Explo(r|it)er. Truth-teller; reputable fabulist.

The problem with the term, "Woke Right" is that it tries to make symmetrical what is fundamentally asymmetrical and so muddies the water. What looks like a mirror is actually a distorted feedback loop.

If your attention is dominated by left hemisphere thinking, you will see political ideologies as abstract, standalone belief systems to adopt or reject.

But if you operate more through the right hemisphere, you will perceive that all ideologies are surface expressions of identity-based groups enacting adaptive strategies within complex, evolving cultural niches.¹

Without that deeper, embodied frame, your "politics" will be detached from the living world and therefore incapable of meaningfully responding to it.

When people dismiss or deny real human dynamics in favor of inherited ideals, they are not preserving timeless wisdom but clinging to left-hemisphere abstractions that no longer track reality.

These axioms may have originated in right-hemisphere insight, but over time they have been flattened into rigid systems. And when the living world contradicts those systems, the left brain insists the world must be wrong rather than re-entering the relational space where real understanding happens.

The Liberalism → Progressivism → Wokeism move is the logical progression of a worldview increasingly severed from relational reality (domain of the right-brain). And it's why the so-called "Woke Right" is a misnomer. It is not a coherent right-wing phenomenon but left-brained mimicry, coming from the Right, of the Woke Left. A kind of mirror-pathology that emerges from the same metaphysical confusion and only deepens the false symmetry.

Liberalism abstracts identity, Progressivism engineers and universalizes identity, Wokeism purifies and pseudo-sacralizes identity. Globalism, as the technocratic layer that manages and takes advantage of the chaos, consolidates and administrates identity. And Leviathan, the beast, is the spiritual dominion of the totalizing technocratic power of disembodied identity.²

Some offer the topology of "Self-Defined Self, Discovered Self, and Received Self"³ to help make sense of the term "Woke Right" but that is focussed only on the psychological and epistemological level of the self, aimed at explaining political behavior. It is also structured within a left-hemispheric, liberal epistemology, and so it functions as a false trichotomy within an assumed liberal metaphysical frame that presumes the sovereignty of the individual as the ground of selfhood.

A better frame starts with the work of Dr. Iain McGilchrist and his work on the brain hemispheres. The differences between the brain hemispheres tell us something fundamental about how our universe is constituted. They represent two different ways of understanding and acting in the world.

The left hemisphere (The Emissary) attends to the details, the parts, is discrete, autonomously self-constructing, selecting from chunks of reality, and of course, is very powerful. Technology thrives on this way of thinking. But it must be ordered by the right hemisphere (The Master), which sees wholeness, pattern, sacrifice, and limit. It sees how everything is related.

Notice how both are good and necessary for maximum expression of being, but that it is nonetheless an asymmetrical relationship. The way of the right hemisphere is more fundamental, and the left-hemispheric way is dependent on the right-hemispheric way if anything at all is to persist and be whole. The reverse is not true.

The Discovered Self is noble, but it is still the Emissary thinking he is the Master. It wants to be free to explore. However, it refuses the participatory patterns that shape perception (liturgy), it avoids the intrinsic direction that gives discovery meaning (telos), and it only accepts tradition as a set of useful legacies, not as something that forms the self through relationship with what is higher and not authored by the self (the Sacred). And this, over time, turns it into the Positivistic Self so rightly feared.

The claim that liberals "don't reject tradition, they choose from it," is misguided because the moment tradition is something to choose from, it ceases to be tradition in the sacred sense. It becomes curated, domesticated, reduced to content, stripped of authority, and subordinated to personal evaluation. What was once a formative container becomes a toolkit. This is the precise moment when the Emissary usurps the Master. The analytic self presumes the right to stand over the forms that shape it.

Tradition is not a bundle of legacy ideas or practices we sift through. It is a living structure that mediates reality before we have language to grasp it. Its authority does not come from its usefulness, but from its participation in the real, and its role in aligning us with the order of being. It is not chosen, it is inhabited, and through it, we are shaped. This is how the self is not just informed, but formed.

And so to "choose" tradition is already to place the self above it and to assume a stance of sovereignty over reality itself. To play God as it were. This is not neutral. It is a metaphysical inversion. And it is why, despite liberalism's modest tone, the Discovered Self inevitably slides into the Self-Defined Self. Because without the liturgical rhythms, telos, and sacred constraints of received form, discovery cannot help but become projection.

Even the Received Self is chosen by the individual. It is "accepted," rather than actually given in the deep, ontological sense. It is only conservative in posture, but still liberal in metaphysical structure (sovereign, just more deferential).

The triangle model of left, liberal, and right paths and their corresponding pathologies, assumes symmetry, as if each selfhood is equally valid in its own domain and merely gets corrupted in its extremes. But the left/right distinction is asymmetrical. Not politically, but metaphysically.

The right (Received Self), at root, aligns with the right hemisphere: the whole, the sacred, the symbolic, the cosmic order. The left (Self-defined Self), at root, aligns with the left hemisphere: atomization, construction, disembedding, anti-form. And liberalism (Discovered Self) is caught in between, trying to be the Master without being rooted in the sacred.

And so the system spirals. What appears as a triangle becomes a feedback loop: Liberalism attempts neutral discovery → Discovers identity → Begins to manage identity → Moralizes identity → Fragments identity → And finally dissolves into managerial wokeism. All the predictable outcomes of the Discovered Self detached from any sacred form.

And here is where the Leviathan behind the Positivistic Self is underestimated. It doesn't just manage, it commands belief. It moralizes abstraction, enforces unity through compliance, offers salvation through equity and submission, replaces being with behavior, and ultimately claims spiritual dominion.

One might think they are resisting Leviathan by defending liberalism, but the very defense still lives in Leviathan's frame: managerial, analytic, epistemic. What Leviathan needs to die is reverence, form, limit, and participation in the sacred, none of which the Discovered Self can fully recover from within its own metaphysical architecture.

And this, ultimately, is the deeper problem with the term "Woke Right." It reinforces the false symmetry. It is not a parallel movement but what happens when liberalism, having severed itself from the sacred, tries to manage rebellion using the same moral weaponry it failed to constrain in the first place.

It doesn't help us locate the disease, it just keeps us fighting over symptoms. It keeps us trapped inside the spiral of liberal epistemology, where everything must be managed, curated, or compared, rather than re-ordered from something higher. It blinds us to the source of collapse and locks us further into the logic of Leviathan.