There is no "woke right"
Insightful analysis from X user Tim Heaton
On Wednesday, the British podcaster Konstantin Krisin - of the great Triggernometry podcast - posted the following to X:
“The left wing retardosphere was created by sensible people on the left being silent when they should have said something. The right wing retardosphere is being formed in exactly the same way. Stop sending me DMs about how much you agree with me about the woke right, strap on a pair and say something. Unless you want to be on the side that thinks evolution is "just a theory" (i.e. doesn't understand what a theory is in science), sees America as the bad guy in every war and wants to stop women voting. I am not right wing but the last thing I want is for the left and right to go full retard at the same time. TRUTH IS KING.”
However, the above post is not the one I wish to direct attention to. It was a response to Krisin that raised an eyebrow for me. Below is X user Tim Heaton’s thoughtful take:
I appreciate the sentiment, but don't use "woke" to merely mean "extreme" or to refer to the "retardosphere." Woke has a distinct meaning. There is no such thing as a woke right.
This is what "wokeness" means:
1. Power is the only organizing principle in society.
2. Those with power oppress. Those without it are oppressed. (by bigotry, bias, prejudice, self-interest, etc.)
3. Deal with individuals only as members of identity groups ("IG"), which are always expanding.
4. Hide or obscure individual differences that challenge the legitimacy of IGs.
5. Rank all IGs in a social hierarchy. Each IG is oppressed by all above it. Intersections between IGs are especially oppressed.
6. IG rank is identified by perceived performance gaps without consideration of underlying causes. Gaps are conclusive evidence of oppression.
7. Weaponize empathy in response to these perceived gaps to create submission of higher IGs to lower IGs.
8. All lower IGs must unite against the top IG ("TIG"). This collective is the coalition of the oppressed ("COO")
9. TIG = White, male, heterosexuals of the western world. COO = everyone else (all victims of all forms of oppression)
10. COO accepts only "lived experience" as a legitimate basis to speak about itself, which, by definition, excludes TIG from the conversation. TIG must shut up and listen to COO.
11. TIG is irredeemable, controls all "systems," and must be overthrown by force.
12. Equality of opportunity and merit-based advancement are TIG's tools of oppression and must be replaced by equality of outcome, also called "equity."
13. Equity is pursued by DEI, CRT, social justice, anti- racism, etc.
14. Perfect equity requires nothing short of total systemic revolution by COO against TIG.
15. An illustrative list of categories and concepts irredeemably contaminated by TIG requiring total restructuring includes: -- truth, goodness, beauty, knowledge -- The United States Constitution -- the nuclear family of mother (woman), father (man), and children -- education -- religion -- the scientific method -- mathematics -- logic -- biology, physics, astronomy, chemistry -- agriculture, economics, law, justice -- music, sports, movies, literature
16. With enough revolution, TIG's power is destroyed. Under the guidance of COO, this power reverts to "the people" as an undifferentiated collective and all social hierarchies are dissolved.
17. Utopia begins (In reality, hell begins. Poverty is universal. Corruption is ubiquitous. Incompetence reigns. The new leadership becomes rich, self-serving, and tyrannical. Society is much worse off than before.)
What say you readers? Does Tim have it right? Has he missed anything?
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Thanks for reading. For more on this topic, read The Utopian Whimsy: Left Politics of Nowhere in the Here and Now - The intellectual origins and development of the left-wing social vision
BREAKING NEWS:
A new long-form essay by Dr. M - Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy
James Pew has contributed a chapter to the new book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers
Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!
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The end game of woke equity-communists is rarely spoken, so I commend the author for doing so: “Utopia begins (In reality, hell begins.) Poverty is universal. Corruption is ubiquitous. Incompetence reigns. The new leadership becomes rich, self-serving, and tyrannical. Society is much worse off than before.”
I will also be worse off as a white male. I would never want to see another group deprecated so why do the woke think I’d accept my own deprecation?
Tim covers the intersectional stuff very thoroughly, but is a bit light on with the postmodernist relativist subjectivism, which goes beyond just the 'lived experience' fetish and into denial of any third party referencing that can critically contextualize subjective experience and enable dispassionate intellectual/evidence based debate, consequential thinking and responsible agency which can be tested against across a range of criteria/points of view.
Wokethink is inherently faith based, dogmatic and heresy sniffing virtue signaling whose ideological paranoia is justified by the slightness of its intellectual content.
Woke is a neo-clericism whose rejection of reason and The Enlightenment threatens to take us back to a form of medievalism in post modern form.
In discussing Wokeism, it is important to divest it of its 'left' and 'right' referencing. The present political vocabulary is frozen in a nineteenth to mid twentieth century time warp.
Wokethink bears no relation to anything except a rather garbled and theatrical idealism and political fantasizing that is in line within an economy and culture of fantasy driven indulgences. It performs in the name rather than the substance of its shibboleths. 'Social Justice' operates in the same way as the 'Redeeming and Saving Love of Christ' that then justifies whatever practices are necessary to further less stated and not so edifying institutional behaviors. The late Medieval and Woke church apparatchiks think and behave in the same self serving way.
The New Left from which the Woke eventually emerged was itself what Lenin would have called an Infantile disorder armed with the moral vocabulary of a three year old; you know, the child falls over and hurts itself and the parent blames the 'naughty' object it tripped over. All the disorders of the world are blamed onto abstractions like imperialism, colonialism and capitalism, while avoiding the much more obvious proximate causes for which some personal and group responsibility needs to be taken, if over the age of 3.
Old socialists never accepted ideological or moral backsliding. The perfidious operations of capitalism were never used as an excuse for poor or dysfunctional behavior or attitudes. Working class discipline and rectitude were non negotiable bottom lines for those who committed themselves to the socialist cause.
And they had an unpleasant word for people who didn't measure up, as in 'lumpen proletarian'; i.e., an underclass of ne'er do wells who live by their wits rather than honest labor.
The left used to have a disciplined intellectual and organizational culture. That has long since disappeared., What has replaced it is a babble of stereotypes, aphorisms, euphemisms, dysphemisms, client excuses and the toleration of them.
The way round this is to contextualize the Woke as social administrative apparatchiks for what I call Indulgence Capitalism. They are not functionally anti capitalist. They are a regime 'Soft' Ascendancy in the same way as the Church once was 500 years ago. And while quarrels like cat and dog with its 'Hard' manufacturing and mining industrials, they are in essence jostling not just for regime power, but to obfuscate and/or shift the blame for the terrible mess they both have inflicted on the social and environmental commons they are supposed to be respectively stewarding.
The whole architecture of political discourse has been reduced to a theatrical Tweedle Dee and Dum fight charade, inside a culture where consciousness and its control is the main product and its ideological imagery and goods and service streams merely serve as its icons.
The Woke are not revolutionaries. They are Idearchs. They are regime and embody all its values and modus operandi.; you know, social deregulation and moral privatization and the replacement of a hierarchic culture of needs and wants with fantasies of desire and immediate and unqualified satiation.
And like its opposite numbers, it needs to obfuscate and blame shift the shambles that is the result of 50-60 years and three generations of its incompetent and malfeasant administration.
This picture bears no relation whatever to any notion of left and right, or traditional and progressive, or radical and conservative. The boundaries of knowing fantasy and unknowing delusion have become so broken down and eroded hardly anyone can tell where one ends and the other begins, which why it has been so easy for the asylums to be emptied and the ex-inmates installed into the very top of our critical institutions.
The Woke administer a form of rationalized irrationality that is not so much left or right, but off its face and twice as dangerous as any of its totalitarian predecessors, because the overwhelming majority of people have no idea what has happened to them, or the extent to which they have been colonized and taken over....which has allowed their masters to completely unhinge discourse from reality.