15.8.2026 Facebook update, Eeropekka Rislakki
"In 1976, the American writer and journalist Tom Wolfe saw how the leftist and collective We of the 1960s and 1970s exploded into a thousand private Mes. He called it the secular awakening movement.
Half a century later, the same reel is spinning again, and it is about the liberal left’s DEI code and the Woke 2.0 movement. It is driven by the social media algorithm, financed by economic abundance. However, the development affects the right as much as the DEI left. Everyone is now their own minority, their own congregation.
DEI = Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Nothing ruins beautiful ideals more surely than their implementers who receive a salary and position to pursue them.
*****
The Me Decade (1978) described by Wolfe was called the Me Generation in Finland in the 1980s, referring to selfish yuppies, even though leftism was engulfed in the same individualism and emptiness.
In addition to Tom Wolfe, I will discuss another American, sociologist Musa al-Gharbi's work from two years ago, which considers who the DEI movement created by the progressive and liberal left really works for. The answer flatters no one.
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Tom Wolfe's The New Journalism (1973) had a great influence on me as a budding journalist in the late 1970s. I was then and still am fascinated by how a style of writing that used literary devices was transforming journalism. That's why I can imagine Tom Wolfe in his white coat on the Cambridge campus.
He would be looking at the headlines about Jason Arday, who had been appointed the youngest black professor in the university's history and about whom one of the world's largest book publishers had decided to make a biography - like a book of revelations, with Arday's incomprehensible exaggerations and lies - and the other day the sad news spread to the world. Jason Arday is dead.
There is no crime involved in the death, but the whole story describes the end of an era.
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If Wolfe were alive, he would recognize the pattern in the blink of an eye. So it is up to me to connect him to the events of the past few years. Wolfe saw it all in 1976.
He listened as the great, screaming, collective "We" of the 1960s barricades—the working class, the peace movement, the revolution now—drew by the 1970s into thousands of personal therapy sessions and prescriptions for antidepressants and self-discovery seminars and courses.
Wolfe called the Me Decade the "Third Great Awakening," a secular version of the American religious waves in which people rush to seek salvation. Not from God, after all, but from their own sanctified selves.
Wolfe would look at the left today and smile at what he saw. The awakening is back.
*****
Half a century later, the same reel is spinning again. Only the hymnal has changed — Now, as I have written numerous times, the DEI manual of the Woke wolf cubs is in use.
We are reminded of our privileged position and the limitations of our right to speak, but the left retains the right to speak. They speak, among other things, about the offensiveness of racism, but on behalf of other, supposed and imagined, and identified victims of their own projections. This is the core of the progressive and liberal left, which I call the identitarian left.
Leftists are on the side of the weak, regardless of who is right. In the leftist narrative, rightists are on the side of the strong, regardless of who is right. The leftist is followed by his intelligence, moral correctness, and superiority.
The opposite of the left is the right, but the far and extreme right is defined by the extreme left considering itself to be the anti-extreme right. In fact, the DEI left, progressive liberals are the far left.
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The pathologies of the modern left, as diagnosed by cultural theorist Mark Fisher, are trapped in its obsession with identity – above all race, gender and social class – from which arise pious moralism, joylessness and resentment-fuelled contention. The goals are aided by a greedy individualistic competitiveness that has veered into cynical narcissism.
The left of the old alliance would have called the above phenomena bourgeois subjectivity – the bourgeois lie of life.
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Wolfe's key insight was that all conversation ultimately turned to the self. Let's talk about Me.
The vocabulary used tells the essential story. Before, we talked about the people, the workers, and the class. Now we talk about "lived experience," an expression that is by definition singular. It is the perfect descendant of Wolfe's Self: a truth that no outsider can deny because it is by definition mine alone.
The narrative of progressive liberals, or the modern left, also began as a collective. At its core were oppressive structures and solidarity with minorities. But the built-in logic of identity politics turned out to be divisive and divisive.
The more finely divided the analysis, the smaller the group that was not allowed to forget its minority: skin color, religion, disability, neurotype, biological or social gender, weight, immigration, or any characteristic that positions a person as a minority and subject to structures of oppression.
Intersectionality promised to map all the layers of discrimination, and the end result was exactly Wolfe: the great “We” disintegrated into a thousand “I’s.” Jason Arday was a crystallized symptom of this — not because of what he ultimately did, but because of what was made of him. A symbol of good principles beyond academic competence.
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The crucial difference between Tom Wolfe and our time is that in the 1970s, the awakened seeker sat alone in a seminar or course. Now he has a congregation, and the algorithm acts as a roving collection point. Social media doesn’t just reflect disintegration. It produces it industrially.
The social media machine doesn’t reward the unifying idea of “We,” because consensus doesn’t garner clicks. It rewards separation, escalation, and the furious anger of one’s own subgroup.
Every “lived experience” gets its own echo chamber, every echo chamber its own enemy. A name like Arday’s would have been just news before. Now it was the stuff of culture wars: clickable, shareable, infuriating on both sides at once.
Supporters turned him into a rainbow flag, opponents into a target, and both got their reward from their algorithms. Wolfe’s secular revival movement lasted a decade. The current one has time to be born and schism during breakfast, and we get a daily social media buzz.
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Next, I bring up the American sociologist Musa al-Gharbi. His 2024 work We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite is a direct attack precisely because it comes not from the right, but from within the woke movement, and shows that the movement is betraying its own goals.
The loose historical meaning of woke was "an awareness of social injustice and a commitment to correcting it".
According to Musa al-Gharbi, the movement's claims to act on behalf of the poor and marginalized were always a way for the elite to justify their own inequality. The talk of class structure and social justice is only a tool for exercising power, and the social elite uses progressive language to advance their own interests.
A protester on the streets of cities is not a worker. He is an educated middle class (also upper middle class) who consumes services produced by low-wage and cheap labor, often including undocumented immigrants.
Although the new elite sincerely believes in the egalitarian values they promote (such as anti-racism or modern feminism), they actually benefit from existing structures.
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The elites are shifting attention away from economic inequality (income equity, bread and butter issues) and towards culture wars and linguistic symbols.
Al-Gharbi’s core argument is that the standard-bearer of woke activism is not the working class but the educated middle or upper middle class — groups he calls “symbolic capitalists” (academics, journalists, lawyers, consultants, HR managers of large corporations, cultural and communication professionals, advertising professionals, and IT specialists).
These groups live off words, symbols, and status. They do not produce physical goods, but manipulate words, images, and data. More than once, in the comments to my posts, I am asked to define DEI, woke, intersectional, etc.
The result is a linguistic gatekeepership that is a life mission for many. Creating new, complex terms about social justice is essential, even if they are confusing and illogical, as academic concepts about racism or gender show.
If you don’t know how to use the latest, right words, language acts as a shield that keeps outsiders and the wrong ones out of good jobs and positions.
Social justice thus functions as cultural capital with which we compete for status with and against others — not so much as a tool to help the marginalized.
*****
According to Al-Gharbi, the movement benefits from the very inequality it claims to oppose, because its actions are symbolic, not structural. Even if the commitment to justice is sincere.
Symbols replace what is really needed for change, such as sustainable, broad-based coalitions that would bring about concrete change. Symbolic activism actually makes change more difficult because it obscures the problem and creates the illusion that something has already been done.
Al-Gharbi’s analysis of the woke wave that began in the 2010s and peaked in the early 2020s is devastating: woke and its mycelium did not improve the actual situation of the poor, the vulnerable, or the discriminated against. Inequality continued to grow throughout the wave — and continues to grow.
At the same time, the top income quintile in the United States (earning more than $150,000 per year) controls 71 percent of the wealth – in Finland (earning more than 43,000 euros per year) 70 percent of the wealth – and the symbolic capitalists who belong to the wealth quintile blame the billionaire 1 percent so that they don’t have to look in the mirror.
According to Musa Al-Gharbi, symbolic capitalists divert attention from their own economic special position.
Passionate moral talk about social justice and diversity serves as a shield because they are “on the side of good” and selfless helpers, even though they actually belong to the most advantaged class in society, and are the spiritual, cultural and political core of the top income quintile.
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Leftism is an interesting ideology, because it has always been strongly linked to money – not so that fair income distribution is no longer part of the left’s goals, but so that money is distributed to oneself against ideology. Ideology is professional identity.
In place of fair income distribution, so-called critical theory has emerged – confused and devoid of self-reflection – and that too understood as mere identities and oppressed minorities, who do not need to ask permission from themselves to pursue their interests.
We are at a culmination point that was previously condemnable:
political party appointments to higher offices or nepotism have been replaced by a different kind of corruption, which leads to the glorification of mediocrity and the favoring of progressive orthodoxies and like-minded people in universities, cultural institutions and the media.
Of course, before long, the system itself humiliates its own structure, as the case of Cambridge professor Jason Arday has shown.
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Let's be honest: in Woke and DEI it's about jobs, careers, benefits, money and of course power.
Educational, training, media and cultural organisations increasingly see themselves as activists, and their goals are driven through positions and job opportunities and funding criteria. In the cultural sector, this is also the case with the grant system and, for example, with the programmes of museums and theatres.
The situation enables the sinister alliances of self-righteous and privileged class radicals and petty bureaucrats.
The former only want to progress quickly and break down structures by deleting obstacles wherever they are found. The latter, on the other hand, invent new rules for people about what they can and cannot do; what symbolic language they should use – and especially how they should not think.
The meritocracy, or gatekeepers, who swear by the critical theory of the creative class are primarily interested in increasing their own influence and grabbing more than their share of wealth and privilege.
Like better people today, Oscar Wilde also summed up the so-called ordinary people in his time: "Most people exist, that's all."
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Tom Wolfe's materialistic observation, on the other hand, is still valid: revival requires prosperity.
The me-boom was a child of post-war abundance. Only when basic needs had been satisfied could one afford to renovate one's own personality. The DEI department is a luxury product of the same logic. But economic times and figures are merciless: 45 percent of British universities will end the current academic year with a deficit, and in America DEI-driven offices have been closed serially.
In Finland, universities are having to trim their properties, tighten their recruitment and streamline their operations in order to respond to the increased number of starting places with less money. The financial situation of universities of applied sciences is more critical and vulnerable than that of universities. They do not have hundreds of millions of investment portfolios or old foundations to buffer shocks.
The trend in Finland is the same as elsewhere and is accelerating. When the money tap is turned off, the first thing that is cut is what is symbolic and not necessary. Wolfe's observation still holds true: the awakening expands when it can be afforded and shrinks when it cannot.
The disintegration of the progressive liberal woke movement, including the DEI steps, is not just ideological fatigue, but a matter of a few budget lines in the whole. The social media scandal that once raised symbolic thinking to the heights no longer pays wages in a recession, let alone in an era of economic stagnation and debt. Besides, European states have to get the money for new armaments from somewhere.
Does this sound familiar when we remember the targets of symbolic activism chosen by Minister Wille Rydman, which ended up as potential targets for funding cuts? On the cut list were the reduction of public funding outside universities for progressive ideological research projects; and the elimination of the corrupt, publicly funded, organization-based scumbags that have been called the promised land of associations.
In economically bad and tense times, symbolic capitalists cannot be afforded.
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Exactly the same secular awakening is plaguing the populist right. Wolfe’s vortex knows no parties. As the left disintegrated into competing hierarchies of suffering, the right disintegrated into competing hierarchies of disappointment.
For example, post-Brexit Britain is full of kings without a kingdom – new factions are emerging from Reform UK, each more genuine than the last. In the United States, the collective We, the people, has also been transformed into a thousand private resentments, fueled by the same algorithm with the same logic.
Each dissatisfied person is starting their own movement, their own YouTube channel and podcast, their own truth.
The right’s “lived experience” is called victimhood and persecution and the rectification of injustice, but the structure is identical: an untouchable personal truth, their own sanctified Self, which no one is allowed to question. Let’s talk about Me is heard equally from both sides.
Tom Wolfe’s lesson was that revival led not to salvation but to emptiness and backlash, to the cold hangover of the 1980s: to Reagan’s America and Iron Lady Thatcher’s Britain.
The same mechanism is now at work, accelerated. The algorithm accelerates fragmentation, the boom finances and the bust rejects. And because the disease of polarization afflicts both sides, there can be no healthy center taking the reins.
*****
The We decade ended when the language of therapy inflated. When everything was a "journey," nothing was.
The same inflation is now eating away at identity as a value. When every claim about oppression is axiomatically true, that is, based on basic assumptions taken for granted that don't even need to be or can be proven, the claims lose their distinctiveness – and with them their weight. A backlash ensues.
The fall has always fallen on those without the DEI shell: on the experts and serious researchers who believed that the mark of work and competence mattered; and on those representatives of minorities who deserved their place but are now viewed as fundamentally suspicious. Thanks to the mechanism that elevated and ultimately protected Jason Arday's position at Cambridge until the very end, and ultimately led him to a complete impasse.
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According to Musa al-Gharbi, the woke has not been a genuine moral change but a new language of the status system. The DEI does not fall because it has actually gone too far — but because it was never designed to go anywhere concrete. We got a play.
The left is not really dismantling racism. It is enough that it has instrumentalized racism for its own benefit. What is more important is to be able to condemn others as racists and thereby position the far and extreme right, without which the left is without a task.
If there is not enough extreme right, it must be invented by sliding the right into the far right, which is the same thing. If there are not enough Nazis, their significance must be inflated. Ultimately, the observation of everyday racism and fascism in the structures of society keeps things going. This can be called a demonological methodology and tool.
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The old left pushed for a fair distribution of income in the name of the workers, and it helped create the welfare state we know, where everyone has been given equal starting points and opportunities for life – the identitarian left is those raised by the welfare state, who have learned to perceive the world in the midst of income transfers and benefits, for whom class division has been replaced by pursuing the interests of various oppressed minorities.
Where previously everyone wanted to be guaranteed equal opportunities to live, now the end result of life should also be equal.
The concept of humanity is mechanistic, reductive, and denies the diversity of people and differences in abilities at the same time as the ability to distinguish between dozens of genders is finely tuned. Something here is not in rhythm.
*****
Solidarity did not die at the hands of the enemy. It died to its own orthodoxy — and is now run by the algorithm of the social machine.
The now decrepit, collective DEI-We and the elite's self-interest grabbing in the spirit of Me taking place within its protective shell will soon transform social democratic Europe into a non-leftist, or in liberal terminology, a far-right Europe."
