I'm basically in agreement with most of this. But I'm still hopeful that the seeds of Wokeness have in fact been sown, seeds that you yourself have described here.
Specifically, your point 13--"The youth are still coddled and mentally broken."--is entirely true. And yes, this does suggest that many of the trends that have brought us to our present situation are likely to intensify for the foreseeable near future. But here's the thing: coddled, mentally broken people tend not to be very good at their jobs.
I think we're starting to see fault lines emerge, not along ideological/political/partisan lines, or even along cultural lines, but along lines of sheer competence. Take the Biden Regime, for crying out loud. These people do not come across as having the slightest clue how to accomplish anything more complicated than ordering DoorDash. They certainly don't have the faintest insight into just how complex the system is that makes something like DoorDash possible. Container ships starting to pile up outside Los Angeles? Have them park far enough offshore that no one can see them from land. Problem solved! Having trouble finding enough truck drivers? Time to fire tens of thousands of them for not getting their shots!
We're hearing about senior software engineers who haven't written a line of code in over a year because they're spending so much time managing the emotional and psychological breakdowns of new hires who aren't doing any real work either. I mean, yes, there is a lot of built up capital in Big Tech, but somebody has to do the actual work at some point.
Medical schools have started punishing physicians who insist that biological sex is relevant to medical outcomes. (Hint: it is.) So we're having trans patients report to emergency rooms having disastrous outcomes because nobody thought that it was important to ask whether the patient's biological sex might be relevant to whether said patient could be pregnant.
The Revolution isn't over. . . but weak, unstable, incompetent people can't even be trusted to enforce a modicum of mob rule. All of the Leftist movements that have started down the road of struggle sessions have eaten themselves alive. Activists become so focused on inter-elite competition that they forget to do their damn jobs.
The silver lining here isn't that this creates opportunities for opposition to make real advances. It does, but I'm no more optimistic about the state of viable opposition than you. Rather, anything that can't go on forever usually doesn't. Wokeness isn't going to end because of some eternal, opposing social or cultural forces. It's going to collapse under its own weight. That or just slam into the brick wall of reality. The food supply chain can do entirely without woke political commissars. Woke political commissars cannot do without the food supply chain for more than a day or two.
My own observation is that in actual practice, "wokeness" metastasizes as utter incompetence and hatred of talent. You see this not only in the hostility to academic excellence, but in the hostility to minority groups, mainly Jews and Asians, who have outperformed. (Who are then dubbed "white adjacent".)
It doesn't escape me that both of those groups are not infrequent victims of violence largely by some of the marginalized groups. And that the white woke overclass does all it can to hide that fact.
BTW, I have friends younger than me in NYC in the art world who grew up in "safe New York" and took "safe New York" to be default. They now quietly complain that getting on trains and using their electronics, as they once safely did a bit ago, is no longer possible. Of course, much that unsafety is the result of De Blasio's left-wing ideology, now put on steroids by people like district attorney Alvin Bragg.
But will my friends have the courage, even if to themselves, to make that connection? Because making that connection means practically traducing their political philosophies and ideologies.
Yeah, I thought some of these same thoughts as I read this. I might be a little more jaded than you, thinking that those coddled and addled youth really can't survive things like violence, fear, or subjugation, and certainly do not have the wherewithal to re-populate at the rate required to sustain. Woke just might fail because of too much soy.
Then again, every time I tell my wife 'something that can't go on forever, won't', she just looks at me like "Ok, Boomer."
I’m reminded of the old saying “One cannot deny reality forever.” Therein lies the ultimate collapse of wokeness: internal contradictions cannot be sustained.
Maybe. But the USSR lasted 70 years. North Korea is coming on 70 too. Internal contradictions can last a long time. And if the way Wokeness fails is via the food supply crumbling, it won't just be the woke who starve. It'll be everyone.
It can’t last forever, but it can decay indefinitely. “Collapse” as promoted by wishful alt-righters and libertarians alike will not really happen because societies tend towards any option available over anarchy, as stakeholders act to conserve wealth and status.
Nothing can decay "indefinitely". Things can decay for a long time, true. Far longer than seems possible at the outset. We may not be able to see the end from the beginning. We may not even be able to tell when the beginning has definitely arrived. But there does come an end. There must. Or, at least, there always has.
Still, I agree that "'Collapse' as promoted by wishful alt-righters and libertarians" probably won't happen, because yes, there is a lot of wishful thinking here. It will take longer to get there than such types seem to hope, and will probably take longer than they suggest.
Still. In AD 450, the population of Rome was at least half a million people, possibly as many as a million By AD 700, it was less than fifty thousand. And who now remembers the glories of Nineveh, Hattusa, Teotihuacan, Persepolis, or Uruk?
And in less drastic terms, where are the Bourbons? If we include events through Waterloo as part of the paroxysm of the fall of the Ancien Régime, it cost at least six million lives before all was said and done. Granted, France is still around. But the "France" that emerged in 1816 was not at all the same place as the France that had existed at the end of 1788. That was only a single lifetime.
Come to that, where are the Hapsburgs? The Hohenzollerns? The Romanovs? The Ottomans? They were all crowned heads of Europe in August 1914, rulers of empires that counted perhaps 280 million people as subjects. By the end of 1918, less than five years but perhaps 20 million corpses later, even those heads that survived had lost their thrones forever.
So yes, I agree that it is unlikely that things will move from what passes for ordinary life today straight to a Mad Max hellscape. Possibly not ever, and certainly not without a lengthy transition period. But just because visions of Thunderdome seem manifestly silly doesn't mean that terrible things can't happen to an awful lot of people in a frighteningly short amount of time.
Agreed. Awful things will most certainly happen (they are happening now). But no regime is forever. Indefinite decay is a useful oxymoron for the inaction that surrounds a power’s social decline.
It’s interesting that all you examples of ancient collapses took place over hundreds of years (okay, we don’t know much about the Bronze Age collapse). No Roman thought the Roman Empire had collapsed. The city’s shrinking population was an indicator of bad times, perhaps, but Rome was eternal.
On the other hand, the modern and extremely bloody regime changes you listed— revolutions, as World War 1 was a war for revolution— all took place under the wonderful auspices of our progressive friends.
Yup. But I don't think these people are that organized. Those millions will die because the people in charge never learned how to maintain the system that keeps us all alive. And they despise those who have.
My kid was writing a paper on classes in victorian society and while I was proofreading for her I posed the question: so what are all these people eating? She hadn't thought about it. I said: maybe you'd better. Please look up information on farmers and fishermen and what class they belonged to and incorporate that into your final draft. Speaking of indoctrinating the youth. I take my work seriously.
Those are merely the useful idiots ushering in global-technofascist-neofeudal rule. The competent will be enslaved and made to do the bidding of the elite using the model of the Chinese “social credit system”.
Although, being a pessimist, I agree with much of this essay, I refer to your previous essay on laughter being the kryptonite weapon against totalitarianism. I’m a gay artist, classically liberal, anti-woke. I live in Portland, Oregon. The hermetically-sealed woke monoculture here is stifling. BUT. In November my partner and I attended one of two sold-out performances by the notoriously deplorable non-person comedian Louis CK (I think he’s the greatest comedic genius of our time.) A sign of the sick cultural/political scene in Portland: there was no sign advertising the show on the marquee outside of perhaps the largest theater-venue here (for fear of woke white Twitter mobs?), and we had to be screened for weapons and reveal what was in our pockets before entering. (Vaccination cards/neg Covid test and masks also required).
I expected the audience to consist almost entirely of misogynistic males. Not so! My partner remarked that it seemed like heteronormative date-night of mostly Gen X, Millenials, and Gen Z, and quite a few Boomers like us. Probably it’d be accurate to describe the crowd as hipster, but I’m really too old (70) to know what that means any more. (Of course, the music playing during seating was classic Boomer: Stones and Led Zeppelin.) Many, many women, maybe 40-45%? 🤯 Even lesbian couples— including an overweight couple who resembled Holly Near groupies. It didn’t appear that they were all self-loathing dupes of the Patriarchy, but what do I know? A couple of younger gay guys, one with neck tattoos and pink glitter nail polish, sat directly in front of us. Evidently, there are a sizable number of people in Portland who enjoy laughing, aren’t too self-important, and have a sense of forgiveness—who knew?! Perhaps there are a lot of Gen Z who have escaped coddling? The vibe of the crowd was like what drew us to Portland 20 years ago, but which I rarely feel here any more. An outrageous, obscene and brilliant performance, I was laughing so hard for more than an hour that I was sweating. I came out feeling not so alone, culturally and politically, and with some hope.
Ah yes, Louis CK, anti-woke comedian. The same Louis CK who said that white people deserve to have their asses beat by black people due to racism. VERY anti-woke.
Wow! By far the best analysis of the woke phenom that I’ve seen yet - and I’ve been trying to track it for awhile. And so well written, too. Major kudos to you.
That said, I think you may be assuming too much stability in the years ahead. If we have a second Trump victory, having a repeat of our prior round of reactive woke fervor might be better than whatever might come with the new, even more intense wave of enmity that seems sure to arise. Not to mention, the destructive chaos so expertly sowed by Trump himself, which seems to have only grown worse in its ambitions since 2020.
Alternatively, regardless of whatever party wins the Presidency, another huge stock market crash would change everything. Or a war. Etc.
Even if everything does remain relatively stable, I think that woke political commitment may be shallower than you think. True, the legal incentives and affiliated bureaucracies will likely remain intact, and that’s a huge driver. But, in my experience, the foundation world runs on pretty short cycles of fashionable (within that world) models of how to revitalize devastated communities, end white supremacy, or whatever the cause du jour happens to be. There’s always so much over-promised that it never works as advertised. So, soon there’s a collective move on to the next new thing.
Similarly, a lot of people seem to reflexively jump on whatever ideological bandwagon is trending on their favorite social media feeds at any given time, and then shift to the next thing as soon as a new wave comes along. And to keep the passions sufficiently stoked, there needs to be change. Recycling an older theme tends not to work so well.
But, that’s all speculation about what may be coming down the pike, as opposed to your very thorough accounting of what’s already in place — which, at the moment, does seem more compelling. I just suspect that there may be much more volatility ahead.
I’m founder of an organization fighting woke ideology. There’s def a thawing of the discourse. People are getting braver. But that’s a far cry from de-institutionalization, which is much harder than affecting a shift In political mood. Thanks for the analysis.
On another comment, I alluded to what I think are some of the very real future dangers of the left's overreach. We may not have a French revolutionary terror. We may skip the whole episode and because of economic chaos, have something like a violent, conservative counterrevolution in the Iranian mold, or because of progressive incompetence, we could lose a war to a disciplined power like China and in the aftermath of a loss, see a reform government captured by an ascendant right.
I want to emphasize that I'm not one of those leftists who constantly claims that we're having a Weimar moment---I am on the political right and a nationalist, and I think that in general both qualities are benign---but I do think that reality tends to reassert itself and that being more realistic, a hard right is likely to spring from the ashes of failure rooted in delusional leftist thinking.
In "The Road to Serfdom," Hayek basically argues that centrally planned, progressive institutions turn brutal because progressive planning requires the empowering a small number of central planners and the promotion as central planners of the most hard-hearted people who are willing to ignore individual losses in pursuit of collective goals. Our bureaucracy is already so empowered and so staffed, and our progressive moment is so detached from reality that its only possible legacy aside from failure might be the creation of these all-powerful bureaucracies ready to be occupied and put to brutal use by the leaders of a backlash.
I agree that a far more likely scenario is the rise of a hard right movement that will capitalize on the ruins wrought by the COVID catastrophe currently ravaging the West. Yes, I do expect a considerable die-off and much on-going illness due to these unsafe gene therapies (whether created through incompetence or malice has yet to be proven but I think I know where many of us stand). As a result of the death and illness, the evil mandates and the vax passports that are surely the goal of all this, all Western societies are staring at unprecedented social chaos and the complete loss of trust in the media as well as all the systems that keep a society running (medical, legal, financial, educational etc.).
There could not be a better invitation for a Hitler-like strongman to step in and clean up the mess.
I'll be looking forward to your forthcoming essays (book?) on: What can we (try to) DO? - both under the very likely (economic - super-inflation, etc.) chaos-scenarios as well as assuming (still RINO-dominated) GOP "winning big" on 11/8/22.
My feeling is that avantgarde of Woke "revolution" is extremely opportunistic & (personal) power oriented. - So our best hope might be to focus on demonstrating to them that their bets on more wokeness is no longer sure thing.
Also, granting your point #17 - I'd still love to see your comments on Trump vs. DeSantis.
Really one of the best and smartest pieces on the Woke zeitgeist I've read this year.
It is so refreshing also after listening for years to liberals whistling past the graveyard with the usual "oh, they're just kids, they'll grow out of it," or "well, maybe the pendulum has swung too far but it will swing back."
I feel like people who are on Team Blue or even just your generic Big City liberal have had to engage in some very high level of cognitive dissonance or just plain denial as to the cultural and social changes that have overtaken the country: "Well, maybe that train rushing down the track I'm tied to will stop or derail or turn around." ;)
As someone with a background in the arts, in particular literature, I knew something had changed when I had lunch in 2015 with a small book publisher who told me he couldn't publish my book because I was a white male (so is he!); or more recently, a good friend in film told me about a petition by (I guess) young black people in documentary film to stop ken burns from making a film about muhammad ali, because burns has no right to tell a "black" story. when I gently expressed shock at the notion of any artist trying to censor another artist, my friend (a 50yr old gen exer!) said I sounded like I would have supported Jim Crow too!
What this points to for me (and hopefully pertains to the essay) is that almost every big city liberal (which pretty much describes just about everyone in art and culture) has such an ingrained reflexive fear of never ever appearing as a republican or bigot (which they consider synonyms) and also thanks to point 11 (Long marches are long) that it just seems gauche and suspicious for them to ever disagree with anything that any black person (or other minority) says on any subject (no matter how silly), that most modern liberals have no language to push back against any of this. (I guess maybe this is a long-winded way of saying that people with strong beliefs always defeat people with weak or vague or no beliefs.)
And, just to continue my last point (sorry for the length!), point 11 aka The Long March has been a smashing success (my succinct summation of the zeitgeist is: After a 50-yr campaign, the New Left has finally seized the means of cultural production), Marcuse and his coalition of the most miserable have made all of Western culture, civilization, history, its achievements and institutions, reek of feces. Thanksgiving now is about genocide, the Founding Fathers are just white supremacists, Washington and Jefferson are only slaveholders, and everyone from Plato and Aristotle to Tolstoy and Hitchcock are "pale, stale and male", all locked in a pillory and scheduled for abolishment to make room for "diverse voices".
And to get to point 12 and finally wrap up (The young are woke as hell), for anyone under 30ish (esp the young people who will be writing books, music, films and TV for the next generation), Critical Theory morality is their worldview and fundamentalism, the rock their church is built on. They really truly and passionately believe that the entire purpose of art, culture and politics is "rectifying historical injustices" aka atoning for the sins of our fathers, and anyone who doesn't profess this is automatically a suspicious heretic who needs to be cast out.
So, yes (in case you couldn't tell), I agree with Lyons: this new religion is still young and growing and gaining strength, and it will most likely dominate our culture for the foreseeable future.
But Ken Burns DID make his Ali documentary, and it's proudly shown by PBS, possibly the most woke organization in the entire US: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/muhammad-ali
oh im sure he did, my entire knowledge of it came from my friend and i discussing a petition against it based on his race and his right to make the film because of his race. my point was more about the use of race or racial classification as an artistic criterion, not about anything to do with Ken Burns or his work per se.
I absolutely agree with you. Marcuse was poison. I read him, heard him speak in college and met him after the speech. Marcuse and his acolytes were nuts in 1972 (including Angela Davis who I also met) and we are reaping the results. This new religion, the Critical Theory morality you identified, is in some ways like the heresies and schisms of the early Church - which were myriad, lasted a long time and spread widely. In the end, though. they disappeared or were wiped out. It will not be quick or easy, and we will have to fight to win.
Not to defend Marcuse, but I believe the present Critical Theory morality has more roots in the Postmodern philosophy of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Rorty. And I believe their ideas are deeply nihilistic, not Marxist or socialist. There was a Frankfurt school of Marxist thought that employed the Critical Theory approach of 'problematizing' everything into Marxist terms (that's about as much as I know of it). And it seems to me that it was after the fall of the USSR that the Left simply gave up on Marxist thinking and picked up Postmodern Critical Theory.
You raise a very good point, and after a few decades of academic leftists working in the lab to prepare and perfect their toxic stew, it is hard to separate the older Crit Theory tradition from the French Nihilists of the 60s and later...I think Crit Theory pre-dates and provides the larger framework for this 'movement', it also has the Marxist pedigree and laid the overarching mental architecture defining all of Western Civ as a binary battle bw Oppressor and Victim (and/or Bourgeois v Proletariat, among others), with the purpose of those in opposition to always be exposing oppression while leading the battle for "liberation" and "emancipation".
The academic Leftists of the 70s/80s took to Foucault and Derrida et al like teenaged groupies to Elvis because it gave their eternal crusade a new and fancy intellectual frisson (American intellectuals have always had a weakness for the French and their outre poses) and because their corrosive nihilism (which was always delivered in enough obfuscating jargon to leave wriggle room for plausible deniability) was like an acid bath used to dissolve all prior thinkers and their ideas. (Every book and idea and tradition is really just insidious hegemonic powers inscribing their knowledge onto your body! Words do not inherently convey any meaning or correspond to any reality, everyone and everything can be anything else you say it is, ergo nothing exists but power and oppressive hierarchies/binaries.)
I think of it as a kitchen-sink approach: anything and everything that would contribute to the vilification and dismantling of all that came before, that allowed the Leftist "theorist" to posit themselves as outside and above looking down on every other field of scholarship (ie "X Studies") was utilized to gain and consolidate power.
You have to give them credit, they've proved once again that a committed band of fanatics (much like the early Christians) with enough time and patience and fundamentalist tunnel vision, can succeed beyond their wildest dreams.
I'm 70, a Boomer and was a hippie back in the day. I voted Democrat until 2000. People do change, but it's not necessarily quick or comfortable. Ask me about Cointel Pro. I will say this, once your eyes are opened, you get how we have been played. Not everyone is susceptible to propaganda and that is reason for hope.
This is an outstanding piece which should be at the very top of peoples' reading lists to understand wokeness.
I would make one addition. Modern liberalism's chief concern is inequality (between certain groups). As liberalism succeeds in reducing these types of inequality, its motivating passion doesn't recede. Therefore it moves to smaller, more obscure and absurd sources of difference with the same zeal as towards legitimate inequalities. Therefore we move from inequality to inequity, and from opposing segregation to concern about "fat shaming". There is no limiting principle to modern liberalism, least of all its own success.
That's a very insightful observation. Perhaps with each round of pushing towards the obscure and absurd a certain portion of the true believers drop off the train and see the game for what it is? Seems to be the case, so maybe there are built-in safety features within the ideology itself.
Yes, that is an essential quality of the progressive movement: it has to keep moving, and it has to look for a 'progressive' direction to go. So, after each forward step there is a pause to 'problematize' something new in society, and then move toward 'solving' that 'problem'. Then on to the next problem, no matter how trivial or absurd it may seem. Only total purification can be accepted (and, of course, there is no end to the process). Naturally, everybody in the movement wants to feel that they are doing something just as vital as their antecedents.
Nazism was also a movement, as Hannah Arendt observed in her book "The Origins of Totalitarianism". Hitler sold Nazism as an ideology but he recognized that an ideological change might reach an end point, and what do you do with your loyal masses after that? So, better to create a movement than pursue a defined ideology. And, as Arendt noted, the masses didn't really care if the Nazi movement changed direction, even abruptly, just as long as there was the exciting feeling of movement.
Wokeism, in my view, is such a movement: endless by design. Nominally 'progressive', but who decides which direction of change is progressive?
Great analysis. I would add only one thing: wokeness will fail eventually for the same reason Marxism did, because it is based on a false view of human nature.
Wokeness posits Man as a smart ape whose behavior can be corrected (rendered sinless) given the right stimulus, thereby ushering in a golden age of equality and righteousness = Heaven on Earth. Contrast this with all 3 Abrahamic faiths, which posit Man as a good but inherently selfish and covetous creature, irredeemable by his own behavior, who's only salvation is in something transcendental. Even a non-believer can recognize sociological differences in these views.
Any governing philosophy built on a false view of Man will collapse eventually, because its policies will be antithetical to human nature. The belief that "defunding the police" would solve crime is an example of this; it fails (and will always fail) because it is contrary to human nature.
Wokeness as a governing philosophy will fail writ-large for the same reason. However, it can certainly do a lot of damage along the way: "defund the police" spiked murder rates nationally last year. You can ask the Hungarians or the Czechs or the Uygurs how bad philosophical models can cause enormous damage to society. However, in the end, Wokeness will fail, just like Marxism did, and for the same reason: it is contrary to Man's nature.
Though this is the information age, and idea transmission/coordination are instantaneous. People can transition between radically different beliefs in the span of a few years. Things happen quicker.
I realize I am quite late to this conversation, but I only found your excellent Substack today and read it & many of the comments here with great interest.
The one thing I've not seen anyone point out when it comes to oppressive top down societies that held on for decades (or more) like the USSR, No. Korea and the CCP is that none of those nations had the Right to Bear Arms. No Second Amendment. It's the Wild Card that's kept the ruling class from dropping the hammer and instead using Woke soft power.
A year-and-a-half after your Substack, it seems to me the soft power is finally wobbling. We see it in the marketplace, as the Narrative masters in Hollywood and the corporate media have lost their mojo and the Woke execs at places like Bud Light, Target, Best Buy, Disney are causing catastrophic Wall Street losses.
I'm curious where you stand. Has your worldview changed at all? Or is what's happening just a Sign O' The Times before the final rug pull? While I still think things look pretty dark, in many ways it's not as bad as it was a year ago. But maybe a year from now it will be twice worse. I have no idea.
One issue is that man's nature is far more malleable today then it ever was in the past. Modern drugs (sex hormones and SSRIs both qualify) and surgery and propaganda techniques (selected for effectiveness by decades of intense viral memetic competition) as well as whatever's causing the generational decline in male testosterone are all already ubiquitous and allow for an anti-human ideology to be far more successful then the past. Human genetic engineering and artificial wombs (which incredibly smart and capable people like Vitalik Buterin are already promoting for gender equity) are technologically on the horizon, and would allow for the effective annihilation of humanity and the indefinite rule of wokeness (one of the most destructive parts of Wokeness is how toxic it is towards normal heterosexual relationships. Since those are needed for societies to reproduce, that would seem to set a limit on how woke things can get over the long term. But artificial wombs remove that constraint)..
Transhumanism is the logical endpoint of the modern view of Man as a smart ape. Rather than conform to our nature in God's image, we will remake our nature in our own image.
It won't work. Man isn't God.
There will always be a John Savage. There will always be Guy Montag. There will always be a Winston Smith. Or to use a more recent movie reference, there will always be a Vincent Freeman.
That's the one consolation as Charon is rowing our society toward our trans-humanist Hades... this too shall pass.
For a less rosy view of resistance to wokeism, refer to the novel Vandenberg (also published as Defiance). Tl;dr...Conservatives have been known to be useless for a long time. The book was published in the early 70s.
I just got back to this comment and saw your reply. Managed to find the novel on Interlibrary Loan. Thanks for the recommendation; it sounds interesting.
Wow ... gasp ... cool down ... try not to slobber with admiration ...
I have read essays of the last 200 years in some languages (is this still an essay?). This is at the top and should be included by Hillsdale et al for emulation in Writing Classes.
I have read comments in many media with shock. The set of comments here below strikes me as the best I have seen yet in my life.
The form is spectacular in structure, sequence of arguments, flow and choice of words, with not one superfluous word. The first half flows like a manifesto and largely like a poem.
The break to the second half helpful as you did include details at least I didn´t know.
I always admire the humility of not quoting those libraries of all-time classics habing flowed into this. Is the author 180 years old, with three lives of reading and thinking?
You will hopefully forgive this commentator for thinking much has been said by other great minds, but this synthesis seems like the essence of the issue to me with many new insightful turns and emphases.
The content has already drawn great comments, so roughly: What about a simplistic perspective?
Wokeness is only one more stage in the growth of The State vs the citizen.
Republican 2025-2028 is the watershed: How brutally will they cut into or weed out non-elect institutions from FBI to EPA, etc., being a mixed bag from blobbies to great libertarian conservatives with innate knowledge of the radix of judaeo-graeco-Christian civilization?
Depending on how much they achieve contrary to N.S. Lyons´ well-founded doubt, the dominant issue afterwards will be: Which mix of soft and hard recession, how much bloodshed and other pro´s and con´s, on the way to the Great Reset I see: A re-founding of the heartlands of the US grounded precisely in the existing Constitution and the Great Western traditions the Founding Fathers worked so hard to bake into it in the half-century from 1760 to 1810.
I wish this text were fed to Daily Wire, Fox, Prager and all those others, even Trump who may need help with it. Nothing much would surprise them, but it deserves national attention in my view as it points so far beyond short-term perspective.
The renaissance of the classical West will grow from the right mix of "deplorables", tough guys and gals, thinkers such as this author united on a moral base.
Dear N.S. Lyons, if ever we have that drink in Texas, I will ask you how you can possibly quote Marcel Pagnol in one of your last essays. I mean, that is really not someone to stumble over ...
1939 #Fascist #Germany or 2022 #Faucist #Amerika? Perhaps #tyranny in Amerika cemented during the 1913 Banker's Coup d'Etat when the FED seized control and its regime was ensured with income tax and the IRS, with election of senators by popular election. The unconstitutional invasion of #BigBrother and the #NannyState into every facet of American life was a "slow frog boiling" process, but here we are today with the #DHS, the name echoes with #Faucist overtones, labeling dissent as treason.
Thanks for this, worth every penny. I am encouraged to read that I am not alone in these thoughts. So many of my age group (boomers) have their head in the sand. They only see political solutions, elect the right people and voila, problems solved. Politics doesn’t solve the problems as it is downstream from culture and the rising culture is scary indeed. Keep writing and speaking your mind and know we our here appreciate it very much. God bless you and keep you.
References to the Long March and the Cultural Revolution seem apt. We see how Maoist “wokeism” was transformed into state-driven capitalism and political authoritarianism and yet the ideology of Maoist “wokeism” today reminds one of East Europeans under Sovietism: everybody pretends and then goes about their business under the radar. One wonders if that is our future.
A superb piece of work. You are correct, the revolution isn't slowing down, it's not even pausing to take a breath. So what will stop it ? The woke successor ideology has a growth pattern of a forest fire or infection rather than that of green shoots, maybe that is the same with all religions, they start slow with years in the wilderness honing their doctrine then if the touch the right fuel at the right time they explode in a break out phase.
But then so does a Ponzi scheme.
Let us judge this new faith on the same rational basis we can use for other religions. Is it (or could it be) a cooperative symboite rather than a consuming parasite for the believers ? Forget about the interior of the doctrines, equality like salvation or redemption can never be measured scientifically anyway. Does the true believer prosper, live longer, is fitter, healthier with more children, defeat enemies in battle ? Need I say more ?
No. Previous religions were memetically selected for symbiosis by their mitochondrial-transmission (parent-to-child) favoring environment. Religions that were too destructive to their host people/societies died out. Advanced communications tech in general and social media in particular make viral (peer-to-peer) transmission overwhelmingly dominant, meaning memeplexes get selected for virulence/transmissibility, rather than symbiosis. Elaborated on at length here:
#9 is absolutely key. No amount of anti-CRT rhetoric or hastily-written legislation will have an impact when education schools are still pumping out activists who go directly into school administration or enforce orthodoxies for new hires while gatekeepers in academia demand ever-more stringent signals of commitment to the cause.
The left understands this. This is why they now require DEI oaths in job applications and interviews along with writing job ads for even regular positions that enforce "centering racial equity" (e.g. https://www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/details.cfm?JobCode=177739246). The explicit goal of the left (openly stated, but somehow poorly understood by many) is to "infuse" their DEI dogma into every aspect of life at work and in the academy so that they can use it as a cudgel against anyone, anytime. It's working.
The right seems completely blindsided by the latest aggressive offensive by the left and barely capable of keeping up with documenting it (Rufo, Sibarium, and Hanania seem to get it, but only Rufo seems to have a popular platform; much more could be done instead of yelling about Dr. Seuss or Mr. Potato Head for hours on end), much less rebutting or opposing. This essay was a breath of fresh air on that side of things and accurately identifies some of the key battlegrounds: gatekeeping institutions like accreditors, long-service government agencies, and personnel across the board.
The next time Rs are in power nationally, they need to learn how to play the long game on the personnel side rather than just ranting and trying (unsuccessfully) to smash things.
You have presented one terrific analysis with so many important items that desperately need to be discussed--it is hard to know where to begin.
Just a few initial thoughts and questions--full of my own biases:
Is the concept of wokeness as a religious belief possibly a response to something deeper, that has been going on in our society for quite some time? I am thinking, in particular, of the idea of ever growing anomie--or the increasing inability of our culture to provide the individual with any type of guidance.
Items 2 ( the void of meaning), item 3 (increasing atomization), item 4 (this atomization as a byproduct of liberal modernity), item 6 (there is no authority or the inability of our contemporary institutions to provide any common metaphysical framework), Item 13 (Youth are coddled and mentally broken)-- all these items seem, to me, related to cultural laxity or the increasing absence of guidance from our culture.
The experience of anomie also seems to lead to, at a minimum, to a profound psychological discomfort and perhaps even mental illness (like depression).
Please, please continue your explorations of this complex beast called wokeness.
I'm basically in agreement with most of this. But I'm still hopeful that the seeds of Wokeness have in fact been sown, seeds that you yourself have described here.
Specifically, your point 13--"The youth are still coddled and mentally broken."--is entirely true. And yes, this does suggest that many of the trends that have brought us to our present situation are likely to intensify for the foreseeable near future. But here's the thing: coddled, mentally broken people tend not to be very good at their jobs.
I think we're starting to see fault lines emerge, not along ideological/political/partisan lines, or even along cultural lines, but along lines of sheer competence. Take the Biden Regime, for crying out loud. These people do not come across as having the slightest clue how to accomplish anything more complicated than ordering DoorDash. They certainly don't have the faintest insight into just how complex the system is that makes something like DoorDash possible. Container ships starting to pile up outside Los Angeles? Have them park far enough offshore that no one can see them from land. Problem solved! Having trouble finding enough truck drivers? Time to fire tens of thousands of them for not getting their shots!
We're hearing about senior software engineers who haven't written a line of code in over a year because they're spending so much time managing the emotional and psychological breakdowns of new hires who aren't doing any real work either. I mean, yes, there is a lot of built up capital in Big Tech, but somebody has to do the actual work at some point.
Medical schools have started punishing physicians who insist that biological sex is relevant to medical outcomes. (Hint: it is.) So we're having trans patients report to emergency rooms having disastrous outcomes because nobody thought that it was important to ask whether the patient's biological sex might be relevant to whether said patient could be pregnant.
The Revolution isn't over. . . but weak, unstable, incompetent people can't even be trusted to enforce a modicum of mob rule. All of the Leftist movements that have started down the road of struggle sessions have eaten themselves alive. Activists become so focused on inter-elite competition that they forget to do their damn jobs.
The silver lining here isn't that this creates opportunities for opposition to make real advances. It does, but I'm no more optimistic about the state of viable opposition than you. Rather, anything that can't go on forever usually doesn't. Wokeness isn't going to end because of some eternal, opposing social or cultural forces. It's going to collapse under its own weight. That or just slam into the brick wall of reality. The food supply chain can do entirely without woke political commissars. Woke political commissars cannot do without the food supply chain for more than a day or two.
My own observation is that in actual practice, "wokeness" metastasizes as utter incompetence and hatred of talent. You see this not only in the hostility to academic excellence, but in the hostility to minority groups, mainly Jews and Asians, who have outperformed. (Who are then dubbed "white adjacent".)
It doesn't escape me that both of those groups are not infrequent victims of violence largely by some of the marginalized groups. And that the white woke overclass does all it can to hide that fact.
BTW, I have friends younger than me in NYC in the art world who grew up in "safe New York" and took "safe New York" to be default. They now quietly complain that getting on trains and using their electronics, as they once safely did a bit ago, is no longer possible. Of course, much that unsafety is the result of De Blasio's left-wing ideology, now put on steroids by people like district attorney Alvin Bragg.
But will my friends have the courage, even if to themselves, to make that connection? Because making that connection means practically traducing their political philosophies and ideologies.
Yeah, I thought some of these same thoughts as I read this. I might be a little more jaded than you, thinking that those coddled and addled youth really can't survive things like violence, fear, or subjugation, and certainly do not have the wherewithal to re-populate at the rate required to sustain. Woke just might fail because of too much soy.
Then again, every time I tell my wife 'something that can't go on forever, won't', she just looks at me like "Ok, Boomer."
I’m reminded of the old saying “One cannot deny reality forever.” Therein lies the ultimate collapse of wokeness: internal contradictions cannot be sustained.
Maybe. But the USSR lasted 70 years. North Korea is coming on 70 too. Internal contradictions can last a long time. And if the way Wokeness fails is via the food supply crumbling, it won't just be the woke who starve. It'll be everyone.
You'll note I didn't say this was going to be pleasant.
There's a solution for that: Eat the Woke.
It can’t last forever, but it can decay indefinitely. “Collapse” as promoted by wishful alt-righters and libertarians alike will not really happen because societies tend towards any option available over anarchy, as stakeholders act to conserve wealth and status.
Nothing can decay "indefinitely". Things can decay for a long time, true. Far longer than seems possible at the outset. We may not be able to see the end from the beginning. We may not even be able to tell when the beginning has definitely arrived. But there does come an end. There must. Or, at least, there always has.
Still, I agree that "'Collapse' as promoted by wishful alt-righters and libertarians" probably won't happen, because yes, there is a lot of wishful thinking here. It will take longer to get there than such types seem to hope, and will probably take longer than they suggest.
Still. In AD 450, the population of Rome was at least half a million people, possibly as many as a million By AD 700, it was less than fifty thousand. And who now remembers the glories of Nineveh, Hattusa, Teotihuacan, Persepolis, or Uruk?
And in less drastic terms, where are the Bourbons? If we include events through Waterloo as part of the paroxysm of the fall of the Ancien Régime, it cost at least six million lives before all was said and done. Granted, France is still around. But the "France" that emerged in 1816 was not at all the same place as the France that had existed at the end of 1788. That was only a single lifetime.
Come to that, where are the Hapsburgs? The Hohenzollerns? The Romanovs? The Ottomans? They were all crowned heads of Europe in August 1914, rulers of empires that counted perhaps 280 million people as subjects. By the end of 1918, less than five years but perhaps 20 million corpses later, even those heads that survived had lost their thrones forever.
So yes, I agree that it is unlikely that things will move from what passes for ordinary life today straight to a Mad Max hellscape. Possibly not ever, and certainly not without a lengthy transition period. But just because visions of Thunderdome seem manifestly silly doesn't mean that terrible things can't happen to an awful lot of people in a frighteningly short amount of time.
Agreed. Awful things will most certainly happen (they are happening now). But no regime is forever. Indefinite decay is a useful oxymoron for the inaction that surrounds a power’s social decline.
It’s interesting that all you examples of ancient collapses took place over hundreds of years (okay, we don’t know much about the Bronze Age collapse). No Roman thought the Roman Empire had collapsed. The city’s shrinking population was an indicator of bad times, perhaps, but Rome was eternal.
On the other hand, the modern and extremely bloody regime changes you listed— revolutions, as World War 1 was a war for revolution— all took place under the wonderful auspices of our progressive friends.
We are collapsing and will continue to collapse. The left turning into an irrational religion is a symptom, not a cause.
^this is an excellent point.
I dunno. They’ve achieved power before and murdered millions before they collapse under their own weight.
Yup. But I don't think these people are that organized. Those millions will die because the people in charge never learned how to maintain the system that keeps us all alive. And they despise those who have.
Truckers are white supremacists!
Farmers are white supremacists!
Longshoremen are white supremacists!
Cops are white supremacists!
At least it will make starving to death a little more satisfying.
My kid was writing a paper on classes in victorian society and while I was proofreading for her I posed the question: so what are all these people eating? She hadn't thought about it. I said: maybe you'd better. Please look up information on farmers and fishermen and what class they belonged to and incorporate that into your final draft. Speaking of indoctrinating the youth. I take my work seriously.
Those are merely the useful idiots ushering in global-technofascist-neofeudal rule. The competent will be enslaved and made to do the bidding of the elite using the model of the Chinese “social credit system”.
Although, being a pessimist, I agree with much of this essay, I refer to your previous essay on laughter being the kryptonite weapon against totalitarianism. I’m a gay artist, classically liberal, anti-woke. I live in Portland, Oregon. The hermetically-sealed woke monoculture here is stifling. BUT. In November my partner and I attended one of two sold-out performances by the notoriously deplorable non-person comedian Louis CK (I think he’s the greatest comedic genius of our time.) A sign of the sick cultural/political scene in Portland: there was no sign advertising the show on the marquee outside of perhaps the largest theater-venue here (for fear of woke white Twitter mobs?), and we had to be screened for weapons and reveal what was in our pockets before entering. (Vaccination cards/neg Covid test and masks also required).
I expected the audience to consist almost entirely of misogynistic males. Not so! My partner remarked that it seemed like heteronormative date-night of mostly Gen X, Millenials, and Gen Z, and quite a few Boomers like us. Probably it’d be accurate to describe the crowd as hipster, but I’m really too old (70) to know what that means any more. (Of course, the music playing during seating was classic Boomer: Stones and Led Zeppelin.) Many, many women, maybe 40-45%? 🤯 Even lesbian couples— including an overweight couple who resembled Holly Near groupies. It didn’t appear that they were all self-loathing dupes of the Patriarchy, but what do I know? A couple of younger gay guys, one with neck tattoos and pink glitter nail polish, sat directly in front of us. Evidently, there are a sizable number of people in Portland who enjoy laughing, aren’t too self-important, and have a sense of forgiveness—who knew?! Perhaps there are a lot of Gen Z who have escaped coddling? The vibe of the crowd was like what drew us to Portland 20 years ago, but which I rarely feel here any more. An outrageous, obscene and brilliant performance, I was laughing so hard for more than an hour that I was sweating. I came out feeling not so alone, culturally and politically, and with some hope.
"I expected the audience to consist almost entirely of misogynistic males."
So you've bought into a fair portion of the propaganda you claim to be immune to.
That was the sort of sarcastic comment that only someone without a sense of humour would miss.
Exactly. Lol
Ah yes, Louis CK, anti-woke comedian. The same Louis CK who said that white people deserve to have their asses beat by black people due to racism. VERY anti-woke.
Wow! By far the best analysis of the woke phenom that I’ve seen yet - and I’ve been trying to track it for awhile. And so well written, too. Major kudos to you.
That said, I think you may be assuming too much stability in the years ahead. If we have a second Trump victory, having a repeat of our prior round of reactive woke fervor might be better than whatever might come with the new, even more intense wave of enmity that seems sure to arise. Not to mention, the destructive chaos so expertly sowed by Trump himself, which seems to have only grown worse in its ambitions since 2020.
Alternatively, regardless of whatever party wins the Presidency, another huge stock market crash would change everything. Or a war. Etc.
Even if everything does remain relatively stable, I think that woke political commitment may be shallower than you think. True, the legal incentives and affiliated bureaucracies will likely remain intact, and that’s a huge driver. But, in my experience, the foundation world runs on pretty short cycles of fashionable (within that world) models of how to revitalize devastated communities, end white supremacy, or whatever the cause du jour happens to be. There’s always so much over-promised that it never works as advertised. So, soon there’s a collective move on to the next new thing.
Similarly, a lot of people seem to reflexively jump on whatever ideological bandwagon is trending on their favorite social media feeds at any given time, and then shift to the next thing as soon as a new wave comes along. And to keep the passions sufficiently stoked, there needs to be change. Recycling an older theme tends not to work so well.
But, that’s all speculation about what may be coming down the pike, as opposed to your very thorough accounting of what’s already in place — which, at the moment, does seem more compelling. I just suspect that there may be much more volatility ahead.
Thank you. And comments where I am accused of predicting too little chaos are a lovely change of pace!
I’m founder of an organization fighting woke ideology. There’s def a thawing of the discourse. People are getting braver. But that’s a far cry from de-institutionalization, which is much harder than affecting a shift In political mood. Thanks for the analysis.
On another comment, I alluded to what I think are some of the very real future dangers of the left's overreach. We may not have a French revolutionary terror. We may skip the whole episode and because of economic chaos, have something like a violent, conservative counterrevolution in the Iranian mold, or because of progressive incompetence, we could lose a war to a disciplined power like China and in the aftermath of a loss, see a reform government captured by an ascendant right.
I want to emphasize that I'm not one of those leftists who constantly claims that we're having a Weimar moment---I am on the political right and a nationalist, and I think that in general both qualities are benign---but I do think that reality tends to reassert itself and that being more realistic, a hard right is likely to spring from the ashes of failure rooted in delusional leftist thinking.
In "The Road to Serfdom," Hayek basically argues that centrally planned, progressive institutions turn brutal because progressive planning requires the empowering a small number of central planners and the promotion as central planners of the most hard-hearted people who are willing to ignore individual losses in pursuit of collective goals. Our bureaucracy is already so empowered and so staffed, and our progressive moment is so detached from reality that its only possible legacy aside from failure might be the creation of these all-powerful bureaucracies ready to be occupied and put to brutal use by the leaders of a backlash.
I agree that a far more likely scenario is the rise of a hard right movement that will capitalize on the ruins wrought by the COVID catastrophe currently ravaging the West. Yes, I do expect a considerable die-off and much on-going illness due to these unsafe gene therapies (whether created through incompetence or malice has yet to be proven but I think I know where many of us stand). As a result of the death and illness, the evil mandates and the vax passports that are surely the goal of all this, all Western societies are staring at unprecedented social chaos and the complete loss of trust in the media as well as all the systems that keep a society running (medical, legal, financial, educational etc.).
There could not be a better invitation for a Hitler-like strongman to step in and clean up the mess.
I'll be looking forward to your forthcoming essays (book?) on: What can we (try to) DO? - both under the very likely (economic - super-inflation, etc.) chaos-scenarios as well as assuming (still RINO-dominated) GOP "winning big" on 11/8/22.
My feeling is that avantgarde of Woke "revolution" is extremely opportunistic & (personal) power oriented. - So our best hope might be to focus on demonstrating to them that their bets on more wokeness is no longer sure thing.
Also, granting your point #17 - I'd still love to see your comments on Trump vs. DeSantis.
BRAVO!
Really one of the best and smartest pieces on the Woke zeitgeist I've read this year.
It is so refreshing also after listening for years to liberals whistling past the graveyard with the usual "oh, they're just kids, they'll grow out of it," or "well, maybe the pendulum has swung too far but it will swing back."
I feel like people who are on Team Blue or even just your generic Big City liberal have had to engage in some very high level of cognitive dissonance or just plain denial as to the cultural and social changes that have overtaken the country: "Well, maybe that train rushing down the track I'm tied to will stop or derail or turn around." ;)
As someone with a background in the arts, in particular literature, I knew something had changed when I had lunch in 2015 with a small book publisher who told me he couldn't publish my book because I was a white male (so is he!); or more recently, a good friend in film told me about a petition by (I guess) young black people in documentary film to stop ken burns from making a film about muhammad ali, because burns has no right to tell a "black" story. when I gently expressed shock at the notion of any artist trying to censor another artist, my friend (a 50yr old gen exer!) said I sounded like I would have supported Jim Crow too!
What this points to for me (and hopefully pertains to the essay) is that almost every big city liberal (which pretty much describes just about everyone in art and culture) has such an ingrained reflexive fear of never ever appearing as a republican or bigot (which they consider synonyms) and also thanks to point 11 (Long marches are long) that it just seems gauche and suspicious for them to ever disagree with anything that any black person (or other minority) says on any subject (no matter how silly), that most modern liberals have no language to push back against any of this. (I guess maybe this is a long-winded way of saying that people with strong beliefs always defeat people with weak or vague or no beliefs.)
And, just to continue my last point (sorry for the length!), point 11 aka The Long March has been a smashing success (my succinct summation of the zeitgeist is: After a 50-yr campaign, the New Left has finally seized the means of cultural production), Marcuse and his coalition of the most miserable have made all of Western culture, civilization, history, its achievements and institutions, reek of feces. Thanksgiving now is about genocide, the Founding Fathers are just white supremacists, Washington and Jefferson are only slaveholders, and everyone from Plato and Aristotle to Tolstoy and Hitchcock are "pale, stale and male", all locked in a pillory and scheduled for abolishment to make room for "diverse voices".
And to get to point 12 and finally wrap up (The young are woke as hell), for anyone under 30ish (esp the young people who will be writing books, music, films and TV for the next generation), Critical Theory morality is their worldview and fundamentalism, the rock their church is built on. They really truly and passionately believe that the entire purpose of art, culture and politics is "rectifying historical injustices" aka atoning for the sins of our fathers, and anyone who doesn't profess this is automatically a suspicious heretic who needs to be cast out.
So, yes (in case you couldn't tell), I agree with Lyons: this new religion is still young and growing and gaining strength, and it will most likely dominate our culture for the foreseeable future.
But Ken Burns DID make his Ali documentary, and it's proudly shown by PBS, possibly the most woke organization in the entire US: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/muhammad-ali
oh im sure he did, my entire knowledge of it came from my friend and i discussing a petition against it based on his race and his right to make the film because of his race. my point was more about the use of race or racial classification as an artistic criterion, not about anything to do with Ken Burns or his work per se.
My point is that these woke campaigns often fail, even at the most woke organizations. So maybe we shouldn't be quite so fearful of them.
I think laughing at them is a good response. "LOL! When did you become a racist?" would have been my response to your friend.
MarkS ,them’s fight’n words!
I absolutely agree with you. Marcuse was poison. I read him, heard him speak in college and met him after the speech. Marcuse and his acolytes were nuts in 1972 (including Angela Davis who I also met) and we are reaping the results. This new religion, the Critical Theory morality you identified, is in some ways like the heresies and schisms of the early Church - which were myriad, lasted a long time and spread widely. In the end, though. they disappeared or were wiped out. It will not be quick or easy, and we will have to fight to win.
Not to defend Marcuse, but I believe the present Critical Theory morality has more roots in the Postmodern philosophy of Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Rorty. And I believe their ideas are deeply nihilistic, not Marxist or socialist. There was a Frankfurt school of Marxist thought that employed the Critical Theory approach of 'problematizing' everything into Marxist terms (that's about as much as I know of it). And it seems to me that it was after the fall of the USSR that the Left simply gave up on Marxist thinking and picked up Postmodern Critical Theory.
You raise a very good point, and after a few decades of academic leftists working in the lab to prepare and perfect their toxic stew, it is hard to separate the older Crit Theory tradition from the French Nihilists of the 60s and later...I think Crit Theory pre-dates and provides the larger framework for this 'movement', it also has the Marxist pedigree and laid the overarching mental architecture defining all of Western Civ as a binary battle bw Oppressor and Victim (and/or Bourgeois v Proletariat, among others), with the purpose of those in opposition to always be exposing oppression while leading the battle for "liberation" and "emancipation".
The academic Leftists of the 70s/80s took to Foucault and Derrida et al like teenaged groupies to Elvis because it gave their eternal crusade a new and fancy intellectual frisson (American intellectuals have always had a weakness for the French and their outre poses) and because their corrosive nihilism (which was always delivered in enough obfuscating jargon to leave wriggle room for plausible deniability) was like an acid bath used to dissolve all prior thinkers and their ideas. (Every book and idea and tradition is really just insidious hegemonic powers inscribing their knowledge onto your body! Words do not inherently convey any meaning or correspond to any reality, everyone and everything can be anything else you say it is, ergo nothing exists but power and oppressive hierarchies/binaries.)
I think of it as a kitchen-sink approach: anything and everything that would contribute to the vilification and dismantling of all that came before, that allowed the Leftist "theorist" to posit themselves as outside and above looking down on every other field of scholarship (ie "X Studies") was utilized to gain and consolidate power.
You have to give them credit, they've proved once again that a committed band of fanatics (much like the early Christians) with enough time and patience and fundamentalist tunnel vision, can succeed beyond their wildest dreams.
oh god, i'm right??? that's terrifying!! ;)
I'm 70, a Boomer and was a hippie back in the day. I voted Democrat until 2000. People do change, but it's not necessarily quick or comfortable. Ask me about Cointel Pro. I will say this, once your eyes are opened, you get how we have been played. Not everyone is susceptible to propaganda and that is reason for hope.
Clever indeed, very well written!
"maybe this is a long-winded way of saying that people with strong beliefs always defeat people with weak or vague or no beliefs."
Sounds like a line from a Yeats poem.
Woke Hollywood will be that way until or unless $$$ are affected.
This is an outstanding piece which should be at the very top of peoples' reading lists to understand wokeness.
I would make one addition. Modern liberalism's chief concern is inequality (between certain groups). As liberalism succeeds in reducing these types of inequality, its motivating passion doesn't recede. Therefore it moves to smaller, more obscure and absurd sources of difference with the same zeal as towards legitimate inequalities. Therefore we move from inequality to inequity, and from opposing segregation to concern about "fat shaming". There is no limiting principle to modern liberalism, least of all its own success.
That's a very insightful observation. Perhaps with each round of pushing towards the obscure and absurd a certain portion of the true believers drop off the train and see the game for what it is? Seems to be the case, so maybe there are built-in safety features within the ideology itself.
Yes, that is an essential quality of the progressive movement: it has to keep moving, and it has to look for a 'progressive' direction to go. So, after each forward step there is a pause to 'problematize' something new in society, and then move toward 'solving' that 'problem'. Then on to the next problem, no matter how trivial or absurd it may seem. Only total purification can be accepted (and, of course, there is no end to the process). Naturally, everybody in the movement wants to feel that they are doing something just as vital as their antecedents.
Nazism was also a movement, as Hannah Arendt observed in her book "The Origins of Totalitarianism". Hitler sold Nazism as an ideology but he recognized that an ideological change might reach an end point, and what do you do with your loyal masses after that? So, better to create a movement than pursue a defined ideology. And, as Arendt noted, the masses didn't really care if the Nazi movement changed direction, even abruptly, just as long as there was the exciting feeling of movement.
Wokeism, in my view, is such a movement: endless by design. Nominally 'progressive', but who decides which direction of change is progressive?
Perfect!
Great analysis. I would add only one thing: wokeness will fail eventually for the same reason Marxism did, because it is based on a false view of human nature.
Wokeness posits Man as a smart ape whose behavior can be corrected (rendered sinless) given the right stimulus, thereby ushering in a golden age of equality and righteousness = Heaven on Earth. Contrast this with all 3 Abrahamic faiths, which posit Man as a good but inherently selfish and covetous creature, irredeemable by his own behavior, who's only salvation is in something transcendental. Even a non-believer can recognize sociological differences in these views.
Any governing philosophy built on a false view of Man will collapse eventually, because its policies will be antithetical to human nature. The belief that "defunding the police" would solve crime is an example of this; it fails (and will always fail) because it is contrary to human nature.
Wokeness as a governing philosophy will fail writ-large for the same reason. However, it can certainly do a lot of damage along the way: "defund the police" spiked murder rates nationally last year. You can ask the Hungarians or the Czechs or the Uygurs how bad philosophical models can cause enormous damage to society. However, in the end, Wokeness will fail, just like Marxism did, and for the same reason: it is contrary to Man's nature.
Agreed. But let us remember that it took the USSR almost 70 years to fail, and the CCP is still going.
To say nothing of North Korea. Once in power, false philosophies can exhibit inhuman strength and endurance.
Though this is the information age, and idea transmission/coordination are instantaneous. People can transition between radically different beliefs in the span of a few years. Things happen quicker.
I realize I am quite late to this conversation, but I only found your excellent Substack today and read it & many of the comments here with great interest.
The one thing I've not seen anyone point out when it comes to oppressive top down societies that held on for decades (or more) like the USSR, No. Korea and the CCP is that none of those nations had the Right to Bear Arms. No Second Amendment. It's the Wild Card that's kept the ruling class from dropping the hammer and instead using Woke soft power.
A year-and-a-half after your Substack, it seems to me the soft power is finally wobbling. We see it in the marketplace, as the Narrative masters in Hollywood and the corporate media have lost their mojo and the Woke execs at places like Bud Light, Target, Best Buy, Disney are causing catastrophic Wall Street losses.
I'm curious where you stand. Has your worldview changed at all? Or is what's happening just a Sign O' The Times before the final rug pull? While I still think things look pretty dark, in many ways it's not as bad as it was a year ago. But maybe a year from now it will be twice worse. I have no idea.
One issue is that man's nature is far more malleable today then it ever was in the past. Modern drugs (sex hormones and SSRIs both qualify) and surgery and propaganda techniques (selected for effectiveness by decades of intense viral memetic competition) as well as whatever's causing the generational decline in male testosterone are all already ubiquitous and allow for an anti-human ideology to be far more successful then the past. Human genetic engineering and artificial wombs (which incredibly smart and capable people like Vitalik Buterin are already promoting for gender equity) are technologically on the horizon, and would allow for the effective annihilation of humanity and the indefinite rule of wokeness (one of the most destructive parts of Wokeness is how toxic it is towards normal heterosexual relationships. Since those are needed for societies to reproduce, that would seem to set a limit on how woke things can get over the long term. But artificial wombs remove that constraint)..
Transhumanism is the logical endpoint of the modern view of Man as a smart ape. Rather than conform to our nature in God's image, we will remake our nature in our own image.
It won't work. Man isn't God.
There will always be a John Savage. There will always be Guy Montag. There will always be a Winston Smith. Or to use a more recent movie reference, there will always be a Vincent Freeman.
That's the one consolation as Charon is rowing our society toward our trans-humanist Hades... this too shall pass.
For a less rosy view of resistance to wokeism, refer to the novel Vandenberg (also published as Defiance). Tl;dr...Conservatives have been known to be useless for a long time. The book was published in the early 70s.
I just got back to this comment and saw your reply. Managed to find the novel on Interlibrary Loan. Thanks for the recommendation; it sounds interesting.
This is grim, but one of the best analyses I've read thus far.
Wow ... gasp ... cool down ... try not to slobber with admiration ...
I have read essays of the last 200 years in some languages (is this still an essay?). This is at the top and should be included by Hillsdale et al for emulation in Writing Classes.
I have read comments in many media with shock. The set of comments here below strikes me as the best I have seen yet in my life.
The form is spectacular in structure, sequence of arguments, flow and choice of words, with not one superfluous word. The first half flows like a manifesto and largely like a poem.
The break to the second half helpful as you did include details at least I didn´t know.
I always admire the humility of not quoting those libraries of all-time classics habing flowed into this. Is the author 180 years old, with three lives of reading and thinking?
You will hopefully forgive this commentator for thinking much has been said by other great minds, but this synthesis seems like the essence of the issue to me with many new insightful turns and emphases.
The content has already drawn great comments, so roughly: What about a simplistic perspective?
Wokeness is only one more stage in the growth of The State vs the citizen.
Republican 2025-2028 is the watershed: How brutally will they cut into or weed out non-elect institutions from FBI to EPA, etc., being a mixed bag from blobbies to great libertarian conservatives with innate knowledge of the radix of judaeo-graeco-Christian civilization?
Depending on how much they achieve contrary to N.S. Lyons´ well-founded doubt, the dominant issue afterwards will be: Which mix of soft and hard recession, how much bloodshed and other pro´s and con´s, on the way to the Great Reset I see: A re-founding of the heartlands of the US grounded precisely in the existing Constitution and the Great Western traditions the Founding Fathers worked so hard to bake into it in the half-century from 1760 to 1810.
I wish this text were fed to Daily Wire, Fox, Prager and all those others, even Trump who may need help with it. Nothing much would surprise them, but it deserves national attention in my view as it points so far beyond short-term perspective.
The renaissance of the classical West will grow from the right mix of "deplorables", tough guys and gals, thinkers such as this author united on a moral base.
Dear N.S. Lyons, if ever we have that drink in Texas, I will ask you how you can possibly quote Marcel Pagnol in one of your last essays. I mean, that is really not someone to stumble over ...
Thank you for this as always.
1939 #Fascist #Germany or 2022 #Faucist #Amerika? Perhaps #tyranny in Amerika cemented during the 1913 Banker's Coup d'Etat when the FED seized control and its regime was ensured with income tax and the IRS, with election of senators by popular election. The unconstitutional invasion of #BigBrother and the #NannyState into every facet of American life was a "slow frog boiling" process, but here we are today with the #DHS, the name echoes with #Faucist overtones, labeling dissent as treason.
https://captainmanimalagonusnret.substack.com/p/living-in-1939-nazi-germany
Jens, my fellow fool, this HSLyons chap is enormous, the man (woman), the best I’ve ever seen, I am still in shock it is so good!
Thanks for this, worth every penny. I am encouraged to read that I am not alone in these thoughts. So many of my age group (boomers) have their head in the sand. They only see political solutions, elect the right people and voila, problems solved. Politics doesn’t solve the problems as it is downstream from culture and the rising culture is scary indeed. Keep writing and speaking your mind and know we our here appreciate it very much. God bless you and keep you.
References to the Long March and the Cultural Revolution seem apt. We see how Maoist “wokeism” was transformed into state-driven capitalism and political authoritarianism and yet the ideology of Maoist “wokeism” today reminds one of East Europeans under Sovietism: everybody pretends and then goes about their business under the radar. One wonders if that is our future.
God I hope those UFOs show up quick.
A superb piece of work. You are correct, the revolution isn't slowing down, it's not even pausing to take a breath. So what will stop it ? The woke successor ideology has a growth pattern of a forest fire or infection rather than that of green shoots, maybe that is the same with all religions, they start slow with years in the wilderness honing their doctrine then if the touch the right fuel at the right time they explode in a break out phase.
But then so does a Ponzi scheme.
Let us judge this new faith on the same rational basis we can use for other religions. Is it (or could it be) a cooperative symboite rather than a consuming parasite for the believers ? Forget about the interior of the doctrines, equality like salvation or redemption can never be measured scientifically anyway. Does the true believer prosper, live longer, is fitter, healthier with more children, defeat enemies in battle ? Need I say more ?
No. Previous religions were memetically selected for symbiosis by their mitochondrial-transmission (parent-to-child) favoring environment. Religions that were too destructive to their host people/societies died out. Advanced communications tech in general and social media in particular make viral (peer-to-peer) transmission overwhelmingly dominant, meaning memeplexes get selected for virulence/transmissibility, rather than symbiosis. Elaborated on at length here:
https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/memetic-evolution-and-progressivism
“Why not subscribe?”…very good point!
Incredible writing
#9 is absolutely key. No amount of anti-CRT rhetoric or hastily-written legislation will have an impact when education schools are still pumping out activists who go directly into school administration or enforce orthodoxies for new hires while gatekeepers in academia demand ever-more stringent signals of commitment to the cause.
The left understands this. This is why they now require DEI oaths in job applications and interviews along with writing job ads for even regular positions that enforce "centering racial equity" (e.g. https://www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/details.cfm?JobCode=177739246). The explicit goal of the left (openly stated, but somehow poorly understood by many) is to "infuse" their DEI dogma into every aspect of life at work and in the academy so that they can use it as a cudgel against anyone, anytime. It's working.
The right seems completely blindsided by the latest aggressive offensive by the left and barely capable of keeping up with documenting it (Rufo, Sibarium, and Hanania seem to get it, but only Rufo seems to have a popular platform; much more could be done instead of yelling about Dr. Seuss or Mr. Potato Head for hours on end), much less rebutting or opposing. This essay was a breath of fresh air on that side of things and accurately identifies some of the key battlegrounds: gatekeeping institutions like accreditors, long-service government agencies, and personnel across the board.
The next time Rs are in power nationally, they need to learn how to play the long game on the personnel side rather than just ranting and trying (unsuccessfully) to smash things.
You have presented one terrific analysis with so many important items that desperately need to be discussed--it is hard to know where to begin.
Just a few initial thoughts and questions--full of my own biases:
Is the concept of wokeness as a religious belief possibly a response to something deeper, that has been going on in our society for quite some time? I am thinking, in particular, of the idea of ever growing anomie--or the increasing inability of our culture to provide the individual with any type of guidance.
Items 2 ( the void of meaning), item 3 (increasing atomization), item 4 (this atomization as a byproduct of liberal modernity), item 6 (there is no authority or the inability of our contemporary institutions to provide any common metaphysical framework), Item 13 (Youth are coddled and mentally broken)-- all these items seem, to me, related to cultural laxity or the increasing absence of guidance from our culture.
The experience of anomie also seems to lead to, at a minimum, to a profound psychological discomfort and perhaps even mental illness (like depression).
Please, please continue your explorations of this complex beast called wokeness.