Posted on 09/24/2018 5:23:02 PM PDT by Para-Ord.45
From the sun-blanched beaches of California to the snow-covered cities of New England, a religious fervor is sweeping the United States. PhD-toting preachers spread the faith with righteous zeal, denouncing those who violate its sacred principles. Sinners are threatened not by an angry god, but by a righteous mob. The impenitent among them are condemned to be outcasts, while the contrite, if they properly mortify themselves and pledge everlasting fealty to the faith, can secure enough lost status to rejoin society, perhaps forever marked by a scarlet epithet. Racist. Sexist. Ableist. This is the religion of Wokeness, and this is the era of the Great Awokening.
...we will explore this quasi-religion, Wokeness, as a status system that functions predominantly to distinguish white elites from the white masses (whom we will call hoi polloi). It does this by offering a rich signalling vocabulary for traits and possessions such as education, intelligence, openness, leisure, wealth, and cosmopolitanism, all of which educated elites value (for a similar analysis, see Rehain Salam’s August essay in the Atlantic, discussed by David French in the National Review article linked above). From this perspective, the preachers of the Great Awokening—those who most ardently and eloquently articulate the principles of Wokeness—obtain status because they (a) signal the possession of desired traits and (b) promulgate a powerful narrative that legitimizes the status disparity between white elites and hoi polloi. The elites, according to these preachers, are morally righteous and therefore deserve status, whereas hoi polloi are morally backward and deserve obloquy and derision.
Those who challenge them are not debated; rather, their motives are denounced, and they are cast out of polite society like heretics. To take just one example, when someone objects to the Woke principle that “diversity is a strength,” committed believers rarely greet the objection as an opportunity for argument. Instead, they attack the apostate for his sacrilege, and accuse him of unspeakable moral treachery.
A positional good is a good that people acquire to signal where they stand in a social hierarchy; it is acquired in order to set oneself apart from others. Positional goods therefore have a peculiar property: the utility their consumers derive from them is inversely related to the number of people who can access them… PC-brigadiers behave exactly like owners of a positional good who panic because wider availability of that good threatens their social status.
The PC brigade has been highly successful in creating new social taboos, but their success is their very problem. Moral superiority is a prime example of a positional good, because we cannot all be morally superior to each other. Once you have successfully exorcised a word or an opinion, how do you differentiate yourself from others now? You need new things to be outraged about, new ways of asserting your imagined moral superiority.
More at: https://quillette.com/2018/09/21/the-preachers-of-the-great-awokening/
"Woke dogmas lead to a sacred narrative about the nobility of perceived victims’ groups (e.g., blacks, women, Muslims, gays, transexuals, et cetera). Members of these groups are to be considered the innocent victims of an oppressive and iniquitous patriarchy. "
Marxist terminology was the oppressed/Proletariat being victimized by the oppressors/Bourgeoisie.
So the new left would be simply ridiculed for preaching old line marxism and marxist economics hence the new phraseology. Old wine in a new bottle.
It really is a new religious or more accurately cult paradigm that is setting up to dominate the world just as European christiandom dominated the previous centuries and islam dominates muslim countries. Its scary to think what our children will have to go through if we don’t fight back.
LoL at first I thought your headline was a typo. “Great Awakenings” were among my research interests as a history major in college! :)
Since when was “awokening” a word, and what the hell does it mean? Another installment of “ebonics?”
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