patrick.net

it has been very distressing to witness our society’s intellectual class fall in line with the bureaucracy and government. They have refused to analyze whether the dramatic suspensions of our civil liberties have been justified or proportionate, and they have failed to highlight the dangers of letting the bureaucracy encroach to such a degree on the private lives and choices of citizens. Cultural and educational institutions (universities, the media, pressure groups, religious institutions, etc.) have abdicated. Not only have they abdicated such a role, but in several cases they have also sided with the bureaucracy in promoting such invasions into private life and attacks on civil liberties. This they continue to do, without realizing the danger it poses to themselves. In addition, they are seemingly unaware that the very policies they defend go against the values they claim to defend: inclusivity, liberty, diversity, and equality and equity.

So maybe their faith in the injection is faith in the "expert class" of which they are members, and they demand that the hoi polloi submit to it as an expression of the elite's power and prestige.

the cure for not being able to manage your own emotional life is to prevent everyone else from having a life too.

this devolves into the adoption of performative ritual to signal which class you are in and to facilitate the monstrous ethical inversion of elevating bullying and dominating others “for their own good” to not just a virtue but a duty.

you get to avoid anxiety AND justify your basest desires to be in control (because you have generally felt out of control). that’s potent psychological liquor. is it any wonder they are drunk on it and have, perhaps, become outright alcoholics, addicted and dependent on this emotional firewater to get through the day?

the endlessly insecure have finally found their happy place.

it’s catnip for karens.

I think these are all pieces of the puzzle. But there’s another real reason that, however unconscious, is certainly also at play, and it’s this: Wokeness perpetuates the economic interests of affluent white liberals. I believe that many of them truly do wish to live in a more equitable society, but today’s liberal elites are also governed by a competing commitment: their belief in meritocracy, or the fiction that their status was earned by their intelligence and talents. Today’s meritocratic elites subscribe to the view that not only wealth but also political power should be the province of the highly educated. Still, liberals see themselves as compassionate and progressive. And perhaps unconsciously, they sought a way to reconcile the inequality that their meritocratic status produces with the compassionate emotions they feel toward the less fortunate. They needed a way to be perpetually on what they saw as the right side of history without having to disrupt what was right for them and their children.

A moral panic around race was the perfect solution: It took the guilt that they should have felt around their economic good fortune and political power— which they could have shared with the less fortunate had they cared to—and displaced it onto their whiteness, an immutable characteristic that they could do absolutely nothing to change. ...

They took a no doubt (?) genuine abhorrence for the truly heinous ways black Americans have been treated historically—and, in some cases, continue to be treated—and instead of seeing in it a call to arms to create a genuinely equal society, they used it as an excuse to withdraw from the common good and the social contract, rebranding the problem of racism to fit the solution that would most benefit them. In the process, they demonized America itself, deplatforming the working class (of all races) while protecting their own status. ...

In other words, wokeness provided the perfect ideology for affluent, liberal whites who didn’t truly want systemic change if it meant their children would have to sacrifice their own status, but who still wanted to feel like the heroes of a story about social justice, who still wanted to feel vastly superior to their conservative and even slightly less radical friends. They took a no doubt genuine abhorrence for the truly heinous ways black Americans have been treated historically—and, in some cases, continue to be treated—and instead of seeing in it a call to arms to create a genuinely equal society, they used it as an excuse to withdraw from the common good and the social contract, rebranding the problem of racism to fit the solution that would most benefit them. In the process, they demonized America itself, deplatforming the working class (of all races) while protecting their own status.