In his 1859 treatise On Liberty, John Stuart Mill observed that one reason for protecting free speech is that there is value in arguing with false opinions. It brings about “the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error,” he wrote. For example, arguing with “Flat Earthers” helps to bring about a better understanding of geodesy, the science of measuring and representing Earth’s shape.

　　The West has collided with many false opinions during its affliction with wokeism, but this has prompted a clearer and livelier impression of many truths. One is that it is not enough to say one simply supports freedom and equality, as these come in infinite conflicting varieties. All sorts of pathological movements in history, from communist and fascist takeovers to genocides, have couched their intentions as a struggle for freedom and equality. But as thinkers from Plato to Mortimer Adler have pointed out, many freedoms and equalities are toxic, and the only ones we need are the kinds that serve justice. For example, do we support the freedom of doctors to mutilate kids with so-called “gender-affirming care” that disaffirms their biological gender through drugs and surgeries? Or do we support the conflicting freedom that keeps kids free from the harm of such doctors? Do we support the equality that gives biological males and females an equal opportunity to win an Olympic medal for punching biological females in the face? Or the conflicting equality that ensures that all boxers have an equal opportunity to compete with others of their own biological sex?

　　Also made clearer through contending with wokeism is the complex nature of the West itself. The many fallacies, fictions, and distortions at the heart of wokeism unintentionally stimulated a renaissance of interest in deeper understandings of Western Civilization, beyond monolithic stereotypes and caricatures. Overall enrollment in college humanities departments is in “free fall,” according to the New York Times. Yet enrollments have skyrocketed where the humanities are taught properly, like classical and Christian schools and other colleges that promote free thought and the principles of classical liberal education. Meanwhile, DEI and propaganda like The 1619 Project have prompted erudite scholars like Jordan Peterson, Victor Davis Hanson, Thomas Sowell, Joshua Mitchell, and John McWhorter to correct woke misconceptions and, in so doing, teach the world about psychology, history, economics, political philosophy, linguistics, and the rest of the humanities. Millions have listened and been educated.

　　In one light, countering wokeism seems like it should have been easy, just common sense. But debunking wokeism has often been a struggle. Why? Those defending civilizations against radical movements frequently stumble at first, precisely because radicals attack things so foundational that people take them for granted. Societies often are not prepared to defend “all the decent drapery of life,” as Edmund Burke put it, because they never had to think much about it. For example, until recently, virtually no one thought much about why separating male and female bathrooms is necessary. No one was arguing, as Ibram X. Kendi now does, that one must necessarily be a racist if they do not believe that racism is always the primary factor in the success or failure of a black person’s life. So no one was penning refutations to this argument. But with the rise of wokeism, suddenly the decent drapery of life was torn off and the obvious needed to be articulated.

　　Radicals tend to immerse themselves in obscurities of issues that most people never much considered, and they often make up their own jargon. This can be good, when it stretches society’s understanding by bringing out new concepts which need to be heard. But when done in an intellectually dishonest way, as with wokeism, it can mean that doctored facts and misleading jargon, like “intersectionality” and “microaggressions,” catch mainstream citizens off guard and go unchallenged for too long.

　　We cannot return to business as usual after colliding with wokeism.

　　How do insidious ideologies like wokeism die? They die when the real consequences and dangers of their fallacies become widely recognized. One way this can happen is by thinking through the consequences of different courses of action. As Alfred North Whitehead put it, “The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.” Thinking can save us from suffering.

　　But sometimes ideologies end only after suffering. In his 1990 book After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom, Catholic University of America political theorist David Walsh examined the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, such as Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism. He found that the destructiveness of such ideologies only became fully apparent to the larger society after the ideologies had been implemented and people had suffered the consequences in the real world. For example, only after the Holocaust did Nazism fade and anti-Semitism drop precipitously in the West. Only after communism drove the Soviet Union and China into poverty and two of the worst famines in human history did their governments finally change course. Similarly, only after years of suffering caused by DEI are companies like Meta, McDonald’s, Google, and Walmart now finally cutting or rolling back their DEI programs. Only after years of doctors mutilating children did a group of responsible doctors come out in opposition to gender-affirming care in 2023.

　　Walsh argues that mankind has a dual nature, both good and evil, and that only through suffering the consequences of its bad choices can a society reject evil and return to its true destiny. He says that, like the characters in Dostoevsky’s novels, we must “undergo the most ancient law of the cosmos: wisdom through suffering.”

　　If Walsh and Mill are right, society must collide with error one way or another, through argument or experience, to move beyond ideologies like wokeism. But these collisions are productive only if society learns from them. So it is not enough to let wokeism slink off into the shadows. We have to keep holding it up to the light after it fades, just like it is mandatory to teach about Nazism and the Holocaust in German schools.

　　False ideologies like wokeism are destined to fail because they are contradicted by human nature and empirical reality. Philosophers use their minds to try to comprehend the world; woke ideologues have tried to fit the world to what it is in their minds. In Brave New World, the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center tries to reprogram babies to hate things they naturally crawl towards, like picture books and flowers. Similarly, woke education has tried to reprogram kids to hate their country, their culture, their institutions, and certain so-called “identities.” Such distortions can fool some of the people some of the time. But common sense always makes a comeback.

　　And that is what is happening now. America is engaged in a “revolution of common sense,” as President Trump put it in his second inaugural address. The Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico believed that common sense and piety are the fundamental forces creating civilization out of barbarism. The West is recovering and renewing aspects of civilization by taking back its institutions. But this is not enough.

　　In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Those who hope that the colored Americans needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the colored citizen is granted his citizenship rights.”

　　We cannot return to business as usual after colliding with wokeism. Failure is the best teacher, and for many years the West failed to stop wokeism from destroying large swathes of our education system and culture. Now, we must identify and fix the deeper flaws in our society that allowed wokeism to get as far as it did. Our failures reveal ways we need to become stronger.

　　Wokeism tells us we should take conflict from the political sphere and project it into every aspect of private life. Not only is this illogical, but we have seen empirically that it is a recipe for perpetual discord, dysfunction, and waste. We have seen that scapegoating identity groups deprives us of the synergy and productivity of a thriving society. So we need to work on all the things wokeism worked against, like creating unity, harmony, meritocracy, and competence. Pursuing these is, as Joshua Mitchell puts it, the only way we can “build a world together” and “have a tomorrow.”