Wokam's Razor: A Fallacious Case of Cognitive Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is a common phenomenon that occurs during the discussion of serious topics. Oftentimes when a person hears something contrary to their perceived narrative they will fail to process it in a rational manner; this is due to the uncomfortable nature of realizing the worldview we hold might not be completely accurate. The aforementioned discomfort and state of cognitive dissonance results in people, when confronted with viable alternative viewpoints, leveraging a tool we will conceptualize as “Wokam’s Razor”:

Wokam's Razor: If an opposition authority presents itself to challenge a pre-existing consensus, shave off that authority to restore the state of 'expert consensus.’

Wokam’s Razor is a play on the classic ‘Occam's Razor’ and the word ‘Woke’ which is often used in reference to radical leftists. While the cognitive dissonance type behavior described by Wokam’s Razor can be exhibited by anyone, regardless of ideological leanings, the Woke were chosen as the namesake due to their pseudo-religious behavior in defense of their ideas being a perfect exemplification of Wokam’s Razor in practice.

In the context of politicized discourse, we have seen it play out time and time again where Wokam’s Razor is used to ignore viable information; typically, there will be a mainstream opinion, and if a competing (while still credible) authority emerges to challenge the mainstream that authority will be summarily ignored or de-platformed. The enforcement of ideas, in many cases, is not done directly through the mainstream authorities themselves, but through legions of NPC followers of the establishment religion where the flow of discourse often looks like this:

NPCs: “All the scientists agree.”

Scientists: “Well not all of us”

*5 cancellations later*

NPCs: “Like we said earlier, all the scientists agree.

It should be emphasized that Wokam’s Razor has been used to shave off actual, well-qualified, authorities either through gross ad-hominems or outright de-platforming from social media which for all intents and purposes serves as the town square. One of the most notable examples of de-platformed viable authorities has been Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist who has been critical of the Woke transgender movement and whose earlier suspension from PayPal we wrote about as a sign of a privatized social credit system.

The above posts from Christina Buttons indicate the suspension was prompted by Wright’s take on the classic trolley problem which does not seem like a suspension worth offense. Due to the nature of Twitter’s policies, the option to delete the post ‘as an acknowledgment of wrongdoing is sometimes given which is incredibly authoritarian in itself since the message boils down to: “agree with us or we will remove your ability to participate in the discourse.” Along with Wright, some of the other people who have been victims of Wokam’s Razor in the context of being ‘shaved’ from social media have been:

• Jordan Peterson from Twitter

• Libs of TikTok from Facebook

• James Lindsay from Twitter

• Robert Malone from Twitter

• Babylon Bee from Twitter

• Megan Murphy from Twitter

• Donald Trump from Twitter

• Defiant Ls from Twitter

• Wall Street Bets from Discord

• Andrew Tate from Instagram

• BIPOC Hate Tweets from Twitter

Amongst others. Robert Malone’s banning was a response to him voicing concerns as to whether or not patients were making informed consent before taking the COVID-19 vaccines; of the listed, Malone’s case is particularly notable as he was a contributor to the invention of the mRNA vaccine technology that the COVID-19 vaccines were synthesized using.

We can also see Wokam’s Razor in action in the context of raw data sources. Take the below chart from the 2018 interracial crime report as an example.

The #StopAsianHate movement put a lot of focus on white perpetrators of anti-Asian crimes while ignoring the African American perpetrators despite the two groups committing a comparable number of violent acts against the Asian community.

When presented with this data, the reactions have been akin to the one above accusing the chart displaying interracial crime data of being a doctored image. This is merely one of many examples where data that goes against an individual’s pre-conceived notions is 'shaved off’ via Wokam’s Razor.

In addition: data that runs counter to a dominant narrative is obscured to preserve the sanctity of the mainstream school of thought. The above example discusses how the interracial crime report removed ‘Asians’ as their own category in the ‘Percent of violent incidents, by victim and offender race or ethnicity’ table in the 2019 version as opposed to the 2018 version.

Wokam’s Razor is one reason why elites, particularly those in the media, end up trapped in echo chambers of their own making. The question naturally arises: what could be the motivations behind shaving competing authorities off from the equation? Eric Weinstein coined two terms that can help explain what is going on:

• Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC): If you imagine that the institutions have become incredibly fragile because they're in fact built for growth, and that plan for their growth obligates them to tell untruths, and to hide certain characteristics, because they are not, in fact, able to grow at the rates in which they are supposed to—you need some complex for making sure that that information doesn't reach the bottom entrance to a pyramid structure.

• Gated Institutional Narrative (GIN): An exchange of information and ideas by institutions, for institutions, which is formally presented to the public as an as-if News Service.

The concepts of the DISC and GIN help us understand why mainstream establishment authorities might not want competing ideas to circulate in a fair marketplace of discourse. Using a Matrix analogy: establishment authorities serve as Agent Smiths while competing authorities are fulfilling the role of Morpheus. The goal, within the current context, is for Agent Smith to weaponize Wokam’s Razor and shave off Morbius before he completes his mission of freeing enough people from the metaphorical ‘narrative matrix’ which would result in a loss of power for the establishment.

To recap, Wokam’s Razor is the rejection (‘shaving off’) of information and authority that goes contrary to an existing narrative. Regardless of what your political and personal views might be never blindly accept a narrative as hard fact. Most of the time there is more to the picture we are missing and there is always more to learn. As the saying goes “the more I learn, the less I know” it is important to recognize the gargantuan volume of information that is out there, especially in the Internet Age, so one avoids falling victim to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Reject echo chambers, reject confirmation bias, and reject the temptation of Wokam’s Razor for the best learning occurs outside our comfort zones.