It is important for us to realize that the reason that this Woke behavior has become much more noticeable since around 2015, was that major challenges and cracks were appearing in the legitimacy and authority of the postmodernist humanities trained Ascendancy that had had control of the means of social reproduction and administration since the 1970s, in the wake of the roll out of Indulgence capitalism.
This transformation involved the closure of a disciplined economy and culture of needs and wants in favor of fantasies of desire and their immediate and urgent satisfaction This was instrumentalized by systematic deregulation, privatization and the fantasization of consciousness across all social and economic platforms within the system.
Production of goods was exported to cheap manufacturing zones and consciousness became the main 'product', which was built around service industries, whereby goods and services were transformed into icons rather than things in themselves. And in the process, consciousness became completely perception based and subjectivized across all platforms, either through directly manipulating the education system and/or controlling it through the now massive public relations and marketing apparatus, that would dominate the architecture of discourse in ways unthinkable during the totalitarianisms of the past.
The challenges and cracks in the social system started to appear really obvious with the emergence of working class and religious rebellions against the prevailing narratives of the system. Internationally, the rise of religious fundamentalism generally and Islam in particular, pointed to a weakening of 'Western'/modern secular narratives generally, as people began to recognize that things were not going well in the once impregnably legitimate modern pantheon.
A society brough up on massive systematic excess across both its social/ideological and economic platforms had started to eat through the infrastructures holding them up. Social and ecological infrastructure were both getting pulped in favor of bottomless pit of exponential consumption growth, primed by the consciousness control apparatus that had become expert in shaping and reshaping mass perception. But it couldn't completely conceal the damage it was doing, as everyone on each side started to blame the other for the stewardship abuse of the areas of life the other was supposed to be responsible for.
The rise of Trump, the yellow shirts and of ISIS were indicative of a reaction to societies that had had too much of 'good thing' for too long and were declining into self-indulgent existential and ecological necrosis, which is why ol' time and new eco-religion became fixtures. Everyone who had assumed that religion of any type was heading for the dustbin of history, suddenly found it wasn't, and wasn't meekly submitting to modern nostrums of what was and wasn't OK, true or false.
And the once liberal and progressive social establishment in its turn 'got religion' by transforming itself into an intolerant and heresy sniffing neo clerical orthodoxy encrusted with unnegotiable dogma whose denial would become an open invitation to persecution, marginalization and exclusion.....in the name of 'diversity' and 'inclusion'....Ho hum.
In particular, the rise of Trump caused absolute panic in the coastal cities of the US where the postmodernist trained elites (Ascendancies) were concentrated, as their hinterlands very unexpectedly turned on them. And after they had recovered from the sheer shock of it, they moved with considerable speed to gut these hayseed upstarts by cutting down their reproductive (family/sex/gender) and civilizational (racism) narratives. The attack was as incendiary as it was sudden, in a very late modern iteration of the crushing of more traditional peasant rebellions that became perennial in the late Middle Ages, a little over 600 years ago.
This has been a very sophisticated assault by gaslighting mass populations across an already totalitarian system that thrives on consciousness lockdown.
The petro-chemical colossi whose operations were similarly under threat, for more or less the same reasons, behaved very similarly by a systematic all-out attack on the science of climatology, to shut down rational attempts at ecological defense. Fossil fuel and Woke trolls and propaganda sites have a lot in common.
All this is happening at the same time that the international clout of Western power and authority is declining into a vacuum whereby new players (and old) are circling for their chance to take the reins of power. The failure of Western power in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the economic crisis in Latin America, the emergence of China as a superpower, and the re-assertion of Russia to get some of its old empire back, are all signs that the international order is about to shift, and probably dramatically.
Both international and civil war are now looming possibilities in an indulgent world that has grown complacent, obese and cancer prone, as global economic production keeps skyrocketing in an environment where living systems of any type are being destroyed at rates that are completely unsustainable.
We are already in an enormous amount of trouble on a lot of fronts, and we need to prepare ourselves for some rude shocks. and a lot of the really bizarre behavior you get when old worlds die, new ones are created and we have to get through the transition with as much skin intact as is possible, in all the circumstances.
It may be the case that the nutso behavior of the woke may be the least of our problems, but it is the one immediately in front of us, and threatens to drown what is left of a democratic society that hasn't been functioning properly for a long time, as intellectual life and social discourse degraded into slogans, cliches, stereotypes, euphemisms, dysphemisms and aphorisms, rather than genuine dialogue of ideas and disagreement about them, as publicrelationsmarketingspeak took over the shop, and replace everything of real substance with conceptual fluff, crib, fudge and bluff, instead of analysis and nuance.
Indulgence Capitalism's shop troops, contract warriors and Wokes have no idea just how much the insides of their heads have tampered with, or how much damage they are carrying as result.
The only comfort I can offer is that the monsters that inhabited the culture of the German people for the best part of a generation evaporated once they had been defeated and disgraced. The once uniformed thugs transformed back into normal people who instead of herding Jews into death trains or belonging to the Gestapo, reported litter offenders to the municipal authorities instead. Old Nazis became model democratic citizens. There is always hope.
It is important for us to realize that the reason that this Woke behavior has become much more noticeable since around 2015, was that major challenges and cracks were appearing in the legitimacy and authority of the postmodernist humanities trained Ascendancy that had had control of the means of social reproduction and administration since the 1970s, in the wake of the roll out of Indulgence capitalism.
This transformation involved the closure of a disciplined economy and culture of needs and wants in favor of fantasies of desire and their immediate and urgent satisfaction This was instrumentalized by systematic deregulation, privatization and the fantasization of consciousness across all social and economic platforms within the system.
Production of goods was exported to cheap manufacturing zones and consciousness became the main 'product', which was built around service industries, whereby goods and services were transformed into icons rather than things in themselves. And in the process, consciousness became completely perception based and subjectivized across all platforms, either through directly manipulating the education system and/or controlling it through the now massive public relations and marketing apparatus, that would dominate the architecture of discourse in ways unthinkable during the totalitarianisms of the past.
The challenges and cracks in the social system started to appear really obvious with the emergence of working class and religious rebellions against the prevailing narratives of the system. Internationally, the rise of religious fundamentalism generally and Islam in particular, pointed to a weakening of 'Western'/modern secular narratives generally, as people began to recognize that things were not going well in the once impregnably legitimate modern pantheon.
A society brough up on massive systematic excess across both its social/ideological and economic platforms had started to eat through the infrastructures holding them up. Social and ecological infrastructure were both getting pulped in favor of bottomless pit of exponential consumption growth, primed by the consciousness control apparatus that had become expert in shaping and reshaping mass perception. But it couldn't completely conceal the damage it was doing, as everyone on each side started to blame the other for the stewardship abuse of the areas of life the other was supposed to be responsible for.
The rise of Trump, the yellow shirts and of ISIS were indicative of a reaction to societies that had had too much of 'good thing' for too long and were declining into self-indulgent existential and ecological necrosis, which is why ol' time and new eco-religion became fixtures. Everyone who had assumed that religion of any type was heading for the dustbin of history, suddenly found it wasn't, and wasn't meekly submitting to modern nostrums of what was and wasn't OK, true or false.
And the once liberal and progressive social establishment in its turn 'got religion' by transforming itself into an intolerant and heresy sniffing neo clerical orthodoxy encrusted with unnegotiable dogma whose denial would become an open invitation to persecution, marginalization and exclusion.....in the name of 'diversity' and 'inclusion'....Ho hum.
In particular, the rise of Trump caused absolute panic in the coastal cities of the US where the postmodernist trained elites (Ascendancies) were concentrated, as their hinterlands very unexpectedly turned on them. And after they had recovered from the sheer shock of it, they moved with considerable speed to gut these hayseed upstarts by cutting down their reproductive (family/sex/gender) and civilizational (racism) narratives. The attack was as incendiary as it was sudden, in a very late modern iteration of the crushing of more traditional peasant rebellions that became perennial in the late Middle Ages, a little over 600 years ago.
This has been a very sophisticated assault by gaslighting mass populations across an already totalitarian system that thrives on consciousness lockdown.
The petro-chemical colossi whose operations were similarly under threat, for more or less the same reasons, behaved very similarly by a systematic all-out attack on the science of climatology, to shut down rational attempts at ecological defense. Fossil fuel and Woke trolls and propaganda sites have a lot in common.
All this is happening at the same time that the international clout of Western power and authority is declining into a vacuum whereby new players (and old) are circling for their chance to take the reins of power. The failure of Western power in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the economic crisis in Latin America, the emergence of China as a superpower, and the re-assertion of Russia to get some of its old empire back, are all signs that the international order is about to shift, and probably dramatically.
Both international and civil war are now looming possibilities in an indulgent world that has grown complacent, obese and cancer prone, as global economic production keeps skyrocketing in an environment where living systems of any type are being destroyed at rates that are completely unsustainable.
We are already in an enormous amount of trouble on a lot of fronts, and we need to prepare ourselves for some rude shocks. and a lot of the really bizarre behavior you get when old worlds die, new ones are created and we have to get through the transition with as much skin intact as is possible, in all the circumstances.
It may be the case that the nutso behavior of the woke may be the least of our problems, but it is the one immediately in front of us, and threatens to drown what is left of a democratic society that hasn't been functioning properly for a long time, as intellectual life and social discourse degraded into slogans, cliches, stereotypes, euphemisms, dysphemisms and aphorisms, rather than genuine dialogue of ideas and disagreement about them, as publicrelationsmarketingspeak took over the shop, and replace everything of real substance with conceptual fluff, crib, fudge and bluff, instead of analysis and nuance.
Indulgence Capitalism's shop troops, contract warriors and Wokes have no idea just how much the insides of their heads have tampered with, or how much damage they are carrying as result.
The only comfort I can offer is that the monsters that inhabited the culture of the German people for the best part of a generation evaporated once they had been defeated and disgraced. The once uniformed thugs transformed back into normal people who instead of herding Jews into death trains or belonging to the Gestapo, reported litter offenders to the municipal authorities instead. Old Nazis became model democratic citizens. There is always hope.