I can't help but think that this entire "woke" ideological movement is in the end ironically just the latest tactic and attempt by oligarchy to maintain power and control through age old divide and conquer tactics. The one thing that the woke "social justice warriors" seem to show very little interest in is working to dismantle the depredations of neoliberal capitalism and it's war machine - given they spend so much time narcissitically navel gazing while developing and obsessing over their latest precious, endlessly aggrieved, designer, micro-identities. No need to worry about a replay of the class consciousness that manifested in Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vests in France, or the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign - if people are left fighting with each other over "what a woman is" and worried about being "cancelled" and perhaps fired from their job for simply having an unauthorized "opinion" about the world. In practical everyday terms Woke is an ideological structure that supports, rather than challenges, the most powerful interests in society - which is why it is embraced by all of Academia, all of MSM, by all of the major Corporations and big NGO's, all the Western governments, right down to my local YMCA. Woke my be "theoretically" revolutionary - but in practical terms it is incredibly regressive and reactionary.
This essay conflates thoughtful radical, socialist, and feminist theories - that critique the injustices in society and defend whole classes of people denied their full humanity based on their race, sex and/or ecomomic class - advocating for positive change from the bottom up through the struggles of ordinary working people; with post- modernism, rooted in the closed walls of academia and which denies objective reality, is mired in subjectivity and an extreme form of individualism , obsesses on language and dismantles everything in a nihilistic fashion. One has nothing to do with the other and in fact they are the exact opposite. Can we really compare a Marx, a Eugene Debs, a Simone de Beavuor, a Martin Luther King, to a Judy Butler? I don’t think so.
I hope you will write a part 2 article with more instructions on the last 3 paragraphs. Other than sending someone a link to a RLS article, how do I "disarm," "redirect," or "expose" flaws, errors, and mistakes in these underlying assumptions? I'm out of my depth!
On target. We must organize as SWMWA, steeped in natural law and common sense, in order to gain power and force these revolutionary bastards to retreat. States outlawing sex surgeries for children is a start. Arrests would be better. Riducule helps as long as it is matched with alternative media power. Complete non-participation in anything owned by the woke overlords and support for our own people and systems is probably the strongest action we can take. https://livingagoodlifechurch.wordpress.com/inspiration/. And this: https://livingagoodlifechurch.wordpress.com/interactive-workshop/
If critical theory + postmodernism really are an acid that dissolves everything, then that acid can be used on itself, and should be. "By your own words I will judge you." So far, I haven't seen anyone come close to doing a decent job of that. Further develop the theories specifically to target itself (and _only_ itself), while using reason and truth to strengthen and support reason and truth, plus further shine light on critical theory + postmodernism. Not only would this be tremendously enlightening, it would be tremendously entertaining.
As I was growing up in university town, Madison, Wisconsin, I heard my friends with professor parents talking about the "publish or perish" theme of getting tenure in their teaching jobs. The topics needed to have "zing" if they were going to be published, and often the politically oriented departments fostered radicalism, if only in this writing. I went to school with the sons and daughters of those scribbling parents. Their fathers (usually the moms worked at home back then) wrote all kinds of Leftist, socialist political diatribes, all from the comfort of well-appointed homes in University Heights, where most of the academic families lived, so my friends could attend West Senior High, where the number of AP classes offered suited and the milieu was "right." (no concerns regarding the drugs and underage drinking at their house parties) They never lived the utopia they published on, in the glass houses. Those who headed departments were often close to nervous breakdowns, I heard from my friends. University campuses evolved to a new level of other-planet-ness as the sexed body went out of fashion.
While this is good as far as it goes, like many who focus on post-modernism and CRT etc, they miss that this all emanates from Marxism, an innately revolutionary, Utopian mysticism. It is based on a larger mysticism, Hegel's dialectic which was updated by Marcuse in his perverse and not so interesting intellectual emissions. One could say that we live in Herbert Marcuse's world.
They lie, cheat, steal and will use force when they can get away with it. They will only be stopped by an actual counter-revolution. They basically sought to overtake the means of 'cultural production' by targeting the major institutions in our society and our elites. And they accomplished that mission by gutting it out. Millions of activists and dedicated political operatives worked for years to bring this about.
Funnily, Joe McCarthy was correct, and there were others at the time who were trying to fight the Marxists in our midst. But that's all been shoved down the memoryhole. But in fact, Joe McCarthy was the first victim of cancel culture. Anyone shocked by this statement is welcome to read, Blacklisted by History, by M. Stanton Evans, a serious and legendary historian of the communist movement in the U.S. You will find out that our surrender back then is how they gained so much ground over the next 70 years.
Next time you want to use the term 'McCarthyism' or 'Red Baiting' or 'the Red Scare', realize you are reinforcing the suppression of how we got here. And what the correct reaction is to marxists. Banishment. We are not required to tolerate revolutionaries. The constitution is not a suicide pact.
The comical thing about the radical version of Post Modern standpoint theory is that when a speaker declares that all truth claims are merely an expression of individual perspectives, that claim is in itself just an expression of his individual perspective. And in fact, most other people disagree with the speakers' indefensible claim that there is no objective reality. Furthermore, it is simple to prove that the speaker himself does not believe in his claim. If he did, he would probably not bother eating as it involves the objectively real need to take in objectively real food into his objectively real body. Either way, whether or not he acknowledges that there are realities outside himself that pre-existed him and will outlast him, he will end up dead like all the rest of us.
The whole ideological history featuring Marx, Marcuse, the Postmodernists and all those intellectual scumbags is neither wrong nor unimportant, but in practice it's like that old Star Trek episode where the USS Enterprise comes across a bunch of space hippies who don't engage in their reasonable arguments and instead behave like insufferable children. Woke people don't care about truth: they behave the way they do because like a spoiled brat who wants candy from a weak-willed parent, it works. And unlike civil debate, it's as easy as it is effortless: the Woke person doesn't have to care about nitty-gritty arguments their opponent likely spent lots of time studying any more than a five-year-old has to care about Marcuse's essay on Repressive Tolerance.
To put it basically: we must treat the Woke like the boys treat Cartman in that South Park episode, "Eric Cartman is Dead," where everybody pretends he's dead after he ate all the KFC chicken skins. But on a societal level.
..."wokeness aims to win socially by attacking the legitimacy, moral authority, credibility, social status, and public standing of their opponents. They gain control of the public conversation by placing themselves in the position of being perceived as the person who is to be taken seriously, believed, differed to, listened to, and seen as a good person."
This is a central point! We need to find strategies for counteracting this particular set up! I am focusing most of my attention currently on figuring out how to "disrupt and deconstruct" this manipulation. Most of the time it is based on triangulation of a mythical group of victims that the woke person is supposedly saving from the person she is attacking. Frequently there are no members of the designated victim demographic in the room, and most of the time the woke person completely misrepresents the perspectives of the real people who make up that demographic. This whole manipulation is a perfect example of what the woke call "a discourse that supports systems of power."
I think that this quote makes a strong contribution to current discourse that would help if more people understood it:
"The alloy of Critical Theory and postmodernism that we typically call wokeness posits that power dynamics are at play in every social interaction, and that no social structure, convention, institution, or arrangement is exempt from these dynamics. Once Critical Theory and postmodernism become fused, it creates a worldview that deconstructs, dismantles, and subverts everything it touches."
The first sentence is more important. "What do you mean by woke?" is a common question you see on the internet, and on Twitter. Your answer, "Woke = CT + Pomo" is the best I've seen. I'll be using it (with attribution, when I have space).
On the solutions though...I honestly don't see one. I think that the share of the population which has irreversibly internalized wokeness has reached critical mass in most Western societies (certainly the US, Canada, UK, EU, Scandinavia, AUS/NZ...), and can not be stopped. I don't think there are currently enough people with the necessary levels of rationality to restore society to the functional equivalent of the pre-woke 1990s now, even if somehow, "Wokeness" was broken completely, and everyone decided that "back to the 90s" was a reasonable goal. The people under 40 are simply too Mal-educated, and too inexperienced to master even the simple skills needed to run a 1990s version of the US.
The only "solution" I see to this situation is for the sane and virtuous people to disengage from societies to the extent possible, get away from the clusters of Wokies, and watch as they inevitably collapse their societies. It's a Galt's Gulch situation, unfortunately, but we all have to go Galt in our own ways.
I spent a day arguing with someone over whether objective reality existed. The example was...a rose. The typical literary line of "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." The counter argument was...well, what if someone had never encountered a rose? To them the rose would be whatever they are told the rose is; and since not everyone has encountered the rose: we can never have a true final definition of what a 'rose' is because we can't all agree on it. The fact that our conception of what a rose is, through language, has no bearing on the actual rose itself was irrelevant: only the experience itself mattered.
Post-modernists do not believe in objective truth, and believe objective truth is entirely unreachable. Therefore all that matters is systems and how we construct them with language. Thus the battle over whether sex/gender are real/social constructs is ALL that matters to a post-modernist. I had a different debate with the same person over whether sex and gender were different (and when we should debate both) and he claimed that the definition of sex changed over time (since kids can't produce gametes and many elderly people can't also create gametes). Therefore: my definition of sex was suboptimal and useless.
The only way to argue with a post-modernist is to NOT argue with them, and instead discuss the issue with bystanders. Ask someone who doesn't believe that language is the height of debate about truth and convince them of the problem is the only solution. It's mind bogglingly infuriating.
Good observations. When arguing with wokeness, calling out mistakes and contradictions rather than making personal attacks against the (probably well-intentioned) activist does seem like the best strategy.
I'll employ this in my personal life. (e.g. "So you're saying that Jewish people are white and therefor white supremacist according to CRT? Even though there's history of American white supremacists committing hate crimes against Jews? And a history of European anti-semites committing genocide against Jews... asserting that they're an impure race? I'm just having a hard time following this thinking. I'm just wondering... is that particular definition of white supremacy... anti-semitic?")
I can't help but think that this entire "woke" ideological movement is in the end ironically just the latest tactic and attempt by oligarchy to maintain power and control through age old divide and conquer tactics. The one thing that the woke "social justice warriors" seem to show very little interest in is working to dismantle the depredations of neoliberal capitalism and it's war machine - given they spend so much time narcissitically navel gazing while developing and obsessing over their latest precious, endlessly aggrieved, designer, micro-identities. No need to worry about a replay of the class consciousness that manifested in Occupy Wall Street, the Yellow Vests in France, or the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign - if people are left fighting with each other over "what a woman is" and worried about being "cancelled" and perhaps fired from their job for simply having an unauthorized "opinion" about the world. In practical everyday terms Woke is an ideological structure that supports, rather than challenges, the most powerful interests in society - which is why it is embraced by all of Academia, all of MSM, by all of the major Corporations and big NGO's, all the Western governments, right down to my local YMCA. Woke my be "theoretically" revolutionary - but in practical terms it is incredibly regressive and reactionary.
This essay conflates thoughtful radical, socialist, and feminist theories - that critique the injustices in society and defend whole classes of people denied their full humanity based on their race, sex and/or ecomomic class - advocating for positive change from the bottom up through the struggles of ordinary working people; with post- modernism, rooted in the closed walls of academia and which denies objective reality, is mired in subjectivity and an extreme form of individualism , obsesses on language and dismantles everything in a nihilistic fashion. One has nothing to do with the other and in fact they are the exact opposite. Can we really compare a Marx, a Eugene Debs, a Simone de Beavuor, a Martin Luther King, to a Judy Butler? I don’t think so.
I hope you will write a part 2 article with more instructions on the last 3 paragraphs. Other than sending someone a link to a RLS article, how do I "disarm," "redirect," or "expose" flaws, errors, and mistakes in these underlying assumptions? I'm out of my depth!
On target. We must organize as SWMWA, steeped in natural law and common sense, in order to gain power and force these revolutionary bastards to retreat. States outlawing sex surgeries for children is a start. Arrests would be better. Riducule helps as long as it is matched with alternative media power. Complete non-participation in anything owned by the woke overlords and support for our own people and systems is probably the strongest action we can take. https://livingagoodlifechurch.wordpress.com/inspiration/. And this: https://livingagoodlifechurch.wordpress.com/interactive-workshop/
If critical theory + postmodernism really are an acid that dissolves everything, then that acid can be used on itself, and should be. "By your own words I will judge you." So far, I haven't seen anyone come close to doing a decent job of that. Further develop the theories specifically to target itself (and _only_ itself), while using reason and truth to strengthen and support reason and truth, plus further shine light on critical theory + postmodernism. Not only would this be tremendously enlightening, it would be tremendously entertaining.
As I was growing up in university town, Madison, Wisconsin, I heard my friends with professor parents talking about the "publish or perish" theme of getting tenure in their teaching jobs. The topics needed to have "zing" if they were going to be published, and often the politically oriented departments fostered radicalism, if only in this writing. I went to school with the sons and daughters of those scribbling parents. Their fathers (usually the moms worked at home back then) wrote all kinds of Leftist, socialist political diatribes, all from the comfort of well-appointed homes in University Heights, where most of the academic families lived, so my friends could attend West Senior High, where the number of AP classes offered suited and the milieu was "right." (no concerns regarding the drugs and underage drinking at their house parties) They never lived the utopia they published on, in the glass houses. Those who headed departments were often close to nervous breakdowns, I heard from my friends. University campuses evolved to a new level of other-planet-ness as the sexed body went out of fashion.
While this is good as far as it goes, like many who focus on post-modernism and CRT etc, they miss that this all emanates from Marxism, an innately revolutionary, Utopian mysticism. It is based on a larger mysticism, Hegel's dialectic which was updated by Marcuse in his perverse and not so interesting intellectual emissions. One could say that we live in Herbert Marcuse's world.
They lie, cheat, steal and will use force when they can get away with it. They will only be stopped by an actual counter-revolution. They basically sought to overtake the means of 'cultural production' by targeting the major institutions in our society and our elites. And they accomplished that mission by gutting it out. Millions of activists and dedicated political operatives worked for years to bring this about.
Funnily, Joe McCarthy was correct, and there were others at the time who were trying to fight the Marxists in our midst. But that's all been shoved down the memoryhole. But in fact, Joe McCarthy was the first victim of cancel culture. Anyone shocked by this statement is welcome to read, Blacklisted by History, by M. Stanton Evans, a serious and legendary historian of the communist movement in the U.S. You will find out that our surrender back then is how they gained so much ground over the next 70 years.
Next time you want to use the term 'McCarthyism' or 'Red Baiting' or 'the Red Scare', realize you are reinforcing the suppression of how we got here. And what the correct reaction is to marxists. Banishment. We are not required to tolerate revolutionaries. The constitution is not a suicide pact.
Really great article!
The comical thing about the radical version of Post Modern standpoint theory is that when a speaker declares that all truth claims are merely an expression of individual perspectives, that claim is in itself just an expression of his individual perspective. And in fact, most other people disagree with the speakers' indefensible claim that there is no objective reality. Furthermore, it is simple to prove that the speaker himself does not believe in his claim. If he did, he would probably not bother eating as it involves the objectively real need to take in objectively real food into his objectively real body. Either way, whether or not he acknowledges that there are realities outside himself that pre-existed him and will outlast him, he will end up dead like all the rest of us.
The whole ideological history featuring Marx, Marcuse, the Postmodernists and all those intellectual scumbags is neither wrong nor unimportant, but in practice it's like that old Star Trek episode where the USS Enterprise comes across a bunch of space hippies who don't engage in their reasonable arguments and instead behave like insufferable children. Woke people don't care about truth: they behave the way they do because like a spoiled brat who wants candy from a weak-willed parent, it works. And unlike civil debate, it's as easy as it is effortless: the Woke person doesn't have to care about nitty-gritty arguments their opponent likely spent lots of time studying any more than a five-year-old has to care about Marcuse's essay on Repressive Tolerance.
To put it basically: we must treat the Woke like the boys treat Cartman in that South Park episode, "Eric Cartman is Dead," where everybody pretends he's dead after he ate all the KFC chicken skins. But on a societal level.
All correct. The woke also call all opposition to their agenda "genocide". It's all manipulative language you cannot debate
So people who witness acts of racism, injustices and indeed are victims themselves should keep their mouths shut?
..."wokeness aims to win socially by attacking the legitimacy, moral authority, credibility, social status, and public standing of their opponents. They gain control of the public conversation by placing themselves in the position of being perceived as the person who is to be taken seriously, believed, differed to, listened to, and seen as a good person."
This is a central point! We need to find strategies for counteracting this particular set up! I am focusing most of my attention currently on figuring out how to "disrupt and deconstruct" this manipulation. Most of the time it is based on triangulation of a mythical group of victims that the woke person is supposedly saving from the person she is attacking. Frequently there are no members of the designated victim demographic in the room, and most of the time the woke person completely misrepresents the perspectives of the real people who make up that demographic. This whole manipulation is a perfect example of what the woke call "a discourse that supports systems of power."
Nice essay, Colin -
I think that this quote makes a strong contribution to current discourse that would help if more people understood it:
"The alloy of Critical Theory and postmodernism that we typically call wokeness posits that power dynamics are at play in every social interaction, and that no social structure, convention, institution, or arrangement is exempt from these dynamics. Once Critical Theory and postmodernism become fused, it creates a worldview that deconstructs, dismantles, and subverts everything it touches."
The first sentence is more important. "What do you mean by woke?" is a common question you see on the internet, and on Twitter. Your answer, "Woke = CT + Pomo" is the best I've seen. I'll be using it (with attribution, when I have space).
On the solutions though...I honestly don't see one. I think that the share of the population which has irreversibly internalized wokeness has reached critical mass in most Western societies (certainly the US, Canada, UK, EU, Scandinavia, AUS/NZ...), and can not be stopped. I don't think there are currently enough people with the necessary levels of rationality to restore society to the functional equivalent of the pre-woke 1990s now, even if somehow, "Wokeness" was broken completely, and everyone decided that "back to the 90s" was a reasonable goal. The people under 40 are simply too Mal-educated, and too inexperienced to master even the simple skills needed to run a 1990s version of the US.
The only "solution" I see to this situation is for the sane and virtuous people to disengage from societies to the extent possible, get away from the clusters of Wokies, and watch as they inevitably collapse their societies. It's a Galt's Gulch situation, unfortunately, but we all have to go Galt in our own ways.
Thanks for this article. It was like a trip into someone’s exhausting brain that never stops.
I spent a day arguing with someone over whether objective reality existed. The example was...a rose. The typical literary line of "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." The counter argument was...well, what if someone had never encountered a rose? To them the rose would be whatever they are told the rose is; and since not everyone has encountered the rose: we can never have a true final definition of what a 'rose' is because we can't all agree on it. The fact that our conception of what a rose is, through language, has no bearing on the actual rose itself was irrelevant: only the experience itself mattered.
Post-modernists do not believe in objective truth, and believe objective truth is entirely unreachable. Therefore all that matters is systems and how we construct them with language. Thus the battle over whether sex/gender are real/social constructs is ALL that matters to a post-modernist. I had a different debate with the same person over whether sex and gender were different (and when we should debate both) and he claimed that the definition of sex changed over time (since kids can't produce gametes and many elderly people can't also create gametes). Therefore: my definition of sex was suboptimal and useless.
The only way to argue with a post-modernist is to NOT argue with them, and instead discuss the issue with bystanders. Ask someone who doesn't believe that language is the height of debate about truth and convince them of the problem is the only solution. It's mind bogglingly infuriating.
Good observations. When arguing with wokeness, calling out mistakes and contradictions rather than making personal attacks against the (probably well-intentioned) activist does seem like the best strategy.
I'll employ this in my personal life. (e.g. "So you're saying that Jewish people are white and therefor white supremacist according to CRT? Even though there's history of American white supremacists committing hate crimes against Jews? And a history of European anti-semites committing genocide against Jews... asserting that they're an impure race? I'm just having a hard time following this thinking. I'm just wondering... is that particular definition of white supremacy... anti-semitic?")