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.
Yes, a movement that gets popular with all of pop culture, all the powers that be, and basically everything, is not a movement for radical change. I am inclined to think that the wokesters are mostly children of the ruling class.
It's the success of the idea of the Long March through the Institutions. The far far left woke-ists want to get power and then, for example, eliminate "whiteness" by perhaps such things as eliminating whites from owning private property so they can distribute it to the "historically oppressed and marginalized." They question the very order of the Enlightenment, which is what produced democracy and our republic. Their end goal is inevitably Marxist in that they want to eventually upend everyone who's in power and then control according to their doctrines of "Social Justice."
Whites have always told black ppl there is no racism in the US. That there is only a class issue.
Meanwhile black ppl hv faced slavery and/or legal discrimination for 75% of US 248 year existence.
They currently are 38% of prison population, have never been less that 2X UE rate of whites ever since stats weee complied in 1954, 38%-50% homeless and have 1/10 wealth of white ppl.
It is not narcissistic navel gazing to challenge the society which has produced these results.
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.
Agreed. There is also quite a difference between today's "liberal feminist" (woke) and a "radical feminist" (TERF) - not saying either of them are very helpful to women, but painting all with one brush is unfair.
It's not so much Marxism as neo-Marxism when they left the working class and rebranded the proletariat based on identity. Frankfurt School, Marcuse, Derrik Bell, etc. Yes, Judith Butler is most definitely a pomo neo-Marxist in wanting to queer the binary bc it's overthrowing heteronormitivity, which is the oppressive power structure of the western world. And pomo bc heteronormativity is a meta-narrative that cannot work bc there's no such thing as objective fact like in biology.
She doesn't even understand what she's talking about. Marx was an awful human being who's ideas are mysticism and also were utterly debunked. His followers caused more human suffering for those who lived under it than any other ideology since Marx was alive. MLK effed up his movement after he was seduced by the commies. Eugene Debs never required socialism to call for racial justice. Judy Butler is a hack's hack, and really, she's the best you feminists have. Unless you want to talk about that lunatic Belle Hooks...
I suspect they abandoned the working class because they are mostly members of the upper middle and higher classes. They think that the parental pockets will never turn up empty. They want to tear down all systems, but SanFrancisco proposes that their citizens pay $97K per year for 250 years to each of the African Americans in the city who descended from enslaved people. I was shocked to see that these anti-American radicals expect that our country will still exist and still be wealthy in 250 years. It is remarkable that our Constitution has guided us two and a half centuries, a fact that wokesters don't even know. But they take it for granted that the Mom and Dad they disrespect so much will still be here with pockets full of money for whatever the little darlings want. Incredible.
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!
James Lindsay's New Discourses site goes into a lot of depth about how to identify the rhetorical games and underlying beliefs of the cult. It has helped me to get some distance from them and see them as being like robots repeating a script and playing a lot of head games and hostile interpersonal ones. We do need to move on though, to figuring out what we can do to reverse their power over the country generally.
I agree. I liked the essay until the end. I would love an essay showing potential dialogues. I'll try a stab at it. Given the post-modernists lack of belief in objective reality, or reason, it's time to resurrect Nancy Reagan's advice: Just Say No. As in, "No, you don't convince me (that men and women are interchangeable/that the police should be defunded/that it is racist to drive a truck/whatever). It must be nice and comfy believing the views of the most powerful people in the country, but those views are wrong. And while you may think you are virtuous in sharing those beliefs, you are wrong. It may be convenient to your interests to pretend that is true, but it is hurtful to many vulnerable people (state the obvious harms)." Never beg for what you have a right to, in this case, the freedom to assert what is true. The PoMo sets herself up as the arbiter of truth, and you don't even need to argue why she's wrong, since she won't listen to reason anyway. Just assert what is true - the PoMo is just pulling power moves and counting on you to be afraid to speak up. But I'd really like to read examples by someone more articulate than I. Hoping for a part 2.
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.
They were under pressure to publish and managing a bunch of male narcissists who want to push them out of the department chair. The Ivory Tower is a dog eat dog world.
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.
This is what most people miss - that the whole thing is intentional. These woke people are not "mistaken," they are cult followers. This Alinsky-inspired philosophy was designed to take apart society in clearly articulated steps, and they play a very long game. The insane fallout is not a "stupid" accident at all, it's the goal: country-wide destabilization. The end game? The one thing these true believers are in denial of? The ultimate power grab as they themselves are lined up against the wall and shot.
Winner, winner, chicken-dinner. Read some of the other comments on this thread, so much bloviating apologia for the Left coming from some 'mindless middle' based on zero facts and no empiricism. And they think they are the 'enlightened ones', lol. Such people hold the revolutionaries jackets while they burned down our society. The only minor corrective I'd offer you is that Alinsky is a rather minor character compared to Marcuse. Alinsky was an enabler on the streets, but the big ideas did not come from him.
I agree, Alinsky was only one of a long line of Bullshevik psychopaths. However he does have modern name recognition, so sometimes it helps to call it out (Hillary identifies Alinsky as her "mentor" after all - people need to wake up to what that means.) The biggest problem is all the "nice" people out there who just can't get their heads around evil. So many exhibit the mind-numbing belief: "If I am good to others, they will be good to me." As the saying goes, "a Liberal is just a Conservative who hasn't been mugged yet."
Alinsky defined what it means to be a "community organizer" and it informed Obama's politics as well. In a way, he was an early critic of the Left's performative politics, preferring to use any tactic to 'win' at all costs. This is where Alinksy is pernicious, his support and promotion of the absolutely most corrupt and ugly and low politics was so important. Hilary was really never much of a serious player. Her low ethics and obvious cravenness got her thrown off the Watergate committee, where she was a young staffer. She's a non-entity politically, just another jr activist type who would work for actual leaders. Bill gives her a platform, which she of course exploits to her advantage fully.
I agree that Hillary was never much of a serious political player. However she isn't just craven - she is seriously psychopathic, and that is always rewarded in [their] system. (F*cking "Madame President"? Gag.) Hillary is one of many psychopaths of course, but she exhibited just enough acumen (perhaps by marrying Rockefeller Bill) to put her into positions where she has been able to - encouraged to - destroy entire countries at will. (Not to mention the child trafficking.) She may be a non-entity politically - perhaps [they] gave her the Alinsky book to read, just to catch her up to speed? [They] love perverted, sick deviants on [their] side, and she was happy to oblige? Who the hell knows for sure how she got there, but I would never dismiss her as insignificant. Alinsky is the method - but the worse the individuals are, the more they are rewarded in [their] system: the system that doesn't actually give a damn about Marxism or Bolshevism or Alinskyism - they just use those methods because they work very effectively on good people.
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 get similarly discouraged at times. Then I remind myself that most successful revolutions are advanced by a small percentage of radicals. That was true of the American Revolution and is still true of the woke cult takeover. It can also be true for those of us who are determined to take back our country.
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?")
Assuming good intentions probably does describe some of the woke. My impression is that many of them are narcissists, however, who want to be seen as good people while they are tearing others down to build themselves up.
I would agree that’s true of the voices leading the charge on social media. Unfortunately it’s branching out. More rational, liberal voices are also absorbing bad ideas like the assertion that white supremacy is everywhere at all times and in every interaction. These liberals get mad when you ask for empirical evidence and provide specific examples that disprove the claim.
Ironically, they’re “crying wolf”, and diminishing the impact of calling out racism.
I agree that many liberal people are climbing on board with this. Most of my friends are Democrats and most of them actually say they are "Progressive." When I probed this self-identification I discovered that they had no idea what "Progressive" currently means. These individuals watch liberal media exclusively, believe everything they are told by those media, and actively avoid exposure to other perspectives. The only reason they know that there is a woke cult is that I have told them there is, and they appear skeptical about my credibility.
I live in Portland, so I don't interact with many people who do not define themselves as liberal Dems. With acquaintances, I find that most people start acting nervous if I bring up alternate perspectives on subjects like "gender affirmative care" or other destructive programs promoted by the woke cult. Their eyes shift in the direction of the nearest door, and they say "Well...I don't know..." Within a few more seconds they shut down the conversation with some rude comment to me that presents them as "caring about people, supporting vulnerable populations, etc." (While simultaneously reprimanding me for being the opposite).
I have received an education in these interactions about how fear-based many people are with respect to the exercise of independent thinking. The guideline for most amounts to conformity with party line positions.
I've had similar interactions, though they were not as aggressive. Friends and family generally get a little pissed and frantic if I challenge something like "gender affirming care". Some are able to wait for evidence, some jump to the conclusion that I'm being prejudiced by criticizing the shortcomings of "gender affirming care". In trying to persuade them, it's been more of an incremental approach with the latter group. I've tried laying a groundwork of acknowledgement that objective truths exist, not just subjective truth/personal truth. It's crazy, I know, but just getting someone to acknowledge the idea that truth exists outside of an individuals head is apparently as painful as asking them to pull out their own tooth.
Chomsky made an interesting observation in that he doesn't consider "woke" activism left wing. I assume that because his axis seems to be maximizing individual rights vs. centralized authority. When you think about it, woke activism and the identity politics it rests on is supremely authoritarian. It actively tries to destroy ideas and careers of dissenters. It doesn't welcome diversity of opinion. In that sense, it is very "conservative" or rigid to an orthodoxy. Agree or disagree. I just thought it was an interesting perspective.
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.
Yes, a movement that gets popular with all of pop culture, all the powers that be, and basically everything, is not a movement for radical change. I am inclined to think that the wokesters are mostly children of the ruling class.
Completely agree.
It's the success of the idea of the Long March through the Institutions. The far far left woke-ists want to get power and then, for example, eliminate "whiteness" by perhaps such things as eliminating whites from owning private property so they can distribute it to the "historically oppressed and marginalized." They question the very order of the Enlightenment, which is what produced democracy and our republic. Their end goal is inevitably Marxist in that they want to eventually upend everyone who's in power and then control according to their doctrines of "Social Justice."
Whites have always told black ppl there is no racism in the US. That there is only a class issue.
Meanwhile black ppl hv faced slavery and/or legal discrimination for 75% of US 248 year existence.
They currently are 38% of prison population, have never been less that 2X UE rate of whites ever since stats weee complied in 1954, 38%-50% homeless and have 1/10 wealth of white ppl.
It is not narcissistic navel gazing to challenge the society which has produced these results.
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.
Agreed. There is also quite a difference between today's "liberal feminist" (woke) and a "radical feminist" (TERF) - not saying either of them are very helpful to women, but painting all with one brush is unfair.
It's not so much Marxism as neo-Marxism when they left the working class and rebranded the proletariat based on identity. Frankfurt School, Marcuse, Derrik Bell, etc. Yes, Judith Butler is most definitely a pomo neo-Marxist in wanting to queer the binary bc it's overthrowing heteronormitivity, which is the oppressive power structure of the western world. And pomo bc heteronormativity is a meta-narrative that cannot work bc there's no such thing as objective fact like in biology.
She doesn't even understand what she's talking about. Marx was an awful human being who's ideas are mysticism and also were utterly debunked. His followers caused more human suffering for those who lived under it than any other ideology since Marx was alive. MLK effed up his movement after he was seduced by the commies. Eugene Debs never required socialism to call for racial justice. Judy Butler is a hack's hack, and really, she's the best you feminists have. Unless you want to talk about that lunatic Belle Hooks...
I suspect they abandoned the working class because they are mostly members of the upper middle and higher classes. They think that the parental pockets will never turn up empty. They want to tear down all systems, but SanFrancisco proposes that their citizens pay $97K per year for 250 years to each of the African Americans in the city who descended from enslaved people. I was shocked to see that these anti-American radicals expect that our country will still exist and still be wealthy in 250 years. It is remarkable that our Constitution has guided us two and a half centuries, a fact that wokesters don't even know. But they take it for granted that the Mom and Dad they disrespect so much will still be here with pockets full of money for whatever the little darlings want. Incredible.
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!
James Lindsay's New Discourses site goes into a lot of depth about how to identify the rhetorical games and underlying beliefs of the cult. It has helped me to get some distance from them and see them as being like robots repeating a script and playing a lot of head games and hostile interpersonal ones. We do need to move on though, to figuring out what we can do to reverse their power over the country generally.
I agree. I liked the essay until the end. I would love an essay showing potential dialogues. I'll try a stab at it. Given the post-modernists lack of belief in objective reality, or reason, it's time to resurrect Nancy Reagan's advice: Just Say No. As in, "No, you don't convince me (that men and women are interchangeable/that the police should be defunded/that it is racist to drive a truck/whatever). It must be nice and comfy believing the views of the most powerful people in the country, but those views are wrong. And while you may think you are virtuous in sharing those beliefs, you are wrong. It may be convenient to your interests to pretend that is true, but it is hurtful to many vulnerable people (state the obvious harms)." Never beg for what you have a right to, in this case, the freedom to assert what is true. The PoMo sets herself up as the arbiter of truth, and you don't even need to argue why she's wrong, since she won't listen to reason anyway. Just assert what is true - the PoMo is just pulling power moves and counting on you to be afraid to speak up. But I'd really like to read examples by someone more articulate than I. Hoping for a part 2.
Especially when logic and rationality themselves are just dismissed as "white dominant culture."
I await that article!
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.
That is what I thought as well
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.
Why were they close to nervous breakdowns?
They were under pressure to publish and managing a bunch of male narcissists who want to push them out of the department chair. The Ivory Tower is a dog eat dog world.
I'm glad I don't live or work at a university. I've wished at times I'd stayed in an academic job, but now I feel like I dodged a bullet.
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.
This is what most people miss - that the whole thing is intentional. These woke people are not "mistaken," they are cult followers. This Alinsky-inspired philosophy was designed to take apart society in clearly articulated steps, and they play a very long game. The insane fallout is not a "stupid" accident at all, it's the goal: country-wide destabilization. The end game? The one thing these true believers are in denial of? The ultimate power grab as they themselves are lined up against the wall and shot.
Winner, winner, chicken-dinner. Read some of the other comments on this thread, so much bloviating apologia for the Left coming from some 'mindless middle' based on zero facts and no empiricism. And they think they are the 'enlightened ones', lol. Such people hold the revolutionaries jackets while they burned down our society. The only minor corrective I'd offer you is that Alinsky is a rather minor character compared to Marcuse. Alinsky was an enabler on the streets, but the big ideas did not come from him.
I agree, Alinsky was only one of a long line of Bullshevik psychopaths. However he does have modern name recognition, so sometimes it helps to call it out (Hillary identifies Alinsky as her "mentor" after all - people need to wake up to what that means.) The biggest problem is all the "nice" people out there who just can't get their heads around evil. So many exhibit the mind-numbing belief: "If I am good to others, they will be good to me." As the saying goes, "a Liberal is just a Conservative who hasn't been mugged yet."
Alinsky defined what it means to be a "community organizer" and it informed Obama's politics as well. In a way, he was an early critic of the Left's performative politics, preferring to use any tactic to 'win' at all costs. This is where Alinksy is pernicious, his support and promotion of the absolutely most corrupt and ugly and low politics was so important. Hilary was really never much of a serious player. Her low ethics and obvious cravenness got her thrown off the Watergate committee, where she was a young staffer. She's a non-entity politically, just another jr activist type who would work for actual leaders. Bill gives her a platform, which she of course exploits to her advantage fully.
I agree that Hillary was never much of a serious political player. However she isn't just craven - she is seriously psychopathic, and that is always rewarded in [their] system. (F*cking "Madame President"? Gag.) Hillary is one of many psychopaths of course, but she exhibited just enough acumen (perhaps by marrying Rockefeller Bill) to put her into positions where she has been able to - encouraged to - destroy entire countries at will. (Not to mention the child trafficking.) She may be a non-entity politically - perhaps [they] gave her the Alinsky book to read, just to catch her up to speed? [They] love perverted, sick deviants on [their] side, and she was happy to oblige? Who the hell knows for sure how she got there, but I would never dismiss her as insignificant. Alinsky is the method - but the worse the individuals are, the more they are rewarded in [their] system: the system that doesn't actually give a damn about Marxism or Bolshevism or Alinskyism - they just use those methods because they work very effectively on good people.
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.
I get similarly discouraged at times. Then I remind myself that most successful revolutions are advanced by a small percentage of radicals. That was true of the American Revolution and is still true of the woke cult takeover. It can also be true for those of us who are determined to take back our country.
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?")
"(probably well intentioned)" - have you argued with a leftist? Do we live on the same planet?
What do you mean? Are you saying leftists have bad intentions?
I guess I would just say that most people believe they're doing the right thing in whatever cause they get behind. Right or left.
Assuming good intentions probably does describe some of the woke. My impression is that many of them are narcissists, however, who want to be seen as good people while they are tearing others down to build themselves up.
I would agree that’s true of the voices leading the charge on social media. Unfortunately it’s branching out. More rational, liberal voices are also absorbing bad ideas like the assertion that white supremacy is everywhere at all times and in every interaction. These liberals get mad when you ask for empirical evidence and provide specific examples that disprove the claim.
Ironically, they’re “crying wolf”, and diminishing the impact of calling out racism.
I agree that many liberal people are climbing on board with this. Most of my friends are Democrats and most of them actually say they are "Progressive." When I probed this self-identification I discovered that they had no idea what "Progressive" currently means. These individuals watch liberal media exclusively, believe everything they are told by those media, and actively avoid exposure to other perspectives. The only reason they know that there is a woke cult is that I have told them there is, and they appear skeptical about my credibility.
I live in Portland, so I don't interact with many people who do not define themselves as liberal Dems. With acquaintances, I find that most people start acting nervous if I bring up alternate perspectives on subjects like "gender affirmative care" or other destructive programs promoted by the woke cult. Their eyes shift in the direction of the nearest door, and they say "Well...I don't know..." Within a few more seconds they shut down the conversation with some rude comment to me that presents them as "caring about people, supporting vulnerable populations, etc." (While simultaneously reprimanding me for being the opposite).
I have received an education in these interactions about how fear-based many people are with respect to the exercise of independent thinking. The guideline for most amounts to conformity with party line positions.
I've had similar interactions, though they were not as aggressive. Friends and family generally get a little pissed and frantic if I challenge something like "gender affirming care". Some are able to wait for evidence, some jump to the conclusion that I'm being prejudiced by criticizing the shortcomings of "gender affirming care". In trying to persuade them, it's been more of an incremental approach with the latter group. I've tried laying a groundwork of acknowledgement that objective truths exist, not just subjective truth/personal truth. It's crazy, I know, but just getting someone to acknowledge the idea that truth exists outside of an individuals head is apparently as painful as asking them to pull out their own tooth.
Chomsky made an interesting observation in that he doesn't consider "woke" activism left wing. I assume that because his axis seems to be maximizing individual rights vs. centralized authority. When you think about it, woke activism and the identity politics it rests on is supremely authoritarian. It actively tries to destroy ideas and careers of dissenters. It doesn't welcome diversity of opinion. In that sense, it is very "conservative" or rigid to an orthodoxy. Agree or disagree. I just thought it was an interesting perspective.