The Woke Subversion of Radical Honesty: A Case Study in Ideological Capture

It’s a grim spectacle when an organization dedicated to unfiltered truth succumbs to the sanctimonious haze of woke ideology. Radical Honesty, once a bastion of raw, unapologetic human connection, has been hijacked by ideologues who mistake dogma for virtue. This article chronicles that takeover, dissecting its mechanics and implications. The irony is as thick as it is bitter: a practice built on dismantling narratives has been smothered by one of the most insidious narratives of our time.

This is, admittedly, inside baseball—a squabble within a niche community that might seem trivial to outsiders. Yet, for those alarmed by the creeping colonization of institutions by critical social justice (CSJ), or “wokeism,” Radical Honesty’s fall is a microcosm of a broader cultural malaise. More poignantly, it underscores a cruel paradox: Radical Honesty, with its ruthless commitment to empirical truth, could have been a scalpel to excise the sophistries of woke dogma. Instead, it’s become another casualty.

At least, that's how I see it. I was involved with Radical Honesty starting in 2001, becoming a certified trainer in 2007, leading workshops and practicing it in my personal life. These are my interpretations of how it all went sideways.

A Brief History of Radical Honesty

Radical Honesty was the brainchild of Dr. Brad Blanton, a psychologist who, in the 1990s, fused Gestalt Therapy’s focus on experiential truth with a defiant rejection of social pretense. Founded as Radical Honesty Enterprises, it grew through books, workshops, and a community of practitioners who embraced Blanton’s mantra: tell the truth, all of it, no matter how uncomfortable. Blanton published works like Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth and ran workshops encouraging participants to bare all.

In 2019, Blanton sold the brand to a group of ten trainers who reincorporated it as the Radical Honesty Institute (RHI). This transition, seemingly innocuous, set the stage for a takeover that would betray the practice’s core principles, as a new guard sought to align it with the fashionable pieties of the 2020s.

The Philosophical Roots of Radical Honesty

Radical Honesty has its roots in the social ferment of the 1960s, a decade when Blanton cut his teeth amid civil rights struggles, anti-war protests, and the sexual revolution. The era’s rebellion against the repressive mores of the 1950s—think white picket fences and stifled desires—shaped his worldview. Psychology was undergoing its own upheaval, moving from the cold, hierarchical doctor-patient model to a more egalitarian dynamic. Workshops replaced consulting rooms; “patients” became “clients” or peers, engaging as adults in pursuit of self-actualization. This was the crucible that would later produce Radical Honesty, steeped in the iconoclasm of Fritz Perls’ Gestalt Therapy, which urged practitioners to “lose your mind and come to your senses.”

Gestalt, with its roots in phenomenology and Buddhism, is empirically grounded, prioritizing moment-to-moment experience over abstract theorizing. Radical Honesty took this further, emphasizing the distinction between raw observation and the narratives we weave from it. To practice Radical Honesty is to expose that alchemy—how we turn noticing into narrative—and to choose truth over comfort. This positivist bent made it a natural foe of postmodernism, which revels in constructivism—deconstructing truth itself as a mere artifact of power.

The Antithesis: Critical Social Justice

Enter critical social justice, the intellectual progeny of postmodernism, which holds that reality is a tapestry of power dynamics, woven by language and ideology. Where Gestalt seeks truth in immediate, sensory experience, CSJ sees truth as a fiction, subordinate to narratives of oppression and privilege. This philosophical chasm makes the injection of CSJ into Radical Honesty not just incongruous but corrosive. Postmodernism’s skepticism of grand narratives is itself a grand narrative, one that Radical Honesty, in its purest form, would shred by demanding: “What do you actually feel, right now?”

Wokeism’s ascent, from an academic curiosity in the 1990s to a cultural juggernaut by the mid-2010s, was a masterclass in scaling a cult into a culture. By 2022, its grip on institutions—universities, corporations, even knitting circles—was near-total. Yet, as sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has documented, its influence waned thereafter, eroded by public fatigue, empirical pushback (e.g., studies debunking implicit bias training’s efficacy), and its own overreach. The 2024 U.S. election, a rout for Democrats partly blamed on woke excesses, marked its nadir. The current administration’s subsequent crackdowns—banning DEI programs, targeting “woke” curricula—have further diminished its cachet. RHI’s embrace of CSJ, then, is not just philosophically suspect but a curious act of self-sabotage.

The Petition: A Woke Manifesto

In May 2023, five RHI trainers, backed by 62 trainers and candidates, submitted a petition to the RHI board titled “Petition to Address Abuse of Power, Manipulation, Sexual Misconduct, and Other Harmful Behaviors within the Radical Honesty Community.” Its text, available publicly and below, is a Rosetta Stone of woke discourse, demanding reforms that read like a CSJ syllabus: mandatory training in anti-racism, gender dynamics, intersectionality, and consent; heightened awareness of “structural discrimination” (ableism, fatphobia, “pretty privilege”); and protocols to protect BIPOC participants from race discussions without prior consent.

The petition’s title betrays its obsession: power. True to postmodernism’s power-knowledge nexus, it frames every interaction as a struggle for dominance, proposing measures that centralize authority in the RHI board. New trainers must demonstrate fealty to CSJ tenets; existing ones must undergo reeducation. This is not reform but ideological conformity, a top-down restructuring to enforce a singular worldview. The petition’s call to end RHI’s “cult-like” atmosphere is particularly risible, given that CSJ’s dogmatic rigidity—its litmus tests, its shunning of dissenters—mirrors the very cultishness it decries.

One thing I can't resist pointing out is the part where they require every trainer to be “able to spot structural discrimination, privilege, and biases in the workshop setting.” Anyone with even minimal understanding of Radical Honesty will immediately recognize the problem: these are not things you can “spot,” that is, they’re not observable phenomena, they’re interpretations. What the petition actually demands is that trainers adopt the ideological framework in which those interpretations are considered meaningful.

This represents such a fundamental departure from Radical Honesty that it jumps off the page. The core requirement for becoming a trainer has always been the ability to distinguish between what you notice and your interpretation of what you notice. The petition’s authors not only fail this basic test, they would require all trainers to embrace their preferred (woke) interpretations as fact. In Radical Honesty, imposing one’s interpretations on others is anathema. In critical social justice, it’s standard operating procedure.

There you have it. From liberating us from interpretations to imprisoning us within them—it’s almost poetic in its irony.

The Tyranny of “Safety” and “Harm”

Central to the petition is the rhetoric of “safety” and “harm,” buzzwords that permeate woke discourse. The document alleges that Radical Honesty’s practices, particularly under Blanton and his senior trainer, caused emotional distress and retraumatization. This invokes what psychologist Nick Haslam calls “concept creep,” where harm is inflated to include subjective discomfort, and safety becomes a sacred cow, trumping all else. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have charted this ascent of “safetyism,” noting its chilling effect on open dialogue. In RHI’s case, the petition’s fixation on harm would appear to transform workshops—once risky arenas for raw honesty—into sanitized spaces where participants are shielded from their own emotions.

The Sexual Smokescreen

The petition’s gravest accusations target Blanton and his senior trainer, who are branded as sexual predators for consensual relationships with workshop participants and colleagues. This is the petition’s sharpest weapon, wielded not to address genuine misconduct but to justify the ideological purge. The RHI’s new guard, who purchased the brand in 2019, were not naive ingénues. They knew both men’s histories—decades-old, consensual encounters within a community that celebrated sexual candor. This retroactive pathologizing of adult agency is arguably anti-feminist, recasting women as perpetual victims needing protection from their own desires.

The Karpman Drama Triangle is evident here, with clearly defined persecutors, victims, and rescuers. But the roles require distortion to fit: consensual sex becomes predation (if you’re male), victimization and harm (if you’re female), and behavioral policing becomes heroic rescue. This forced framework demands we accept that mutual consent somehow constitutes abuse, and the RHI bureaucracy is our saviour.

The petition’s framing—power imbalances as inherently coercive—infantilizes participants and regresses from the advances in sexual autonomy we’ve made since the 1960s. Radical Honesty workshops unavoidably foster emotional and sometimes physical attraction. Because we commonly conceal our attractions and repulsions toward others, it’s natural that when we start telling the truth, that’s what comes out. The new rules, including bans on trainer-participant relationships and anonymous reporting mechanisms, will almost certainly have the effect of stigmatizing and suppressing this frankness.

Legitimate Problems in RHI

That’s not to say there weren’t genuine issues within RHI that needed addressing. As Brad Blanton began transitioning his legacy to a younger generation, structural flaws emerged. Radical Honesty is a practice that hinges on a subtle but profound shift: distinguishing between one’s direct experience and the narratives constructed around it. This requires not just intellectual understanding but the ability to embody it in practice and guide others to do the same. Effective trainers need both a deep grasp of this principle and technical skills to lead workshops, drawing on exercises Blanton developed or adapted.

However, the certification process was flawed. Rather than prioritizing understanding or capability, it hinged on attendance at expensive trainings, amid organizational pressure to certify more trainers to grow the brand. This led to a haphazard system, where some certified trainers may have lacked the depth or skill to lead effectively. Participants invested tens of thousands of dollars expecting certification and a viable career, but the training couldn’t guarantee competence, as it depended on personal qualities not easily taught. Unlike academic degrees earned through coursework, Radical Honesty certification required a transformative shift that not all could achieve, creating tension between participant expectations and organizational realities.

Moreover, Radical Honesty’s intensity attracted individuals grappling with unresolved personal challenges. Like many therapeutic fields, it drew those seeking to understand their own struggles, sometimes projecting unmet needs onto the practice or community. This dynamic, while not unique to RHI, amplified vulnerabilities, as some trainers or participants used the platform to address personal wounds rather than facilitate authentic connection.

These issues—flawed certification, inconsistent trainer quality, and the emotional intensity of the community—created a system ripe for disruption. One can sympathize with those who saw these problems and sought reform. Unfortunately, the solution—a bureaucratic overhaul steeped in critical social justice dogma—does not address these root causes. Instead, it imposes ideological constraints that stifle the practice’s essence, replacing Radical Honesty’s commitment to truth with a rigid framework of “safety” and “consent” that risks alienating participants and undermining the very freedom the practice once offered.

Implementation: The Purge

The RHI board implemented the petition’s demands with apparent zeal. The organization’s website now boasts a Code of Ethics heavy with CSJ jargon, mandating “inclusivity” and “anti-oppressive” practices. Trainers must undergo training in power dynamics and anti-racism, while a “Speak Up” policy encourages anonymous complaints.

Blanton was unceremoniously ousted in 2024, stripped of his title and barred from RHI activities, despite having effectively retired years prior. His senior trainer faced a similar fate, subjected to an “accountability process” that reads like a show trial. These public shamings, featured on RHI’s news page, serve as both punishment and warning: dissent from the new orthodoxy will not be tolerated. The Ethics Circle, tasked with drafting guidelines, prioritizes CSJ compliance over Radical Honesty’s original principles. They're calling it Radical Honesty 2.0.

RHI’s pivot to CSJ is not just a philosophical betrayal but a strategic blunder. Wokeism’s decline—evident in public opinion polls, electoral backlash, and policy reversals—makes this alignment a death knell. By politicizing a practice that thrives on universal human experience, RHI repels potential participants who reject ideological litmus tests. The organization’s new structure, with its committees and anonymous snitching, transforms a liberatory practice into a bureaucratic nanny, undermining the individual agency Radical Honesty once cultivated.

What Remains

The Radical Honesty Institute’s capitulation to woke ideology is a betrayal of its foundational principles. What was once a vibrant community—encompassing not just trainers but readers, participants, and dreamers who saw truth as a path to freedom—has been fractured. The board may control the brand, the mailing list, the workshops... but they’ve jettisoned the philosophy that gave Radical Honesty its power. They’ve tossed its leaders under the bus, not for justice but for optics, replacing Gestalt’s clarity with postmodern muddle. This is not progress; it’s a parasite devouring its host.

I came to Radical Honesty in the early 2000s, already steeped in Gestalt and meditation, and found in it a lucid, teachable distillation of my existing practice. Brad Blanton’s method, and the community it spawned, felt like home—a place where authenticity trumped pretense. The RHI’s descent into ideological conformity is heartbreaking. To those who share my disappointment, and who view this takeover as a sham, feel free to reach out. Share this piece, post it where the curious might find it. Let’s keep honesty radical.

If anyone would like to be in touch, I may be reached at honestyforachange.com.