Thursday, July 29, 2021

Do the "woke" believe any of it? Some further reflections


Some further reflections on wokeness and whether or not the woke believe in their own bullshit ideology. This also ties in to the question whether they are consciously evil, honestly deluded or just plain irrational. For some time, I operated on the assumption that the SJWs don´t believe a word of what they were saying, that the whole woke BS is just a power play or sorting mechanism through which the elite can "cancel" its competitors. 

As a commentator on this blog pointed out, though, while wokeness is indeed a sorting mechanism, why *this* particular mechanism? Two generations ago, the sorting mechanism may have been to mimic the mores of the White Anglo upper and upper middle class. And two generations before that, you had to *be* White Anglo upper and upper middle class to even be considered for elite promotion. So why exactly does the present sorting mechanism emphasize belief in 57 genders, CRT or censorship of "COVID disinfo" rather than, say, equity feminism, colorblindness or censorship of anti-Zionism? 

On second thoughts, I think it´s obvious that the woke *do* believe in their ideology *on some level*. It´s the formal ideological reflection of certain very definite class or stratum interests. Like all other formal ideologies, it combines deliberate BS with false consciousness. It reflects both the "sociolect" of the elite and its honest delusions. Of course, the latter becomes less and less possible to sustain as the elite and its system slides towards its inevitable destruction. This is the phase we´re in now, which probably explains why regular globo-liberalism with its attendant left-liberal "causes" has gone mad, becoming more and more shrill and cultish in the process. It probably is both evil, honestly delusional, irrational *and* elitist, all at the same time. 

Note that I said "formal" ideology and "believe at some level". We can compare wokeness to Communism. In the Soviet Union, the only way to make a career was to pretend to believe in Communism, join the Communist Party, make all the obligatory genuflections and denunciations, etc. Of course almost nobody after a certain point *really* believed in, say, Lenin´s Communism or the formal ideology of the Brezhnevite CPSU. (Internationalism, working class unity, dialectics, and so on.) But note that when Communism fell, almost half of the Russians still voted for the Communist Party in free elections! The reason, I think, is that the *real* ideology of (post-Lenin) Soviet Communism came to the fore after the fall of the USSR: Russian nationalism, in which a global great power is administered by a centralized bureaucracy, with some input from loyal technocrats and military men. This is what all those evil Russians really believed in all those years. Note also the salient fact that the Communists were eradicated in Estonia, but remained in power in Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania by simply changing their moniker (and their poglavniks). Obviously because the formal ideology of world peace and proletarian internationalism was actually hiding a militant but statist form of nationalism and/or Pan-Slavism. 

In the same way, SJW ideology has its ideological BS and underneath it, its real substance: the promotion of "multi-cultural" globo-liberalism within a hybrid neo-liberal/bureaucratic system dominated by a certain kind of managerial elite groups. It would be interesting to delve more deeply into exactly how this dynamic works itself out in practice. Thus, the "logical" globo-liberal position on "race" should be to promote a White-Jewish-East Asian alliance, but it seems the latter group have been dumped into the politically incorrect gutter. Note also how Blacks and Muslims are used by storm troopers by the globo-elites, but play a token role at best further up the hierarchy. (It´s interesting to note that neither Obama nor Harris are "real" Black Americans, for instance.) Finally, note how the young and easily impressionable (and probably stoned) are also used as sturmabteilung (and cannon fodder) in a culture revolution-like frenzy, probably because they *really do* believe all the BS they´ve been fed by their superiors (what a "youth rebellion"!). I mean, why else would they "transition", for instance? In the same manner, the most self-destructive and bizarre actions and statements on the European side of wokeness (none mentioned here) are always young activists who on some level probably think they are saving the world by their actions, not *simply* playing for power in a hierarchy (although that´s probably also involved in some cases). 

With these somewhat marginal notes, I end for today. 


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