Elon Musk has warned us time and again about the so-called “woke mind virus”, as if you catch wokeness when a progressive activist sneezes on you.

Let’s be real – wokeness isn’t a virus. You don’t come down with “pronouns” and break out in climate anxiety.

What’s being labelled a virus and a cultural disease is, in fact, something far more ordinary. It’s basic human development in action. 

Developmental psychologists have long studied how individuals and societies grow through predictable stages.

The term “wokeness,” for all its baggage, is best understood as a symptom of what developmental psychologists tend to call the postmodern stage of development.  

Developmental stages are a way of understanding how human thinking, morality, identity and worldviews evolve over time. This process lasts our whole life and doesn’t stop after childhood.

Just as children grow through predictable stages of cognitive development, so too do adults progress through increasingly complex ways of making sense of the world.

Our worldview at age 55 tends to be more complex than it was at age 25. 

If you ever studied psychology at an undergraduate level, you will be familiar with Jean Piaget. He famously mapped out how children’s thinking matures.

Lawrence Kohlberg explored stages of moral reasoning in people of all ages. Jane Loevinger and Susanne Cook-Greuter extended this thinking into adult ego development, showing how our sense of self evolves.

Robert Kegan built on these ideas with his theory of subject-object shifts, explaining how we gradually become aware of (and take responsibility for) more aspects of our inner and outer worlds.

And Clare Graves, whose work inspired the rather popular Spiral Dynamics model, showed that societies evolve through similar stages.

Each stage has its own values, blind spots, and challenges. 

Every stage has its light and its shadow. Ken Wilber describes the shadow side of postmodernism as the “mean green meme” (green here refers to the name of the postmodern stage of development rather than the political ideology). That’s a tendency toward hyper-critical thinking, identity politics, and the moral policing of language and ideas.

It’s the overcorrection that comes with learning empathy at scale.

What Musk and his army of culture warriors criticise as woke is simply the shadow side of the newly emerging postmodern stage of human development. 

Let’s have a look at a popular version of the developmental model showing how individuals and cultures evolve through stages of consciousness.

Each stage offers a more complex and inclusive way of seeing the world. These stages build on one another, like layers in a growing psyche.

A stage cannot be skipped in development. We all live through these stages in order. No stage is inherently “better”. They are just different, albeit increasingly complex, expressions of human development, each with strengths and weaknesses. 

Ken Wilber reminds us that psychological growth means we don’t discard the previous stage once we enter the next one. Rather, we transcend and include them. “Each worldview offers a vital piece of the human puzzle. Conflict arises when we confuse our stage of development as the final level of human evolution and the one and only correct worldview.

We also can’t force others to leap to the next stage before they’re ready. Everyone has a right to their own stage of development. The real work? Making space for all stages to coexist in a system (like in our nation, in our political system), while gently encouraging evolution. 

In other words, woke isn’t an ideological takeover that will forever stay unchanged. Rather it’s a sort of cultural adolescence.

Loud. Awkward. Prone to shouting instead of listening. But it’s also necessary.

Just as we don’t declare war on teenagers for being moody, we shouldn’t declare war on wokeness for being clumsy. You don’t win battles against developmental stages. You grow through them. 

That’s why the so-called “war on woke” makes as little sense as the “war on drugs”.

Both are rooted in the same flawed logic – the belief that if we just get tough enough, ban the right books or lock up enough dealers, we can make the thing go away. But we’ll never eliminate drugs by force. Not while demand persists.

We’ll never eliminate wokeness with online takedowns, public bathroom policies or government inquiries. Not while the cultural conditions that gave rise to it (inequality, injustice, a longing for inclusion, a search for meaning) are still present. 

The critics of wokeness (your Andrew Tates, Jordan Petersons, and Joe Rogans) often point to real weaknesses of postmodern thought. They point to the shadow aspects of the postmodern stage.

Postmodernism can devolve into moral grandstanding. It can turn oppressive in the name of liberation. But here’s the twist: These flaws are obvious only from outside the stage.

If you’re stuck in an earlier worldview (traditional, modern, or even tribal), woke and wokeness can feel like a hostile alien force. And if you’re fully immersed within the green/postmodern stage, you’re blind to its excesses.

The irony is, both critics and activists are usually shouting past each other, locked into a developmental standoff. 

Musk is serious about the ‘woke mind virus’. Source: Amazon/Allen Dennison

So, what’s the way out? 

Developmental theory offers a clear, if challenging, answer – we must transcend and include. That means moving beyond the postmodern stage without rejecting it.

We carry forward its genuine gifts: Pushing society towards more diversity, inclusivity, and environmental concern while letting go of its self-righteous impulses.

This next step is what Wilber calls the integral stage of development. 

From the vantage point of integral thinking, the culture war looks a bit absurd. It’s like watching older siblings argue over rules they’ll both outgrow. Integral thinkers can hold multiple perspectives at once.

They see that every worldview, from traditional to modern to postmodern, has truths worth preserving and shadows worth addressing. The goal isn’t to defeat any stage, but to grow a society that can metabolise all of them. 

And that’s where hope lies. Not in censorship or culture war skirmishes, but in creating the conditions for a critical mass of people to rise into this next, more inclusive way of seeing the world. We won’t drag the whole society there overnight.

But a large enough minority of politicians, teachers, media voices, and thinkers can help shepherd the rest of us through. 

So no, we don’t need to panic about the “woke mind virus”. We need to grow up. And growing up takes time, compassion, and the maturity to know that every cultural stage, even the loud ones, has a role to play in the long story of human development.  

How long might the process take?  

If history is any guide, it might take about 100-150 years for a worldview to move from cultural emergence to societal dominance.

Since the postmodern “green” stage first appeared in the 1960s, a truly postmodern society that has conquered its own shadow is at least 40 years away. Barring major disruptions or accelerations, that tipping point may arrive sometime between 2070 and 2100.

Culture wars won’t speed the process but only deepen the divides in society. What’s needed is a critical mass of citizens, role models (spiritual leaders, politicians, authors, artists) who can guide society through this transition with empathy, nuance, and a willingness to grow.  

So no, we don’t need to fear the “woke mind virus”. We need to grow up. And growing up takes inner-work, courage, and the humility to admit we’re all still evolving.

If we want to move past the culture wars, we’ll need fewer hot takes and more perspective. Also, we need a few more leaders willing to go to therapy.

Elon, this means you. 

Simon Kuestenmacher is a co-founder of The Demographics Group. His columns, media commentary and public speaking focus on current socio-demographic trends and how these impact Australia. His podcast, Demographics Decoded, explores the world through the demographic lens. Follow Simon on Twitter (X), Facebook, or LinkedIn.