Paul, a contractarian

A little timeline cleanse. It's Halloween morning in Japan right now, right?? Some Marin Kitagawa vibes

Cults are easy. It's attractive because it allows you to subsume your cognition and identity into a larger group. You have a perfect... often coerced alignment of values and principles. You don't have to encounter any kind of uncomfortable information, and as long as you do as you are mandated, you can maintain your "membership". But the problem with the cult is that the closer you get to 100% alignment in ideas and values, the smaller the group gets, and you end up with a small group that has no power. The weakening of the woke is that problem. The endless purity spiral pushed more and more people out, until their numbers dwindled, leading to a reduction in their power to affect the culture. Culture is a large umbrella. You often meet people with opinions, values, and even core principles you disagree with... but as long as they are aligned on the same cultural "mission," you can work with them. As I said, as the woke weakened, the right, which adopted all the refugees from the center and the left, is now doing its own purity check... and it's fracturing the anti-woke movement and weakening it as a result. The problem is that these purity checks are missionless and directionless, other than falling down to the bottom of the pit. The people who proclaim their absolute authority in being righteous will lead that purity test and will start excommunicating those in their own group. Winning the culture war doesn't mean purity in ideology... It means purity in the cultural mission. The problem is that the anti-woke side doesn't know what that mission is other than to be a blind opposition to the woke. The anti-woke movement has become a blind hydra where each of the heads moves in different directions, and at times bites and harms the other heads. Classical liberals, free speech maximalists, libertarians, Christian theocrats, monarchists, Ancaps... all different heads striving for dominance.