patrick.net

Recognize that even concentrated capital is not entirely cynical. The fortunate wealthy have a deep need to assuage their sense of guilt which arises from their massive material acquisitions. Wokeism provides that assuaging much like the Christian impulses that drove the robber barons to build universities and libraries bought them indulgence for a life of materialism. Wokeism provides relief from feelings of sinfulness and embarrassment that arise from the rank materialism of today’s oligarchy. Bumping commercial flights on your approach to Aspen in your Gulfstream GVI feels a lot better if you are, in your mind, striving elsewhere to be a saint of wokeism.

Not only is wokeism providing the “something else” for people to believe, it is also aligning with powerful economic interests. Simple spiritual and economic incentives give shape to wokeism, offering a form of redemption to capital classes that simultaneously protects their monopolistic economic and political power. The structure of woke thought has come to dominate not just the economic scene, but the private and political lives of nearly all Americans. Thus ordinary Americans are caught up in a capitalist redemption myth in ways that neither serve nor save them. ...

The woke have little need of kindness for anyone in their immediate circle. In fact, such affections are a detriment to the saintly woke work of scolding and harming the sinners. What is important for the woke is that they hold the right opinions about people with whom they have little to do directly; all that is required is to embrace wokeism’s doctrines about the environment, race, gender, and sexuality. Blocking traffic is extra credit. Destroying someone’s career—and putting his family in economic jeopardy—is fine behavior, as long as it is done in accordance with woke doctrines. ...

Wokeism is therefore the mashup of beliefs that results when a “something else” has been cobbled together to satisfy both the superstitions and capital interests of various constituencies. Indeed, the majority of impulses behind wokeism and the mainline Protestant embrace of its doctrines are driven by the incentives of capital to want more and to keep what it has.

Capital, as a class, is very clever. This should be no surprise. People who have, and who are able to retain and maneuver capital, possess not just property but often a proven capacity for abstract thinking and deferral of gratification. A good part of wokeism is a collective effort by capital, not as part of a conspiracy, but rather by a large number of relatively simple—but compelling—incentives to protect its interests against a mass of people who have little to no capital and few prospects of acquiring it, under a system of trade and policy that serves monopolistic structures and depresses the value of unskilled and semi-skilled labor. Absent some doctrine to induce their cooperation, in a responsive republican form of government, change would be forced by public outcry and ultimately ballots

Wokeism renders government less responsive to electoral inputs. Witness how wokeism—in the form of #theResistance—hobbled the Trump Administration’s efforts to effect the policies Trump campaigned for and was elected to implement. But wokeism also is an instrument in majority formation to mold electoral inputs (whether genuine or manipulated) to support capital. Wokeism inspires the corruption of electoral integrity, because ballots are not a means of public deliberation and choice, but an instrument to achieve a predetermined end. Results of elections which reject the woke agenda are, to the woke, inherently illegitimate. ...

But if America’s faux Marxists paused for a moment, and the scales of wokeism fell from their eyes, they might see that, at least for the present, their interests are aligned in overturning the structure of trade and labor that we call globalism. Their interests, Trump voter and Sanders voter alike—white, brown, black, straight or gay—are aligned in revolution against a corrupt oligarchy. ...

While wokeism has won most of the recent battles triggered by catastrophe, it is important to remember that opinion is perhaps more fluid than it may otherwise appear. Sudden and forceful action at the right time may permanently shift opinion in favor of the possibility of the restoration of sound—or more sound—broadly shared beliefs and opinions (endoxa). ...

The national government is incompetent. It is gerontocratic, headed chiefly by people over the age of 75. It is dishonest, among other things, having probably funded (under the care of a then 78-year-old physician!) the genetic engineering of a virus, without supervising it, resulting in its physically and politically devastating release. The United States cannot convince as much as half the electorate that its elections are free and fair. With political voices gagged by mainstream and social media, no serious person believes public deliberation which is the basis of choice in free elections is fully possible. ...

Yet we are obliged to hope for better things. In order to do so reasonably, however, hope must be backed by a stubborn effort—which may come at a cost. We must labor to keep alive opinions about the natural and the supernatural—those things endowed by our Creator, revealed or otherwise known—that are the ground of freedom.

In the context of wokeism, a phrase for this stubbornness is religious dissent. So we may as well get on with it. Call out the woke over their false religious doctrine. Say it behind their backs and to their faces. Confront superstition by its name. Align with people who share your convictions. And dissent.