America’s Very Own “Tall Poppy Syndrome”

When I lived in Amsterdam, I noticed that Dutch people discouraged standing out. They were more than "down to earth." They refrained from bragging about anything to avoid making others look bad. In Scandinavian countries, people refer to this code of modesty as the “Law of Jante”. Dutch people too hold onto the idea that one should never try to be different or better. In Anglo-Saxon societies that’s the “tall poppy syndrome”. In some Asian cultures, “the nail that stands out gets hammered down”. For many Egalitarianisms, the recipe for equality is like trying to help wheelchair users by cutting everyone else’s legs off. 

Jante’s Law and its foreign cousins are the justice systems of the crab bucket. Any crab that tries to get out of the bucket gets pulled back by those at the bottom. Egalitarianism builds by demolishing individualism. The stability of the collective precedes any aspiration of the individual. 

Sounds familiar? Wokeness, a loose constellation of progressive ideas, operates under the very same playbook. If you are fortunate enough to have avoided Twitter and do not work in a progressive industry, your awareness of it may be peripheral. So let me give you the broad brush strokes of it. 

As the Wokes have it, we live in a system of interlocking oppressions. That's the core truth of our condition. Further, all power is zero-sum. You either have power over others or they have power over you. To the extent that men exercise power, women don’t. In so far as white people accumulate power, blacks don't. To such a degree that there is no mutually beneficial outcome, Wokeness is a Prisoner's Dilemma: an advantage on one side is equivalent to a loss on the other. 

This Manichean interpretation of Egalitarianism is no new trend. Switch out Marxism’s focus on class for the various oppressed groups du jour to get a taste of the trendier American Egalitarianism. As in any fierce, no-holds-barred competition for power, “tall poppies” are the existential foes who betray the collective good. And they should be chopped down, "for the benefit of society". 

In this worldview, individuals only exist where these group identities intersect. You have no independent existence outside these power dynamics. I can’t be me. I’m the Cartesian product of white, straight, European, Catholic, and immigrant. In the words of Ayanna Pressley: “We don’t need any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” Individual ambitions are a secondary business. Any assertion of individuality is, in fact, a threat to the group. 

As Andrew Sullivan adds, Wokeness denies not only the individual but also the universal. There are no universal truths, only narratives. The entire concept of reason—whether the Enlightenment version or even the ancient Socratic understanding—is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power. Therefore, it deserves to be undermined. 

All we have is narrative, whose meaning is entirely contingent, and can change with the gender, sexual orientation, or complexion of the storyteller. Instead of rational arguments, you have identity showdowns. You measure yourself against your opponent on the intersectionality stack. The more oppressed always win. Intersectionality is like an American drone strike – you never know who’s getting hit. 

That’s partly why diversity at “The New York Times” or “The Guardian”, say, has nothing to do with a diversity of ideas. Within Wokeness, “diversity of ideas” is downstream from oppression. What matters is a diversity of identities expressing the same idea: that Wokeness is a con job. 

But, if recent political history shows anything, is that US citizens will fight hard for the right to not be lectured by the Rainbow TED Talk. Dumbing down academia and institutions to promote “equity” will fare no better than defunding the police. Wokeness is akin to what 1960s-era Maoists called a “paper tiger” – a toothless, threatless ideology. However, though the core woke ideology is nothing truly new nor impressive, its outer edges and ramifications do reveal something special. In tech parlance, Wokeness is a duct-taped product with a stellar go-to-market.

The political merit of Wokeness is mainly – or exclusively – cultural. Wokeness stands apart from other types of Egalitarianism because it is uniquely American. It is the product of the largest global superpower. Conceived, nurtured, and exported by the United States. As Noah Smith puts it, Wokeness, like apple pie, is simply an American tradition. Unlike European or Soviet Egalitarianisms, Wokeness thrives at the interplay of capitalism and culture. 

Marxism, Maoism, apartheid resistance, and suffragette movements all had localized impacts. Wokeness is the only form of postmodern Egalitarianism that transcended borders. And it did, oddly enough, thanks to market-based capitalism. Now, isn’t that ironic? 

In 2020, George Floyd got murdered in Minneapolis. Intense protests started breaking out in Britain, Iceland, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Thousands of people – among whom I suspect many can’t point Minneapolis on the map – marched all over the world for BLM, an extremely specific American movement with no precedent outside of the US. 

Think about it this way. In the West, you are always in the presence of America. I grew up with “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”, “Friends” and “The Simpsons”. I remember watching 9/11 on live TV and discussing the outcomes of the 2016 Trump election with co-workers the day after. Hardly any country is as followed as America outside America. This is an exception, not the norm. 

Paul Skallas argues that every empire or great power falls to the neighbor that borders it. Except for America. He reflects on the fact that there’s never been a world superpower in history without enemies on the borders. Rome had the Gauls, the Germans, the Persians, and then later on the Arabs and Turks. China was surrounded by enemies, they had to build a great wall. Later on, the French had Britain, and then Germany border them. America hasn’t even fought a war on its territory in 150 years, and that was a war with itself. 

Not only that but it's the richest country in the world. The biggest economy. For more than a century, America undeniably controlled much of global culture. In the post-war boom, America beamed its influence through a consumer-based economy. Hollywood in theaters, fast-food in restaurants, celebrities on TV, and hip-hop on the radio. America had the sound system and played the tracks too.

And, more recently, tech. An overwhelming majority of the tech revolution that happened over the last 20 years is American. It started in Silicon Valley and grew in the US first. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon, are all spiritually American. The railways upon which the Woke dogmas traveled were laid by Americans, for Americans, first. Wokeness has the message, and the piping too. As for mineral fuels and aircraft parts, the West is just a net importer. 

Hence, I believe Wokeness's Americanness illuminates three important truths about the West, all with varying degrees of obviousness. The first is that its overseas popularity is a clear testament to American cultural dominance. The second is that modern Egalitarianism is inextricably sewn into – and only as strong as – the fabric of market-based capitalism. And finally, Egalitarianism in America is likely a self-sabotaging behavior stemming from the discomfort of abundance.

The rejection of its own exceptionalism is a clear red flag for any successful society like America. In his recent “An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West”, Konstantin Kisin compares America to famous rockstars degenerating into excessive lifestyles at the height of their careers. Like Jimi Hendrix with barbiturates, Michael Jackson with propofol and benzodiazepine, or Janis Joplin with heroin, the success of the US lead to its own sociopolitical undoing.

Kisin then continues arguing that Wokes are no different from the tortured artist with everything they’ve ever wanted but – to the frustration of onlookers – throw it all away without a good reason. Instead of booze and hard drugs, we are snorting 54-gender theories and downing shots of racial rhetoric. The safety of liberal democracy drove us into the arms of self-destruction.

Freud wrote about mankind’s tendency to self-sabotage, referring to it as “Thanatos”. He suggested human beings are their own worst enemies. He wrote that "Thanatos" is "at work in every living creature and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to inanimate matter". According to him, such odd behavior is our primal response to psychological pressure. It helps alleviate shame, guilt, and imposter syndrome. This helps explain why many Americans (and their Western cheerleaders) seem determined to overthrow the developed world they live in. Maybe they feel overwhelmed by so much freedom, and unworthy of its abundance. Gaslit to question their own reality, Wokes embody what the unwritten rule of “multiculturalism” boils down to – the fact that you can praise any culture except American culture – and you cannot blame any culture except American culture. We should all remember that great civilizations are not murdered — they cut down the tall stems and take their own lives.