Posted on 02/16/2024 11:56:19 AM PST by Red Badger
A very long essay, but crucial to understanding where we are.
One would think that by now all these anti-woke conservatives and moderate liberals would have learned at least some of the bitter lessons from the last decade about how political power and cultural change actually work, but I guess not. …
They could have recognized by now that this is not a simple political issue with a political solution, but they have not….
No, the Revolution is far from over.
[Here are] twenty reasons to get woke and despair.
1. One does not simply walk away from religious beliefs.
What is called “Wokeness” — or the “Successor Ideology,” or the “New Faith,” or what have you (note the foe hasn’t even been successfully named yet, let alone routed) — rests on a series of what are ultimately metaphysical beliefs. The fact that their holders would laugh at the suggestion they have anything called metaphysical beliefs is irrelevant — they hold them nonetheless. Such as:
The world is divided into a dualistic struggle between oppressed and oppressors (good and evil).
Language fundamentally defines reality; therefore language (and more broadly “the word” — thought, logic, logos) is raw power, and is used by oppressors to control the oppressed. …
No oppression existed in the mythic past, the utopian pre-hierarchical State of Nature, in which all were free and equal …
The stain of injustice only entered the world through the original sin of (Western) civilizational hierarchy …
All disparities visible today are de facto proof of the influence of hierarchical oppression (discrimination). …
Ultimate victory is cosmically ordained by history, though the arc of progress may be long….
I could go on, but the real point is that these are faith-beliefs, and ones capable of wielding an iron grip on the individual and collective mind. And they have a strong civilizational resonance, because they are in fact not arbitrary but deeply rooted in a metaphysical struggle that effectively stretches to the very beginning of Western theological and philosophical thought. …
Perhaps the wokies have a genetic preference for the hunter gatherer past, when people lived in small-bands of related individuals, when communist-level sharing was necessary. But with the agricultural revolution, society grew big, there was specialization, and societies that respected private property wildly out-competed those that didn’t (because people don’t try hard if they must give away all the fruits of their labor). The woke would throw away the societal developments since the agricultural revolution that allow us to get along and thrive.
7. Political parties can’t choose their policies.
Political strategists have been pointing out for some time now that woke ideas like Critical Race Theory and defunding the police are not politically popular and are hamstringing the Democratic Party’s electoral chances. So theoretically they would just drop these things, stop talking about them, change course, and talk about popular things. But of course it’s not that simple. All they can actually do is ride the chaos of the Zeitgeist, because some small portion of their base (maybe some 8% of Americans) are true believers gripped by a religious fervor that transcends political calculation. And this minority is steering the ship, because…
8. Majorities don’t matter.
Unfortunately for those dreaming of harnessing a majority anti-woke popular will, the truth is that, as statistician and philosopher Nassim Taleb has explained in detail, it’s typically not the majority that sets new societal rules, but the most intolerant minority. If the vast majority generally prefers to eat Food A instead of Food B, but a small minority is absolutely insistent on eating Food B and is willing to start chopping the heads off of anyone who disagrees and serves Food A — and the majority doesn’t care enough to get all bloody dying on this particular culinary hill — all restaurants will soon be serving only Food B, the new national cuisine. This is especially true if the intolerant minority already holds a disproportionate position of influence within the system, given that…
9. Personnel is policy.
Let’s imagine, for example, that some lawmakers officially ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in their state’s schools or universities. Will this be the end of the matter? … No of course not. As one consultant/cleric recently advised teachers, “Don’t say critical race theory, just teach its precepts… ” Yes, the work of spreading the new good news shall not be stopped! After all, who is going to stop them? Will they be fired by the woke human resources department, or the woke principal? Abandoned by the woke teachers’ union? Reported to the state by their un-woke peers, all of whom have already been systematically purged from the collective for their heresy? If concerned parents do manage to get them fired, who will hire their replacements? Why… the woke HR department! The people who actually set the effective policy of any institution are inevitably the personnel located in the power centers closest to implementation. …
10. All the institutional high ground is still occupied.
Have the top universities already been retaken from the woke, or replaced? (No, one still imaginary university in Austin doesn’t count.) What about the elite finishing schools? The accreditation companies? Most mainstream news media? The social media companies? The publishing houses? Hollywood? The major foundations? The non-profits and the think tanks? The consulting and accounting companies? The investment banks? The NASDAQ? The digital service providers? The HR departments of the Fortune 500, and most of their boards? The law schools? The Bar Association? The permanent federal bureaucratic state? Heck, even Halliburton? No, at such a ludicrous suggestion the Cathedral merely echoes with the mocking laughter of the new woke high clerisy. …
12. Culture wars are generational wars, and the young are woke as hell.
… Sweeping social changes typically only occur “generation to generation,” or through what he called “cohort change.” For most people, the formative experiences of coming to age are truly formative — afterwards their fundamental values will typically barely change for the rest of their lives. For this reason … it is necessarily the case that “culture wars are long wars,” because “cultural insurgents win few converts in their own cohort.” … The process of “instilling new ideas and overthrowing existing orthodoxies takes time — usually two to three generations of time.” …
Of Generation Z Americans (those born after 1996)
51% report that America is “inextricably linked to white supremacy,”
52% support racial reparations,
60% believe systemic racism is “widespread” in general society,
64% say “rioting and looting is justified to some degree” by the need to address systemic racism “by whatever means necessary.”
51% believe the “gender binary” is “outdated,”
Up to 40% self-identify as LGBTQ+ (although Gallup separately finds only about 16% do, compared to 2% of Baby Boomers).
59% support expanding non-binary gender options.
41% support censorship of “hate speech,”
66% support shouting down speakers they consider offensive,
23% support using violence to silence such speakers.
61% have positive views of socialism
70% think “government should do more to solve problems.”
Sorry conservatives, but that’s the 67 million-strong cohort who will fill the pipeline of employees, leaders, educators, and voters for the next two decades or so …
13. The youth are still coddled and mentally broken.
Back in 2015, … Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff … advanced an essentially psychological explanation for why so many college students were suddenly acting simultaneously like fragile snowflakes and rabid authoritarians: thanks to the embrace of the “self-esteem” movement and “helicopter-parenting” by their Boomer parents, along with liability risk-aversion by institutions, young people had grown up physically and psychologically “coddled” and therefore emotionally fragile.
By this the authors specifically meant that they had adopted a number of beliefs totally inverse to the Stoic-derived principles considered best practice by modern Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
These unhealthy beliefs included:
Always trusting your feelings,
Assuming disagreement is always a personal attack,
Believing hurtful words lead to real harm, including permanent trauma….
I must admit that I’ve grown a bit skeptical of this explanation by now. As things have progressed, it’s become increasingly clear to me that these claims to offense are often used as cunningly deliberate weapons against empathetic liberals, and are probably frequently evidence less of psychological fragility than of psychopathy.
But, it does seem true that Gen Z sadly does indeed suffer from much higher rates of mental illness than older generations (though the millennials are very close). Even before the pandemic, the rate of anxiety and depression recorded in their age group nearly doubled between 2007 and 2018, as they came of age. The suicide rate rose 57%. From 2009 to 2019, the proportion of high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40%. Only 45% reported their mental health was good overall in 2018. One-third reported having a mental health or substance abuse problem. They are also far and away the loneliest generation.
Meanwhile, our whole culture seems to have grown significantly more possessed by emotivism in general, to the point that the decline of rational language and the rise of emotional reasoning can even be tracked quantitatively…
As average IQ drops and midwits use their greater numbers to dominate public discussion.
14. Elite overproduction is still in overdrive.
… Scrabbling desperately with one another for status, and horrified at the idea of ever falling into the ranks of the mere working class, the overproduced elites have found another solution: they’ve set themselves up, not as the nobility, but as the First Estate, the new clergy, where they can labor diligently to produce basically nothing but the “right” opinions to police our collective moral rules. And now they’ve succeeded in creating their own job market (e.g. critical theorists, diversity consultants) out of thin air. Or as Mary Harrington recently put it succinctly: “Once you start seeing the calls for moral re-evaluation of everything as a mass job application on behalf of an ever-expanding surplus of arts graduates it’s difficult to unsee.”
And in this crowded, hyper-competitive world of the bourgeoisie, the surest way to move up is to take someone else down — hence “cancel culture” and the vast, elaborate, ever-changing, mandatory “correct” vocabulary that functions as a way to help weed out any of the competition (or dirty proles) who can’t keep up. Thus Wokeness. …
15. “Wokeness” is still required by law.
… The scope of U.S. federal antidiscrimination statutes that grew out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have already made the core facts of what people think of as “Wokeness” the law of the land. This includes the concept that all disparities are due to discrimination (“disparate impact”), the requirement that employers relentlessly police private speech that could be in any way offensive to any “protected class” (to prevent a “hostile work environment”), and “affirmative action” in hiring. …
For example, if any employee refuses for whatever reason to refer to another employee by their chosen gender pronouns, the entire company is in real danger of being held liable for violation of Title IX and Title VII by permitting discrimination on the basis of sex … Or at least so the company must assume, because the potential financial penalties are far too high to risk it. … The safest path through this regulatory mess is simply to hire a very large HR department staffed with “experts” in all these rules and let them handle it. …
Practically speaking, this means any claim by conservative politicians that they will put an end to Wokeness if elected to office is pure theater. Without addressing the structure of the law, none of the forces at play in the workplace will reverse on their own …
But unless these politicians are willing to take on the politically suicidal task of reforming the Civil Rights Act (practically holy writ in American society due to having tackled a genuinely great moral wrong), nothing they do will have any significant impact on the concrete incentives at play. So it’s a safe bet that they will just posture rhetorically and pass another tax cut instead.
16. Money is still power.
Those who live outside places like Washington D.C. or San Francisco might hear the word “philanthropy” and think it means feeding the hungry, or something naïve and low-brow like that. But “philanthropy” is really a word for how the concentrated power latent in oligarchic money is transformed into applied political and cultural power. In this process, money from concentrations of wealth (today mostly from the tech industry) flows (tax free!) into very special institutions called foundations, where it is laundered of any appearance of corrupt influence or nefarious motive, and then handed out to the vast constellation of non-profit NGOs, activist organizations, think tanks, and academic programs that subsist almost entirely on such money, where it can find a way to “inspire change.” …
This means the foundations have truly tremendous influence over public policy, because every nominally independent think tank, for example, automatically tailors its projects to attract the blessing of their funding. …
Today this means there are massive tides of woke capital hard at work changing the world. … The inertia is now immense. …
But even the foundations, despite their zeal and close relationship with government, may ultimately wield only a shadow of the influence exerted more quietly by titans of finance like the “Big Three” asset managers, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. With a collective $22 trillion in assets under management, and owning an average of 22% of the typical S&P 500 company, these three firms have the power to dictate corporate policy across the world …
Because these firms’ leaders are now woke (or at least see advantage in acting woke), there is now, as Vivek Ramaswamy has explained in detail in Woke, Inc., constant pressure on companies to get woke too, or face losing critical access to capital. …
20. Leviathan has a’woken.
In the end, it may be that “revolution” isn’t quite the right word for Wokeness after all. Real revolutions characteristically replace one elite with another, redistributing their wealth and power. True, this is happening at the individual level, with many a white male manager finding himself suddenly replaced by someone younger and “more diverse.” But at the broader level this is a “revolution” that has been embraced wholeheartedly by the leadership of the elite, who show little fear that they will ever be replaced as a class. Indeed they seem to have adopted woke ideology as a wonderfully useful tool for reinforcing their position while punishing their inter- and intra-class rivals.
Nonetheless, the set of old ideas we call woke will fail and subside, as they always do — because they do not work. A woke society is a weak society. It will succumb to competition or conquest by non-woke societies, or change from within, just as hunter-gatherers have always succumbed to civilization.
You’d be surprised how quickly the social zeitgeist can change.
When Reagan was elected in 1980, most of the hippies shaved their beards, cut their hair, put on suits, ties, and wing-tipped shoes, and marched off to their office at the bank. It was an amazing transformation.
Communist Rules for Revolution
1. Corrupt the young: get them away from religion. Get them interested in sex. Make them superficial; destroy their ruggedness.
2. Get control of all means of publicity. Get peoples minds off their government by focusing their attention on athletics, pornography, plays and other trivialities.
3. Divide people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial matters of no importance.
4. Destroy the people’s faith in their natural leaders by holding the latter up for contempt, ridicule, etc.
5. Always preach true democracy; but seize power as fast and as ruthlessly as possible.
6. Using government extravagance, destroy its credit; produce fear of inflation, rising prices and general discontent.
7. Foment strikes in vital industries; encourage civil disorders and foster a lenient and soft attitude on the part of government toward these disorders.
8. Cause a breakdown of moral virtues; honesty, sobriety, continence, faith in the pledged word, ruggedness.
9. Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext with a view of confiscation of them and leaving the population helpless.
Wokeness is an entirely logical result, indeed it is the only possible result, to reconcile empiricism with a religious belief in equality.
I don't believe that. More like 80%. Systemic racism is easily defined by DIE, affirmative action, colored women (like Fani) in power, our educational, cultural and entertainment industries, unfettered immigration and hundreds more examples of ways in which hatred and racism of all Americans, not just white ones, is on full display.
It didn’t last.
The GeriatriCons on FR don’t want to hear this, but Reagan changed nothing, and things were worse than ever at the end of the 1980’s.
“8. Majorities don’t matter.
Unfortunately for those dreaming of harnessing a majority anti-woke popular will, the truth is that, as statistician and philosopher Nassim Taleb has explained in detail, it’s typically not the majority that sets new societal rules, but the most intolerant minority. “
The GeriatriCons on FR don’t want to hear about this either. They are still clinging to ‘muh Constitutional Conservatism. Regardless of how much it fails and loses.
All societies are ruled by Elites. Popular Sovereignty is a lie.
All Democracies and Republics are fake, and disguised Oligarchies.
Just as all Monarchies, Empires and even Dictatorships are fake, and disguised Oligarchies.
You are going to be ruled by an Oligarchy. Pray that it will be a God-fearing one.
So far, we are afraid to be an intolerant minority.
But things can change.
“We have the best Government money can buy.” - Mark Twain................
You’re going to have to shoot your way out of it.
The left has advanced its cause by this principle for years. It is now the time for conservatives to act by the same principle. No more tolerance or compromises with wokeness. Push back on wokeness with full voice. Take names and take heads. Whether we like it or not, we are in a cultural war. We need to start acting like. We need to be more intolerant of wokeness than they are of us.
Yep.
Every “successful” revolution is simply an exchange of oligarchic rule.
Including American revolution. In the case of US, the elites were benevolent, defended individual rights from government, and realized that the Christian moral consensus was necessary for the republic and constitution to work for society.
In most cases, oligarchs simply replace each other and install their particular brand of despotism.
They changed their appearance but didn’t change their beliefs. They were communists in suits who joined boards and subverted organizations from within.
***9. Cause the registration of all firearms on some pretext with a view of confiscation of them and leaving the population helpless.***
In 1941, the US Congress noticed how the nazis were using gun registration to confiscate guns in invaded countries. It was decided never to register guns in the US.
In 1962 the democrats began to push gun registration and pushed harder in 1968. They are still pushing.
The smartest folks in the room that I listen to do not think that “we” will get it done.
Foreign conquest will get it done.
Only foreign armies will have the fanaticism needed to take out the trash.
The woke will be the elites of every major institution that are lined up and executed during the occupation process.
We are probably a generation away from that result.
Just to add to my post—when great empires like the Roman Empire or the Aztec Empire fell the invaders were welcomed or at least not resisted by the masses.
The average citizen hated their own elites so much they were thrilled the conquering armies were on the way to execute the ruling class.
There already is a ‘Gun Registry’ of sorts, a ‘backwards registry’ starting at the manufacturer then to the retailer, then.............
“Wokeism” - just a cover for another command-and-control scheme that somehow devolves into a strongman rule and the vast majority of its subjects being reduced to poverty. Another distinction from outright socialism without a difference.
One man, one vote, one way, one time - until the inevitable revolution that may either provide a road to freedom or just a new tyrant moving into the Maximum Leader’s former domicile.
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