The Counterweight Handbook:
Principled Strategies for Surviving and Defeating Critical Social Justice

by Helen Pluckrose
Pitchstone, 2024, 276 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

Helen Pluckrose, who co-authored with Greg Lukianoff in Cynical Theories, has created a nicely written manual for how to deal with wokesters and woke employers. To be effective, she says, you must first understand them. This book is intended to help you with that.

She calmly and accurately describes what critical social justice (CSJ), known as diversity, equity, and inclusion or DEI in the USA, really stands for. Critical social justice, she says, is not about finding truth but is about pushing the simplistic concept of oppressor vs oppressed into every aspect of society. It is a self-justifying ideology that defines resistance or dis­agree­ment as automatically invalid.

Its proponents know it's all based on falsehoods. That is why DEI has to be imposed by force instead of by convincing people. Most Americans are familiar with its claims: if it's an ideology, it is the ideology of a madman. But it has taken over the federal government, all our colleges, and many of our corporations.

Pluckrose says that individuals must resist it by arguing back and taking a calm, persistent, and polite but firm approach. She suggests a list of counter­argu­ments for each of the ten claims of CSJ. For instance, if they tell you all whites are racist, you could quote Kendi who said that calling all whites racist is itself racist. If they claim that STEM is colonialist because it originated in the West, you could say CSJ should also be thrown out then because it too originated in the West. And so on.

Next, she says to understand precisely what your objections are to DEI, then network and determine a strategic response in your organization.

These counter­arguments are certainly valid, logical, and well reasoned. Pluckrose recommends looking for signs before acting. Consider, she says, that the company might not be run by rigid ideologues but is just fulfilling what they consider a silly requirement.

I don't know what things are like in the UK, but in the USA her recommendations to challenge DEI or expose wokesters to the truth would fail.

If you followed the sample letter on page 111, where she suggests saying things like “I'm hoping you can reassure me that we can oppose racism without subscribing to any radical movements,” the recipient would probably decide that you're not fully on board with DEI, and you'd be out on the street corner within the hour.

Woke ideologues—indeed, most bureaucrats—are very fragile and will fly into a rage if their beliefs are challenged, however politely.

Even if you could find out who initiated the program in your organization, they would be protected by an impenetrable wall of bureaucracy. If you're somehow able to arrange a meeting, they will not seriously discuss the issue; at best, they will sit there and lie to you. Then, just as they did with the Covid vax, they will tell you the policy is you take it or you're fired. Maybe things are better in the UK, but here in America only legal coercion and ruthless financial pressure could eliminate this deceptively named ideology from our institutions.

Thus, this book is not really for someone who wishes to try to fight back, but for someone on the edge who thinks it's all exaggerated, that wokeism is “being nice” and cancel culture is a myth. It is not, as its architects have repeatedly told us. Our only other option is to hunker down and wait. CSJ, says Pluckrose, is “too unstable, incoherent, contradictory, cannibalistic, and divorced from reality . . . to survive forever.”

DEI is dedicated to destroying merit­ocracy. If it's not stopped, that will cost thousands of lives from diseases that are not cured, discoveries that are not made, and products that crash and burn. Maybe it's slowly dying out as Pluckrose says, but after seeing it up close it's hard for me to care what happens to the colleges and corp­ora­tions that were so willing to embrace it.

jun 19, 2024. last updated jun 25, 2024