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As we enter the new year, America has passed far beyond the threshold when the public needs to put ideological beliefs and partisan politics aside and honestly reevaluate how our culture has become a toxic stew of maladaptive groupthink.
How is it that identity politics, critical race theory and the bizarre fusion of Wokeism’s ideology with pop culture has gone beyond mere indifferent toleration and become infused into our institutions and legal system?
For the rest of the non-Western world, which now refuses to idolize the US’s faux democracy as a paragon of an enlightened civilization, our nation has morphed into a self-inflicted insane asylum that would qualify the Marquis de Sade as its chief psychiatrist.
Our liberal intelligentsia self-flagellates itself and cowers to the absurd demands of Wokeism’s aggressive degenerate thinking. The collateral damage has been the demolition of whatever remains of a former national moral structure that once upheld universal humanitarian and spiritual values. In this convoluted ethos, the anti-fascists become the most rabid fascists. Anti-racists are the exemplars of a new modernist racism. Ideological avarice either infects or intimidates those who are perhaps the most connected with reality to remain silent for fear of being labeled heretics and cancelled. Those who are most wise, humane and truly progressive are condemned as fools.
Of course, social media has now revolutionized the public commons for dialogue and debate.
Social media has also reinvented how people relate to and interact with each other. Now we observe this is having irreversible consequences.
Rather than creating new forums and venues for diverse groups to resolve differences amicably to discover common ground, social media platforms have further shredded the prospects for a future cohesive society that respects humanity’s enormous diversity and differences in political persuasions, social and religious beliefs and worldviews.
This new liberal commons has enabled the paltriest minded and emotionally fragile voices to rise to influence regardless of any merit or achievements people may have earned during their lifetime. Virtual liberalism, or as one Indian critic calls “the western memeplex,” has contributed greatly to the proliferation of Wokeism’s creed.
Curiously, Wokeism is undoubtedly the product of Western civilization’s social consciousness. It is unimaginable that a militant cancel culture could spontaneously arise from more traditional civilizations such as China, Latin America, Africa or Russia.
One argument is that Wokeism can only arise in a society that places a high premium on hyper-individualism at the expense of social cooperation and tranquility.
If we agree that Wokeism is a distorted and mentally disturbed mutation of Western culture, then there is certainly something centrally unhealthy in the Anglo-American collective self-awareness. Wokeism praises victimhood, whether authentic or counterfeit; therefore, the woke demand our perfunctory compassion and empathy, despite their violent behavior. Forensic experts repeatedly confirm that dehumanization and desensitization gives rise to cruel and hysterical behavior. The very idea that everyone deserves compassion and sympathy is counterintuitive to Wokeism’s hatred and its strategy to marginalize its detractors, especially White people, heterosexuals and men. Consequently the woke fragility’s contrived victimhood is nothing more than attention-seeking narcissism.
A serious question arises that even most critics of Wokeism refuse to ask. Are those who are the most woke living in a prison of an imbalanced and deluded mind that is not only a danger to themselves but also to others? This is not an especially comfortable line of inquiry because of the consequences if reason brings us to an affirmative conclusion.
However, consider for a moment how mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, compulsive behavior and irrational fears have become normalized. Moreover, these mental diagnoses are increasing exponentially with no indication of a likely decline. Worse, it is being romanticized. In the Woke universe, being depressed or having one’s personal feelings hurt are viable reasons to affirm one’s self-righteousness and give license to be unforgiving, vicious and callous.
Wokeism weaponizes resentment. Therefore, is it too preposterous to suppose that Wokeism is unwillingly constructing a nationwide mental asylum as its most ambitious and fervent followers undeservingly land coveted professorships, privileged government employment and higher administrative jobs? In positions of authority, Wokeism is steadily trickled down through the brainwashing of mandatory employee training, critical race workshops and seminars and the sexualization of children in grammar schools.
It is fair to say that those who relish their wokeness entertain a weird personal romance with adverse and unhealthy psychological conditions. The walls of Plato’s bleak cave are replaced with self-entitlement, gender dysphoria, mobile phones, pornography, Facebook, TikTok and other social media with its cancel culture mobs. The woke mob bars itself from courageously discovering a healthy relationship with the natural world. Its fascist elements fuel a system of intolerance.
The relative nature of Wokeism’s sentiments is believed to be absolutely true. On social media, everyone’s language must be policed. A person’s righteous pride is rewarded by likes and emojis depending upon how successful the opposition is castigated, reviled and demeaned to a subhuman level.
And not unlike the frenzy of a Super Bowl match or World Cup final, this bottom-up wave of the feeble minded surges and proliferates to a point where any potential universal values, which have been championed by the world’s greatest civil rights activists and peacemakers, has been eradicated in a unified self-loathing towards a shared humanity. Righteous indignation turns into depravity, violence and tyranny, and these are signs of a larger degeneracy of the psyche. The woke mob’s tyranny, as we have observed, welcomes social media censorship, pandemic lockdowns, vaccination mandates, firing of professors, and supports the government usurping greater control in order to police people’s thoughts and beliefs. Wokeism’s tyranny even demands the destruction of the nuclear family and traditional parent-child relationships. Aberrant behavior, such as pedophilia that can traumatize a minor for life, is being rebranded as “minor-attracted persons” to gloss over its negative social stigma. And our intellectual class rapidly falls into lock step cooperation with this tyranny. As Plato warned in his criticisms against Athens’s anemic philosophical intelligentsia, they are “swamped by the flood of popular praise and blame, and carried away with the stream till he finds himself agreeing with popular ideas of what is admirable and disgraceful, behaving like the crowd and becoming one of them.” And this snowflake insanity is sweeping the nation’s opinion makers, who are then obliged to surrender to the bullying demands of the woke mob, which then create the narratives for education, journalism, mainstream media, entertainment and popular culture.
Minus the presence of charismatic, magnetic personalities promising personal liberation from the neoliberal suppression that pervades the US, the new woke culture shares many characteristics common with religious cults.
The authoritarian figure in traditional cults has been replaced by a collective groupthink fueled by a strange, perverted reward system that reinforces an individual’s worst mental and emotional afflictions and vulnerabilities. For example, in her best selling book White Fragility, author Robin DiAngelo instructs her sleepwalking followers that it is impossible to overcome their inherent and complicit racism, despite there being no empirical and quantifiable evidence that racism is biological or that racism is fundamentally inherent at birth.
For DiAngelo and her followers, racism is absolute. If you are White, you are racist and there is unconditionally no cure other than to accept this delusional charade and then try your hardest to suppress hidden, invisible racist traits by default. In this Kafkaesque world, there are two types of racists: racists who accept they are racist and racists who deny their racism. And at various levels this includes everybody without exception, but especially Whites dominant White. Similar to every fundamentalist cult, woke critical race theory exploits people’s compulsive weaknesses in an attempt to self-define itself and its constructive role in society.
This includes making sense of the contradictions in people’s lives and their relationships with others. Despite the faulty logic in modern critical theory’s analysis and understanding about race and socio-biological diversity, it is rapidly gaining a large number of followers, especially among younger generations who struggle with an existential angst compounded by our culture where all meaning has been reduced to materialistic and biological impulses. In our overtly science-driven society, morals and deeper ethical values, which otherwise nurture new, harmonious relationships between people of diverse races, ethnicities and nationalities, have no foundational basis. There is nothing ethically imprinted in our brains, our biology, or genetic inheritance. Nor are there any emotional responses that determine whether we will act in one way or another at any given moment. The very idea that racism is in some mysterious way intrinsic to the circumstances each of us are born into is not only ludicrous but outrageously dangerous. It is anti-science, anti-psychology and anti-spiritual throughout.
Another cult-like component of the emerging woke culture is that it promises a future, idealistic utopia. However, this future society would be inevitably populated by extraordinarily dysfunctional people. The rule of order upon which such a society would be based would equally be cruel and authoritarian. All cults have some type of utopian vision used to indoctrinate its followers as a mission and goal to strive for. This provides purpose and meaning in a society where anxiety and depression has become the norm. Thus we find the most vocal persons in woke culture, undeterred by the tiny minority of the actual percentage of the population they represent, admonishing a radical activism that is intent on condemning anyone who opposes its dogma. For example, in early 2022, a large Gallup survey reported that transgenders and persons self-identifying as non-binary only make up a tiny minority of 0.7 percent of the entire population however we also should be sensitive to any minority groups rights ; nevertheless, the attention the mainstream media and government institutions grant them would have us believe that a critical percentage of the American population deserves more attention than other minority groups. This utopian ideal reduces an individual’s uniqueness and gifts to a level playing field whereby nobody can prosper by pursuing excellence.
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone.” Repeatedly we read about professors, celebrities, and prominent people being unduly ridiculed and cancelled by any means available in order to destroy careers and remove them from public life. No doubt Western civilization has evolved with many prejudices. Many of the biases that cause division have been institutionalized, have been consolidated into unwarranted power, and need to be surgically excised. Nietzsche declared, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Yet today, we witness the woke mentality being adopted into social mandates and even laws at some of the highest levels of government. For Huxley, such despicable behavior is “righteous indignation.” Now we are experiencing this pseudo-righteous revenge being collectively carried out across the US by the new liberal Left. The Democrat party’s woke caucus, spearheaded by the Squad, utters disdain for people’s fundamental Constitutional rights. This has been on full display through the recent revelations of widespread censorship and propaganda of misinformation and lies on Twitter. Cancel culture has entered foreign policy. The rise in national Russophobia is another manifestation of the woke mind and is nearing the threshold of hatred that the Nazis directed towards Jews, Gypsies, communists, and other minorities.
Contrary to critical theory’s very name — to critically understand the social consequences of power structures — its followers demand there be a superficial public mass consumption of Wokeism’s incongruences, contradictions, and irrational claims.
We are expected to leave self-examination aside because, as in Kafka’s The Trial, you have no willful choice. You are guilty if you do and guilty if you don’t. Wokeism creates social gulags with no viable escape portal aside from becoming a public outcast to preserve your self dignity.
The more people read the writings of DiAngelo, and others, the more indoctrinated into the woke cult they become. Rather than advocating for a genuine class struggle based upon the economic unfairness in the distribution of wealth benefitting the elite and lowering the living standards of everyone else, the woke mob would prefer a new caste system founded upon social-group identity. And all of this cutting, splicing, partitioning, and labeling is playing nicely into the forthcoming social-credit scoring that will divide the socially acceptable from the unacceptable.
Any deviance against woke’s dogma and its self-gratifying rules of behavior is judged evil, vile and a threat to a new society founded upon totalitarian principles to assure a highly controlled social order. Such a structure was being strategically erected on Twitter by the deep state and its demands for censorship by Adam Schiff before Elon Musk took control to bust apart the platform’s woke agenda. We are also witnessing woke psychology breaking up families over pandemic policies, whether or not a person is vaccinated, and whether you swallowed a red or blue pill. This is a very common symptom of religious cult dynamics that encourages followers to dissociate themselves from and renounce family members, friends, colleagues and associates who don’t embrace their newly adopted social gospel. Today the most vicious domestic war is being waged between Wokeism’s dehumanized world and a higher moral society that values inclusiveness and tolerance.
Finally, it should be stated that critical theory, which has been the groundwork for Wokeism’s intelligentsia, pretends to be objective and to follow a scientific methodology. If we accept this claim, then critical race theory is thoroughly junk science. Junk science did not begin with the pandemic, nor will end when the rogues who orchestrated this monster come to justice. Instead junk science has been permeating throughout all disciplines, even disciplines that are not properly scientific such as critical race theory, gender studies, history and even psychology. Wokeism is just one more cancer that has manifested from the scourge of metaphysical realism that masquerades as being objectively rational and methodological observation. But with all the Orwellian double-think bombarding us through the halls of Washington, mainstream media networks and educational classrooms, this is a complete sham, a product of outrageous delusional flights of imagination to confirm entrenched biases and prejudices.
So as we begin the new year, and if you identify as a member of the nation’s overwhelming majority of persons deeply worried about America’s spiraling ethical and spiritual bankruptcy, just say no and walk away. But do so with the courage to speak truth to childish ignorance and the despotic demands of deranged personalities and especially those in positions of power and authority who have every intention to exploit Wokeism’s energy, enthusiasm and religious-like zeal. And, also feel compassion towards the woke because once they serve their purpose, they too will be ostracized, marginalized and tossed to the side after the deep state decides Wokeism’s naivety is no longer useful to its tyrannical goals.
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Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.
Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow
They are regular contributors to Global Research.
