It seems that "wokism", a sort of modern incarnation of the concept of "political correctness", is running rampant throughout Western cultures. Russia and China have used this phenomenon to mock Western freemarket democratic systems and their attendant freedoms. Russia and China use wokism as an example of the catastrophic bankruptcy and corruption of the West.
The effects of wokism are everywhere. These wokist consequences are obvious if one observes carefully and knows what to pay attention to. For example, consider:
(1) The ESG movement in corporate governance
(2) The seemingly frantic need for multibillion dollar multinationals to insult their customers they depend on for their revenue and their very existence. This is also true for nonprofits, like PBS and NPR, who cannot seem to resist the tendency to vilify, reject and offend the majority of their audiences. It is also true of the US military, which has gone out of its way to disparage and annoy many potential recruits, and now is having massive problems with recruiting and retention.
(3) The drastic decline in rationality in the West, and a love affair of sorts with nonsense that is clearly false. Mathematics and empirical science are currently under massive attack by the "woke". According to wokists, evidence-based science is supposed to be replaced because it is "racist" or something. Data is unfair. Reason and rationality are unfair. Correct answers and grades are unfair. Degrees are unfair. Standards are unfair. Merit-based choices are unfair. Competency is unfair. And so on and so forth.
(4) The re-emergence of a segregation movement in the US.
(5) Classifying Martin Luther King Jr. as a pariah in some quarters, and branding MLK Jr. as a "colorblind racist" because King was in favor of equality, not equity. Equity is the opposite of equality, and requires open discrimination.
(6) The championing of "anti-racism", which is really just racism in a different form.
(7) A movement pushing for child sexual abuse, and the normalization and destigmatization of pedophilia, completely contrary to Western norms and precepts and laws and even common decency.
(8) A war on grammar and language usage to accommodate some fringe minorities.
(9) Efforts that effectively seek to remove females from the public square, including women's sports and all other venues. This is the signature of "Fourth Wave Feminism" which apparently has the goal for women to all be replaced by men pretending to be women, in the name of "fairness".
(10) A movement to attack "cultural melting pots" because they are associated with the cardinal sin in wokeness of "cultural appropriation".
(11) Demands to ban competency and merit in favor of selection based on proportional representation of an ever-increasing number of "identities". Except for white males, who are supposed to basically disappear, unwanted, unneeded and unwelcome according to the woke.
(12) People who judge each other's virtue based on the number of "intersectional identities" they can be associated with.
(13) Virtue signaling writ large.
(14) Threats and intimidation, even up to and including legal penalties for not going along with these trends and demands.
(15) Destruction of education at all levels, and an attendant drop in standards.
(16) Replacement of productive elements in educational institutions by an ever-growing number of bureaucrats who serve absolutely no productive function. These bureaucrats are effectively leeches, and often impede whatever the mission of the institution was or is.
(17) Vilification of people based on their skin color or their ancestry. This is like a sin that cannot be atoned for, and a stain that can never be erased, from birth through death and beyond.
(18) The widespread sentiments and fervent convictions that life on earth is soon coming to an end. In addition, the related beliefs that most if not all humans have to be eliminated so that the earth can return to a "pristine state", or that humans must return to being hunter-gatherers living in caves (their conditions prior to the introduction of agriculture) are very appealing to many and associated with wokist beliefs.[1]
(19) A developing hatred for history and the lessons of history. The public, under the spell of wokism, is desperate to sanitize what came before and pretend it did not happen.
(20) A frantic and deep-seated desire to engage in imperialist and colonialist practices to force others around the world to adopt these same principles and mindsets.
(21) Antisemitism is almost irrevocably connected to wokism.
(22) Demands that no individual have the rights of self defense or free speech, or even of independent thought and opinion.
(23) The desire to conceal the existence of wokism and associated beliefs by claiming they do not exist, all evidence to the contrary. This includes things like the deployment and appearance of woke Antifa progressive shock troops, BLM, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and other critical theories and a host of other belief systems. After a while, this takes on the appearance of an example of a massive "gas-lighting" operation. Some even claim that these movements were not generated by the progressive political elements that gave birth to them, but by conservatives in some shameful disgraceful dishonest attempt to gain some advantage and to attack progressives based on these supposedly nonexistent movements and belief systems.
(24) Pushing for medical "affirming care" for people with gender dysphoria. This verges on the criminal and is at least unethical. There are no studies demonstrating any long term psychological benefits from this sort of intervention. But there are plenty of other negative consequences, not the least of which are massive costs.
(25) Relaxation of penalties for criminal behavior, repeat criminal offenses, excuses for criminal behavior by certain ethnic groups, lack of interest in personal accountability, a two tier or multi-tier justice system that metes out different punishments based on which tier the individual is associated with, etc. This all contributes to a breakdown of the rule of law and the traditional common law justice system, where everyone was supposedly equal before the law.
(26) A frantic effort to admit millions of illegal aliens into the United States. Why would they be interested in doing this? It undercuts the very lower classes that they claim to favor. If one looks in more detail, one finds the answer. All illegal aliens are welcome except for Cubans and Venezuelans and Eastern Europeans; in other words, people likely to vote for Republicans. This is purely an effort to steal elections "by any means necessary". It has nothing to do with being nice or taking care of the disadvantaged. Instead, it is all about money and power.
Wokism is taking on all the characteristics of some kind of new religion focused on "social justice" and vacuous posturing. While it is admirable to value human rights and fairness, somehow wokeness has departed from what might have been these original intentions and aims. This movement has been debauched, and it appears to be picking up steam as it evolves. Hopefully the social contagion (some might characterize it as a "mass psychosis") of wokism can be stopped, but it is not particularly apparent how this might occur, at least not yet anyway.
So what is the appeal of wokism? How did it reach this point?
Most will recognize that wokism originated in academia, and has now been spreading like wildfire throughout society. Wokism has been festering away mostly unseen and ignored and effectively invisible for a few decades, if not longer, and now has burst into the open.
Wokism is far more prevalent in humanities departments in academia. It has almost completely taken over these portions of academia, at least in North America. And it is now making serious inroads in STEM areas as well.
Wokism long ago took over University administration and governance. And it is replacing other types of thought in Law Schools and Medical Schools and even Business Schools.
So what is the allure?
My conjecture is that the appeal of wokism is basically founded on some realization of weaponized envy. STEM fields have gained an incredible prominence in modern society in the last few decades, if not the last few centuries, since at least the Scientific Revolution, followed by the Industrial Revolution. STEM has changed life drastically through the introduction of innovative technology and new ideas.
Hardly a day or a week passes without some new stunning revelation from practitioners in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. People in the humanities have long resented this. STEM gets all the money, and the gifted students and all the attention, it would seem.
But what about the humanities? Well, they feel neglected. Where I was an undergraduate, the people studying the humanities were usually referred to as "Artsy Fartsies". Everyone "knew" that these people would spend the rest of their lives pouring coffee and cleaning toilets. That is all they were qualified for, effectively. This did not sit well with humanities scholars, and they have been more than a little annoyed with this state of affairs for a long, long time.[3]
I believe that what wokism represents, for people who are not technical, is some magical belief system where they can "come out on top".[4] They feel this is their rightful position. They are entitled to this prominence, according to them. They should be making all the decisions for everyone else in society. And they should have all the money and the power as well.
Numerous laws have been passed by wokists making it effectively illegal to disagree with them. And they pollute the minds of the young by instructing them at an early age in wokism.
Wokism is full of crazy statements and beliefs, not that different from "all women have a penis" and "all biological males can give birth". And adhering to this nonsense is sort of like a litmus test, demonstrating that the person making these assertions is somehow "worthy". Making these kinds of claims is a kind of "shibboleth" or code-word. This is how wokists can recognize each other, and determine who can "get into the club".
So wokism is a tremendous weapon for the humanities scholars, who feel neglected and who feel they have no power. With Wokism, they now can demand and receive plenty of power. They can "lord it over" the STEM practitioners, destroying many STEM careers in the process.
And now, it has started to spread like wildfire outside of academia, which gave birth to it, to the rest of Western Society, and is a direct attack on Western Culture.
People ignore this phenomenon at their peril.[9]
Notes
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[1] The Malthusian idea that we have to reduce world population by a factor of 10 or 20 very, very soon is quite appealing to these wokists. If they just allowed the natural course of events to take place, the world population would fall - of its own accord, really. With lower infant mortality rates and more educated women, particularly women in the work force, women do not want to have 10 or 15 kids each (a situation that used to exist even in North America just a century ago or so).
Once fewer people have fewer children, the population will plummet. Completely naturally. In just decades.[2]
But, this is too slow for the wokists, apparently. And they have frequently alluded to this in speeches and in their writings.
[2] As examples of this "population shrinkage" principle, in the next few decades, if things continue on their current path, Israel will have a greater population than Germany, and Nigeria will have a larger population than China.
[3] When it was widely and publicly announced that I had won numerous academic prizes and awards at the end of my high school studies, one of my neighbors contacted my father, an engineer. This neighbor was a proud intellectual, but heavily steeped in humanities traditions. This neighbor was horrified to hear from my father that I would not be pursuing studies in the humanities at University, but technical fields instead.
The neighbor was incensed and offended to a maximal degree.
[4] It is common for modern physicists to look at Sir Isaac Newton's career and bemoan the fact that so much of Newton's life seemed to be devoted to projects that modern physicists deem a waste of his time and talents.[5] Most of the reasons Newton is famous now are because of his contributions in gravity and motion and the calculus and in optics. Newton did most of his work in these areas in 2 or 3 years when the Universities were closed because of The Plague.
In the 1980s, I met some professional philosophers who were faculty at major universities. And we eventually somehow got onto the topic of Sir Isaac Newton. The philosophers regarded Newton as a tremendous scholar in philosophy.
The philosophy professors only had one issue with Newton. They felt Newton had wasted his time and talent studying worthless garbage like the calculus and gravity and motion. To them, this crap was all bullshit that only fucking morons cared about.
These philosophers opined mournfully that if ONLY Newton had devoted himself purely to philosophy, he might have made something of himself.[6]
[5] Newton was very successful in his job at the Royal Mint. [8] And Newton also explored alchemy, in an attempt to find new scientific truths or principles buried in the alchemical texts. In addition, Newton studied the bible extensively and investigated various chronologies based on the bible.
[6] There were similar comments made by Albert Einstein's supervisor at the patent office when Albert resigned to be a theoretical physics professor at Zurich University.[7] The supervisor could not understand why Einstein would waste his time on such monotonous worthless horseshit. If Einstein would just apply himself to his patent work, Einstein might eventually get promoted and really make something of himself as a patent examiner.
The supervisor could not understand the "dumb" choices that Einstein seemed to be making.
[7] Einstein was hired by the Swiss Patent Office as a patent clerk, third class. Einstein referred to the patent applications he read as “inconsequential babble”.
[8] Apparently Sir Isaac Newton in his role at the Royal Mint was extremely innovative and clever at tracking down criminals. And this supposedly was the motivation or inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character, Sherlock Holmes.
Along those lines, here is a link to the first episode in a podcast series about Newton's adventures at the mint, that I really enjoyed:
Newton's Law
Episode 1: The Warden and the Con Man
https://omny.fm/shows/newtons-law/episode-1-the-warden-and-the-con-man
When Isaac Newton leaves his career as a renowned scientist to become the Warden of Royal Mint, he thinks it's going to be an easy gig. But with an economy teetering on the brink of collapse, and a entrepreneurial con man looking to win at all costs, the world's smartest man may be in over his head.
[9] Numerous friends and colleagues have insisted repeatedly that wokism is just a fad, that it should be ignored, that no one should waste any time worrying about it. I beg to disagree.
I am acutely aware that various movements throughout history have sought to destroy the STEM enterprise. This includes Islam after the influence of Al Ghazali's book "Incoherence of the Philosophers" and the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the German Nazi Regime and the Catholic Inquisition and many other similar campaigns. If we do not oppose these forces for chaos and ignorance, they will triumph. There is no doubt in my mind of this whatsoever. And the Enlightenment and its fruits will be no more.
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