If you want to understand why our current cultural battles feel so exhausting, you have to look past the daily outrage machine and glance backward.

Roughly 500 years ago, humanity began pulling off a slow-motion miracle. We started building what we now call the secular liberal society.

To the average person today, “secular liberalism” sounds like academic white noise. But for Jan en San Alleman (every Tom, Dick, and Harriet) on the street, it is the only thing keeping them free.

Before this 500-year shift, your life was entirely decided before you were born. If you dared to question the local priest, the king, or the rigid dictates of your tribe, you were exiled, imprisoned, or worse.

The “modernity project”—championed by Enlightenment thinkers and paid for in blood—flipped the script. It established a revolutionary rule: You are an individual first. You possess universal rights, your mind is your own, and you should be judged by your actions and character, not by your birthright, your skin color, or your ancestral tribe. It allowed Jan to criticize authority without going to jail, and San to pursue her own path outside of her prescribed social class.

Enter the critique of modern social justice politics—commonly crammed into the heavy-lifting word: “woke.”

What does “woke” mean in this age? Strip away the academic jargon of postmodernism, and it is fundamentally a Great Regression. It is a u-turn on 500 years of human progress. Where liberalism fought to judge people as individuals, the new orthodoxy insists on judging people entirely by their group identity. You are no longer an individual human being with independent thoughts; you are a collection of demographic markers that dictate whether you are an “oppressor” or the “oppressed.”

Author and critic Helen Pluckrose is entirely right to sound the alarm on how hostile this ideology has become to open debate. When institutions drift from seeking objective evidence to enforcing ideological conformity, they become punitive. Disagreement is no longer viewed as a difference of opinion; it is treated as a moral sin.

Has the world gone soft? Yes, but not in the way critics usually complain about. It has gone soft in its spine. By coddling the idea that emotional discomfort is a form of harm, we have created a hyper-fragile culture. In trying to build a society where no one is ever offended, we are building a society where no one can speak the truth. We are replacing the rigorous, truth-seeking tools of John Stuart Mill and Socrates with the cheap dopamine of the digital mob.

To be fair to the well-meaning activists, the impulse behind this shift often starts in a good place: a desire to fix the blind spots where liberal societies failed to live up to their own promises.

Genuine exclusions and historical injustices still exist. But the cure currently on offer is worse than the disease. You do not fix a broken liberal system by burning down liberalism itself. You fix it by applying liberal principles more universally.

This matters because a society that values group loyalty over objective truth cannot survive. When we forget why we built a secular, free-thinking world in the first place, freedom stops being an inherent right. It becomes a temporary permission slip issued by whichever mob happens to hold the loudest megaphone this week.

If Jan en San Alleman want to keep their freedom, they need to realize that the soft tyranny of enforced conformity is just the old tribalism in a new, trendy coat.

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