameworks out of fear[6]. Others act with genuine conviction, attempting to do the “right thing” in the absence of viable political alternatives.
Regardless of the motive, this is NOT liberation; it can be read as a manifestation of affective capitalism[7] (simply the commodification of emotions as sources of value in workplaces, markets, and politics). Seen this way, the woke “left” becomes the manager of identity and our private emotional worlds, rather than a disruptor of class hierarchy and other forms of domination.
In response to this emphasis on self-monitoring and moral shame, some are driven into a defensive polarization that, at its extreme, pushes people toward right-wing authoritarianism. In that space, shame and self-restraint are rejected in favor of their inversion: the celebration of ‘shamelessness’ and the assertion of a ‘right’ or ‘freedom’ to say or think whatever one wants.
Conversely, caught between right-wing repression and “left-wing” moralism, sadly, many well-intended people opt out of political spaces altogether because in today’s moral economy, leadership and having different ideas are increasingly a “high-risk, low-reward” endeavor.
FROM MORALISTIC FIRING SQUADS TOWARDS A REALITY POLITICS
In a political climate as increasingly repressive as ours, many might ask: why critique the “left?” Or isn’t a critique of wokeness outdated?
On the contrary, there is no more urgent time for critical reflection than the present; what matters is the mechanism not the label. The neutralization of the left has been decades in the making, leaving behind an interpretation of progressivism that preserves the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of “the left” while abandoning its material and democratic commitments.
What remains are characteristics of “the left” most easily aestheticized, commodified, and institutionalized, in addition to the traits that enforce discipline, turning “the left” (or remnants thereof) against itself. As a result, its strongest tools (mass organizing, intersectional solidarity through universal politics and programs, class and systemic analysis) are nearly absent, while its least generative (moral purity, ideological policing, and “circular firing squads”) are amplified.
In this configuration, wokeness doesn’t just neutralize the left; it compels it to police itself into irrelevance more effectively than the state ever could. This is because morality and shame can punish, but cannot build emancipatory mass movements.
Someone from Latin America that I follow on social media offered an assessment: “The problem with much of the left in the United States is that you hate your country and people, and you are ashamed of belonging to an imperial power. But if you want to organize effectively, you have to find a way to love your country and people to build with them.” While perhaps overstated and nationalistic in tone, his observation speaks to a deeper issue within left politics in the United States: an aversion not just to the state or its institutions, but to the very social fabric and relations we must engage with to build a society where the democratic redistribution of wealth is possible.
One cannot organize or build among people one secretly or overtly disdains or seeks to humiliate[8]. While we may envision worlds beyond the violence of the nation-state, neo-colonialism, and capitalism, we must build with the people who exist here and now, in all their contradictions and complexities, because we share —although varying— material and social conditions.
Fantasies of purity and rhetorical posturing won't protect us from the collective effort required to build meaningful solidarity—an effort that demands critically examining the discourses and frameworks we regurgitate without question (and why we get so damn excited when it goes viral, even if it leads to no structural change at all), an analysis of who benefits from these discourses, and a willingness to confront the destructive tendencies of the left.
This is precisely why truly egalitarian projects are difficult, because we are tasked not only with dismantling oppressive systems but also with confronting the sadistic, moralistic, and self-interested impulses that can reside even within the most “liberatory” intentions. When the left abandons this task, we become what we claim to resist and/or cede ground to a right that offers its version of "belonging.”
For better or worse, whether we like it or not, political organizing that aims to generate power on a larger scale requires engagement with the systems around us, even if they are deeply flawed. Political and personal purity is a fantasy; it does not exist, only the difficult, messy work of navigating complexity in the pursuit of a more just world.
It’s time to let go of utopian fantasies that none of us can agree upon anyway. Instead, ideals must be led by concrete projects, goals, and real power; we must focus on the mature, grounded work of orienting ourselves to reality. History shows that the left is strongest and most democratic when it combines pressure from the outside with strategic engagement from the inside: through political parties, policymaking, institutional reform, and coalition-building. As such, institutional power domestically is a prerequisite to addressing injustices internationally[9].
In the end, the psychic life of the woke American “left” (moral posturing, aestheticized dissent, and therapeutic self-management) has made us fluent in performance, self-optimization, and social punishment, conveniently creating a plethora of specialty markets, new career possibilities, and published books, etc. However, it has paralyzed us in action. If we continue to confuse the absorption of dissent into lifestyle capitalism, consumerism, careerism, or performance of virtue by the professional-managerial class, we risk remaining in political unconsciousness, acting out and in, rather than creating power.
Our contradictions and self-interests are not disqualifications but the terrain on which we must organize. If we cannot face them, we cannot face ourselves, and that means we cannot confront power, let alone transform it[10]. Turning on one another in “circular firing squads” only surrenders the future to those who will define it for us. We must move beyond performance and personal “goodness.” Only by confronting the world as it is, not as we wish to appear within it, can we expose systems of domination and create a future shaped by conscious human agency, rather than capital or coercion.
FOOTNOTES
[1] As stated, I am interested in the contemporary function of wokeness, not the word itself. While wokeness is often critiqued as being associated with liberal politics, I have observed that it operates aesthetically along a spectrum, ranging from mainstream liberalism to more “radical” expressions. What may appear “radical” in language, branding, or subcultural affiliation is often liberal in function. In my mind, this overlap makes the phenomenon of wokeness difficult to articulate and untangle precisely because it ranges across different registers of left-identified or progressive discourse, all of which ultimately adapt to institutional needs.
Christian Parenti (2024) has a detailed definition of his interpretation in the essay, The Cargo Cult of Woke.
When dissent or progressiveness becomes compatible, a commodity, a way to
make a profit, a career, a professional identity, or an aesthetic (and in particular well distanced from the working class and poor), who is being liberated? This is the ultimate question I aim to ask, and I hope we can ask ourselves (without shaming each other, of course!).
[2] In my opinion, a “substantial leftist” politics emphasizes universal programs that redistribute wealth and democratize public goods and infrastructure. By prioritizing broad solutions like universal healthcare, free education, and public housing etc., the aim is to improve economic conditions for all. Core to this vision is expanding democratic participation and principles, both in governance and in economics, as they are interdependent. Rather than centering identity (i.e., known as identititarianism), strategic solidarity is built across racial, gender, sexual, and other divides by focusing on our shared economic interests as a foundation for intersectional movements that challenge various forms of social domination and oppression.
[3] See Piven & Cloward, 1971; Schreker, 1994; Frank, 1997, 2016; Cushman, 1996; Saunders, 1999; Herman & Chomsky, 2002; Fisher, 2009; and many more.
[4] This is not to say that all forms of confrontation or social accountability are inherently punitive or wrong; some behaviors clearly warrant ethical scrutiny and / or social / legal boundaries. However, there is a difference between addressing serious harm in good faith and weaponizing shame as a tool of ideological purity or social control. This dynamic is exacerbated in the oftentimes collapse between the private and the public in woke culture: meaning matters that might be more appropriately handled in intimate or restorative contexts are instead aired in highly visible, performative ways (on social media) that are less about justice and more about a spectacle meant to establish dominance. It almost always ends up instilling fear and anxiety in the larger community, as we wonder if we will “be next.”
[5] As a psychotherapist, I affirm the political potential and countercultural value of certain branches of psychodynamic / depth psychotherapies. There’s a rich history of Marxist and other liberatory practitioners whose work has meaningfully bridged psychotherapy/ psychoanalysis and political struggle (Reich, Fanon, Fromm, Tosquelles, Martín-Baró, Black feminism, etc). My critique, however, concerns the increasing commodification of therapeutic discourse, especially when it is marketed as a lifestyle or branded as a “radical,” individualized, and decontextualized response (in the form of services tailored to the middle classes).
In the United States, it’s becoming increasingly more common to see private practices or training institutions adopt the label “liberatory,” etc., yet these approaches often lack grounding in community-based work with the working classes or poor. Instead, they tend to serve the professional and personal development of the professional-managerial class (PMC), especially as economic realities (lack of funding, increased costs of living, etc.) make sustained engagement or creation of community clinics more difficult. By contrast, the liberatory psychotherapists referenced earlier were all directly involved in community clinics, other community projects, and/or social movements that engaged working-class and other populations in material and collective ways.
Take, for example, how in much of Latin America, psychotherapists rarely claim such a politicized identity without direct involvement in grassroots projects serving poor and working-class communities. In the U.S. context, however, economic realities (along with professional and legal constraints) have neutralized these liberatory frameworks and possibilities for cross-class community organizing and service development.
The current systems of mental health provision are in a state of significant crisis, a reality that warrants deeper examination within the profession. Many progressively minded or “radical” practitioners are increasingly responding to these systemic problems by “promoting mental health awareness,” opening private individuals and group (business) practices that claim to be ‘aware of systemic issues,’ and marketing individualized “solutions” (often framed through identitarian lenses), thereby commodifying the very issues they claim to treat.
This is not a personal or moral failure; I do not aim to personally judge individual therapists. This is rather an inevitable structural contradiction, one I explore in my essay The Therapist as the "Good-Enough Commodity": From Holding to Selling. In effect, the merger of therapeutic culture and political action is another mode of absorbing political dissent into capitalism. And without simultaneously confronting the systemic failures (i.e., of insurance reimbursement and the erosion of public (mental) health infrastructure, and failures of the non-profit industrial complex), psychotherapy, even when “politicized,” risks becoming a luxury good. Which will remain out of reach for those who need it most, while therapists, often working in private offices, risk becoming managers of political dissent for the middle classes.
[6] In addition to therapeutic culture, it is not uncommon for people to turn to books like “Conflict Is Not Abuse” by Sarah Schulman or “Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times” by Alexis Shotwell, perhaps subconsciously, to search for new frameworks to defend themselves against the irrationality of woke culture. Books like these seem to offer us comfort by supplying yet another woke lens; as wokeness endlessly attempts to correct and rationalize its contradictions through ever more refined frameworks and lexicon that are: largely abstract, for the most part ignore social class, and don’t grapple with the reasons for how or why purity and victimhood took hold in progressive spaces to begin with.
[7] Affective capitalism is a concept (used in various fields, cultural studies, sociology, economics, etc.) that explores how emotions have become a source of value and accumulation in capitalism and how they shape areas like the workplace to consumer markets and politics. For example, in the workplace, emotional labor is increasingly managed and monitored to increase productivity, while on the other hand, businesses are cultivating and manipulating what we desire to generate new markets. In politics and social media, for example, emotional engagement (outrage, anxiety, hope, or fear) is strategically used to maintain attention, loyalty, and control. The commodification of affect operates through “emotional norms” that reinforce existing hierarchies and inequalities, shaping not just how people work and consume but how they feel, express, and relate to one another. (Dlaske & Del Percio, 2022).
[8] Catherine Liu’s 2021 book, “Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class,” offers in part an assessment of this class-based humiliation. It’s a must read if you haven’t already.
[9] Refusing to engage with power or concrete change in the name of ideological purity may feel morally righteous, but in practice, it often amounts to political surrender and a form of cruelty toward those who have one life to live and cannot afford to reject reform on principle or ideology alone.
[10] While my language often reflects generalities, particularly around class positions on the left, it’s important to note that this framing emerges from the specific audience I had in mind for this essay: primarily those belonging to the professional-managerial class, and more narrowly, in the mental health professions. Of course, “the left” is not homogeneous, nor exclusively middle-class, far from it. But for the purposes of this essay, certain tendencies are highlighted because they speak most directly to the contradictions I see operating within that demographic.
I’m aware this risks flattening out complex realities and can even be symptomatic of objectifying the poor/ working classes and treating individuals more as symbols or reference points than as active political subjects. That’s not the intention. Rather, the focus here is on highlighting internal contradictions within a particular class, which I am also a member of, to promote dialogue around these topics.
REFERENCES
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