Excellent analysis as always. The part in which you describe the Woke religion as subverting the concepts of vice and virtue is especially chilling; I’ve lost friends to this cult, as I’m sure many other readers have, the final straw to our degenerating relationship occurring whenever I started trying to get my life together – again, an experience other readers no doubt can empathize with.
But while this leftist notion of virtuous self-destruction does indeed act as a kind of inbuilt population control, it seems worth mentioning that it is also testament to how utterly disposable the managerial class view their conscripts as. Not only will they force their adherents into psychological, intellectual, and emotion serfdom, they are willing to morally and spiritually lobotomize them to such a degree that these folks are unlikely to ever recover. And I get that woke morons are insufferable, but that must be a hell I’m not sure too many of us on the sane side of the debate can really imagine.
The purpose of the Leftist Permanent Revolution is...the Leftist Permanent Revolution.
To devote your life to the cause, to "enact change", "make the world a better place", "bend the arc of History", to be a holy and righteous soldier in the cause of Progress and Equality (which has now been rebranded and franchised as Diversity Equity Inclusion). And of course to score some juicy sinecure for proselytizing and payback, financial and otherwise.
Young people with their hearts full of zeal and certitude don't worry about abstractions like the Future, Virtue, or even logic and sense, they worry about those other juicier abstractions that get you more followers and fungible virtue points: battling various evil Isms, centering the marginalized, eradicating the Old, midwifing the New.
The Leftist Permanent Revolution is the post-60s Crusades, a one-stop shop to get your social, psychological, spiritual and career needs all met, and for those simpler younger folk who believe the label on the package, it provides the same basic needs as all prior belief systems: allowing you to get ahead while at the same time making you feel holy special & righteous.
Great writing and analysis, like everything else on your substack. I have found myself revisiting Christianity lately. I had been agnostic about the existence of God and come to view the historical claims about Jesus as doubtful, but . . . wokeism seems so perfectly demonic; it looks like the deliberate creation of an evil genius who made it in order to maximize suffering and destroy life for no reason other than the sheer sociopathic joy of doing so, and wokeism seems so perfectly calibrated to hijack the human mind like a virus and degrade people spiritually until they take delight in their own destruction . . . that I have begun to seriously wonder if there is not a literal devil after all. And if there's a devil, then maybe there is a God?
To paraphrase Bertrand Russell: only those who have enough to eat can afford to be woke. Russell used this with regard to philosophy in general, in that philosophising is a luxury of the well fed upper classes, whereas the poor are too concerned with obtaining their next meal to worry about the finer points of philosophical debate. Wokery is most definitely a luxury of the Global West.
I’m a materialist at heart, in the Marxist sense that material (literally the tangible stuff you eat, sit on, work with) is the substrate (Unterbau) without which nothing else would exist - even virtually. The high voodoo of derivatives, futures and all that other finance mumbo jumbo is only possible because someone, somewhere (generally in the Global South) has produced an actual tangible product which someone in the Global West has bought. Everything else is superstructure on top of this substrate.
Similarly, wokery can only exist as a cultural superstructure on top of those very same “populist” working class ways of life that it so rails against. Basically, the woke are cultural parasites living off the very structures they want to destroy.
"Useful to the managerial class" Indeed. Anyone adopting this religion would be mercilessly crushed by the weight of reality in a free society. This would, of course, be good for them in the long run as living in hyper-reality is unsustainable (to the chagrin of Mark Zuckerberg I'm sure). I would like to think the delta between the woke and everyone else will continue to widen as every behavior that underlies human performance optimization can't be endorsed within wokeism for the reasons you outline. Then again, normies tend to get terrible fitness, nutrition, and cognitive enhancement advice from the incompetent among the credentialed class that are afraid to offend anyone by providing information inconsistent with wokeism. There is a tendency within many professions to not call a spade a spade out of courtesy. Unfortunately, I don't think this is a luxury that can be afforded any longer, especially in the cognitive enhancement/behavioral health space. I'm skeptical that such professionals can provide a valuable service if they're woke, and additionally I'm not sure they can help woke people without addressing their religious beliefs. Doing so is all downside given the state of licensing boards that are vulnerable to capture. Truly one of the great problems of our age...
Very well done, indeed. May your Woke sister realize her madness soon.
It isn't just the schools the Woke use to increase their adherents. It is the entire society, media, business, and more. Woke would be a small academic pothole if not for the money and power of the billionaires that push it for their own personal power.
Are they true believers or just using it as a tool for enslavement? I really wonder about that. Maybe the people behind those like Schwab and Fink and Gates put them in power because they already believed.
Jul 10, 2022·edited Jul 10, 2022Liked by John Carter
Great piece and full of insight but I think that the examination of woke here and elsewhere needs to go further. Maybe I read too much of this stuff, but woke as a religion is fast becoming a cliche. It does not explain enough. We need to determine why at this stage of history a phenomenon that generates aberrant and dysfunctional behaviour becomes not only possible, but necessary for societies like the US.
You rightly point out the implications of woke for fertility. If demography is good for anything, it establishes that fertility is determined across all cultures by the opportunity costs of child-bearing. When these rise, fertility falls. Iran ( a most unwoke country) has pretty serious problems with its fertility rate.
My guess is that the content of woke is simply confected out of junk that has been floating around for generations. It began forming into a coherent phenomenon during the maturation of the post-Cold War economy. It is adapted to meet the needs of a society in which growing numbers cannot realistically expect to earn sufficient income to form or maintain families of the traditional type. The 2008 crisis was the inflection point culturally and politically.
The Clinton/Blair era established social peace in the absence of welfare-capitalism on the basis of cheap consumer credit, capital accumulation through asset bubbles and the promise of upward social mobility through higher education. This has run its course. Western capitalism (North America, Europe and Australasia) no longer enables the masses to enjoy the benefits of secure employment or substantial prosperity. The global mobility of labour makes replacement level fertility irrelevant.
Woke legitimises the family structures and lifestyles of a fragmented society with a swelling number of people who are superfluous. It is all about managing the anomie and dysfunction through the period in which the US and related societies adjust to its changing economy. Feminism managed the reproductive health of female wage-slaves in the 20th c., woke will do the same for the proles and the the sub-proletariat (whose fertility is postponed or somehow frustrated by economic insecurity) in the 21st.
I suspect you convinced your sister more than she's willing to admit. Church of Woke is losing adherents pretty fast. The priests will revert to ritual mumbling as they find no one is listening. We can help them end their misery.
"Woke may seem powerful now, but its worship of illness in all its forms is a crippling handicap. Its only possible destiny is to be replaced by a religion that actually works."
There will be much wreckage to clear, unimaginable lost souls to pray for, bur I predict we will be up for it. Our real task will be to prevent it from happening again, and again, and again.
For that, we need a comprehensive change and approach.
Jul 10, 2022·edited Jul 10, 2022Liked by John Carter
A great piece John.
Also, the Woke is just another cog in the machine to further develop the doom we see spiraling faster and faster....until a day shall come, where those left will wonder, "what did I miss?" As they go by their days now Wokexercising .....
One of the best descriptions of Wokeism I have read, Your analysis was quite thorough. I would differ with you, however on your statement of the collapse of Christianity leaving a spiritual vacuum in the West. I don't believe there is a vacuum, perhaps a temporary void, maybe because many have ceased to believe in a higher being, be it a Christian view or another.
I don't believe that wokeism is spiritual but rather more cult like, there is nothing about it that satisfies one's soul. It may replace an emptiness due to the lack of spirituality in a person but in itself, it is not spiritual. Linking tomorrow as usual @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
Wokeness is good business for pharma, too. Not just with covid. I mean, perpetual psych meds and puberty blockers and everything we hand out like candy to keep people enslaved. People I know who embrace that treadmill end up worse and worse, shadows of themselves, even as they claim to be “finding” themselves.
Also, I find JK Rowling a fascinating case study. Already has her billions in the bank and doesn’t seem to care if she’s totally maligned by her once-woke allies for sticking to her stance that promoting trans-inclusion is anti-feminist and dangerous to women. I have to give her props for that.
Minor point. You have confused the Shakers with the Oneida community. Shakers were celibate. Sexes had separate housing, even separate stairways. Oneida is the free love commune.
It is instructive too, the similarities between militant jihadism and wokeism, insofar as they both wish to erase history in favor of their worldview. They also are equally dour. Wokeism might ultimately kill more people.
Thank you, John. Your insights and clarity are inspiring, however horrific the context. I can only hope with enough of us, with concerted action we can not just survive but thrive in this, our awakening. It's going to be a group effort of trust and faith.
Excellent analysis as always. The part in which you describe the Woke religion as subverting the concepts of vice and virtue is especially chilling; I’ve lost friends to this cult, as I’m sure many other readers have, the final straw to our degenerating relationship occurring whenever I started trying to get my life together – again, an experience other readers no doubt can empathize with.
But while this leftist notion of virtuous self-destruction does indeed act as a kind of inbuilt population control, it seems worth mentioning that it is also testament to how utterly disposable the managerial class view their conscripts as. Not only will they force their adherents into psychological, intellectual, and emotion serfdom, they are willing to morally and spiritually lobotomize them to such a degree that these folks are unlikely to ever recover. And I get that woke morons are insufferable, but that must be a hell I’m not sure too many of us on the sane side of the debate can really imagine.
The purpose of the Leftist Permanent Revolution is...the Leftist Permanent Revolution.
To devote your life to the cause, to "enact change", "make the world a better place", "bend the arc of History", to be a holy and righteous soldier in the cause of Progress and Equality (which has now been rebranded and franchised as Diversity Equity Inclusion). And of course to score some juicy sinecure for proselytizing and payback, financial and otherwise.
Young people with their hearts full of zeal and certitude don't worry about abstractions like the Future, Virtue, or even logic and sense, they worry about those other juicier abstractions that get you more followers and fungible virtue points: battling various evil Isms, centering the marginalized, eradicating the Old, midwifing the New.
The Leftist Permanent Revolution is the post-60s Crusades, a one-stop shop to get your social, psychological, spiritual and career needs all met, and for those simpler younger folk who believe the label on the package, it provides the same basic needs as all prior belief systems: allowing you to get ahead while at the same time making you feel holy special & righteous.
Great writing and analysis, like everything else on your substack. I have found myself revisiting Christianity lately. I had been agnostic about the existence of God and come to view the historical claims about Jesus as doubtful, but . . . wokeism seems so perfectly demonic; it looks like the deliberate creation of an evil genius who made it in order to maximize suffering and destroy life for no reason other than the sheer sociopathic joy of doing so, and wokeism seems so perfectly calibrated to hijack the human mind like a virus and degrade people spiritually until they take delight in their own destruction . . . that I have begun to seriously wonder if there is not a literal devil after all. And if there's a devil, then maybe there is a God?
To paraphrase Bertrand Russell: only those who have enough to eat can afford to be woke. Russell used this with regard to philosophy in general, in that philosophising is a luxury of the well fed upper classes, whereas the poor are too concerned with obtaining their next meal to worry about the finer points of philosophical debate. Wokery is most definitely a luxury of the Global West.
I’m a materialist at heart, in the Marxist sense that material (literally the tangible stuff you eat, sit on, work with) is the substrate (Unterbau) without which nothing else would exist - even virtually. The high voodoo of derivatives, futures and all that other finance mumbo jumbo is only possible because someone, somewhere (generally in the Global South) has produced an actual tangible product which someone in the Global West has bought. Everything else is superstructure on top of this substrate.
Similarly, wokery can only exist as a cultural superstructure on top of those very same “populist” working class ways of life that it so rails against. Basically, the woke are cultural parasites living off the very structures they want to destroy.
"Useful to the managerial class" Indeed. Anyone adopting this religion would be mercilessly crushed by the weight of reality in a free society. This would, of course, be good for them in the long run as living in hyper-reality is unsustainable (to the chagrin of Mark Zuckerberg I'm sure). I would like to think the delta between the woke and everyone else will continue to widen as every behavior that underlies human performance optimization can't be endorsed within wokeism for the reasons you outline. Then again, normies tend to get terrible fitness, nutrition, and cognitive enhancement advice from the incompetent among the credentialed class that are afraid to offend anyone by providing information inconsistent with wokeism. There is a tendency within many professions to not call a spade a spade out of courtesy. Unfortunately, I don't think this is a luxury that can be afforded any longer, especially in the cognitive enhancement/behavioral health space. I'm skeptical that such professionals can provide a valuable service if they're woke, and additionally I'm not sure they can help woke people without addressing their religious beliefs. Doing so is all downside given the state of licensing boards that are vulnerable to capture. Truly one of the great problems of our age...
i always ask my “woke” friends… “to where are we progressing to?” what does the end result look like? and of course, they never have the answer.
Very well done, indeed. May your Woke sister realize her madness soon.
It isn't just the schools the Woke use to increase their adherents. It is the entire society, media, business, and more. Woke would be a small academic pothole if not for the money and power of the billionaires that push it for their own personal power.
Are they true believers or just using it as a tool for enslavement? I really wonder about that. Maybe the people behind those like Schwab and Fink and Gates put them in power because they already believed.
Great piece and full of insight but I think that the examination of woke here and elsewhere needs to go further. Maybe I read too much of this stuff, but woke as a religion is fast becoming a cliche. It does not explain enough. We need to determine why at this stage of history a phenomenon that generates aberrant and dysfunctional behaviour becomes not only possible, but necessary for societies like the US.
You rightly point out the implications of woke for fertility. If demography is good for anything, it establishes that fertility is determined across all cultures by the opportunity costs of child-bearing. When these rise, fertility falls. Iran ( a most unwoke country) has pretty serious problems with its fertility rate.
My guess is that the content of woke is simply confected out of junk that has been floating around for generations. It began forming into a coherent phenomenon during the maturation of the post-Cold War economy. It is adapted to meet the needs of a society in which growing numbers cannot realistically expect to earn sufficient income to form or maintain families of the traditional type. The 2008 crisis was the inflection point culturally and politically.
The Clinton/Blair era established social peace in the absence of welfare-capitalism on the basis of cheap consumer credit, capital accumulation through asset bubbles and the promise of upward social mobility through higher education. This has run its course. Western capitalism (North America, Europe and Australasia) no longer enables the masses to enjoy the benefits of secure employment or substantial prosperity. The global mobility of labour makes replacement level fertility irrelevant.
Woke legitimises the family structures and lifestyles of a fragmented society with a swelling number of people who are superfluous. It is all about managing the anomie and dysfunction through the period in which the US and related societies adjust to its changing economy. Feminism managed the reproductive health of female wage-slaves in the 20th c., woke will do the same for the proles and the the sub-proletariat (whose fertility is postponed or somehow frustrated by economic insecurity) in the 21st.
I suspect you convinced your sister more than she's willing to admit. Church of Woke is losing adherents pretty fast. The priests will revert to ritual mumbling as they find no one is listening. We can help them end their misery.
"Woke may seem powerful now, but its worship of illness in all its forms is a crippling handicap. Its only possible destiny is to be replaced by a religion that actually works."
There will be much wreckage to clear, unimaginable lost souls to pray for, bur I predict we will be up for it. Our real task will be to prevent it from happening again, and again, and again.
For that, we need a comprehensive change and approach.
I hate to say it, but a harsh one!
A great piece John.
Also, the Woke is just another cog in the machine to further develop the doom we see spiraling faster and faster....until a day shall come, where those left will wonder, "what did I miss?" As they go by their days now Wokexercising .....
Another square on the Bullshit Bingo card.....
One of the best descriptions of Wokeism I have read, Your analysis was quite thorough. I would differ with you, however on your statement of the collapse of Christianity leaving a spiritual vacuum in the West. I don't believe there is a vacuum, perhaps a temporary void, maybe because many have ceased to believe in a higher being, be it a Christian view or another.
I don't believe that wokeism is spiritual but rather more cult like, there is nothing about it that satisfies one's soul. It may replace an emptiness due to the lack of spirituality in a person but in itself, it is not spiritual. Linking tomorrow as usual @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/
Wokeness is good business for pharma, too. Not just with covid. I mean, perpetual psych meds and puberty blockers and everything we hand out like candy to keep people enslaved. People I know who embrace that treadmill end up worse and worse, shadows of themselves, even as they claim to be “finding” themselves.
Also, I find JK Rowling a fascinating case study. Already has her billions in the bank and doesn’t seem to care if she’s totally maligned by her once-woke allies for sticking to her stance that promoting trans-inclusion is anti-feminist and dangerous to women. I have to give her props for that.
Minor point. You have confused the Shakers with the Oneida community. Shakers were celibate. Sexes had separate housing, even separate stairways. Oneida is the free love commune.
It is instructive too, the similarities between militant jihadism and wokeism, insofar as they both wish to erase history in favor of their worldview. They also are equally dour. Wokeism might ultimately kill more people.
Thank you, John. Your insights and clarity are inspiring, however horrific the context. I can only hope with enough of us, with concerted action we can not just survive but thrive in this, our awakening. It's going to be a group effort of trust and faith.