Examining the Religious Nature of Wokeism and Deconstructing an Illogical Woke Meme
INTRODUCTION
This specious and fallacious meme has been making the rounds on social media, with people who identify as “woke” using it to signal their own narcissistically-driven virtue to fellow wokeists. But if you take a step back and examine both the express and implied logic behind it, it demonstrates just how irrational and illogical the modern woke movement has become. Before taking this particular brain-fart apart, I think it is important to clarify what I mean when I use the term “woke”, as many pundits on the Right seem to throw it around like Chimpanzees flinging faeces at any progressive idea that scares them. It would also be useful to highlight wokeism’s fairly sound analogy to religion, and the negative impact that ideologically-driven thought processes have on the cognitive abilities of human beings.
I have spent over a decade critiquing religion. Over that decade I have published a plethora of essays and articles analyzing and critiquing religion and have had several books published by traditional publishing houses on atheism and religion. I guess it would also be worth noting that I hold a Master’s Degree in Studies in Religion from the University of New England. I mention all this, not as an appeal to authority, but because it is relevant to the subject at hand, and such confessions, whilst making me feel awkward, do go to my somewhat competent ability to speak on the comparative analogy between traditional religion and the seemingly religious nature of wokeism.
THE NOBLE ORIGINS OF WOKEISM AND ITS TOXIC EVOLUTION
The term ‘woke’ originates in Black American culture, with its earliest use found in a 1962 New York Times article written by novelist William Melville Kelley, who wrote:
‘If you’re woke, you dig it’.
The term was later used in 1972 in a play entitled ‘Garvey Lives’, written by Barry Beckham. Beckman penned upon the lips of one of his characters the following words:
‘I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon stay woke. And I’m gon’ help him wake up other black folk.’
The character was referring to Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican political activist who was President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. Marcus Garvey was a talented writer and orator, who, at a time when racial inequality in the USA was acute and severe, raised the consciousness of Black Americans and armed them with the a gift that would eventually see the end of segregation and the beginning of a new age in which racial equality became enacted into public policy and successfully engrained into the laws and consciousness of America. This elevation of consciousness became a global revolution that would eventually spread across Western democracies and make them far superior to their dark and bigoted histories.
If one were to examine the trajectory of racial equality in the US from Garvey’s day to ours, one would notice a very positive incline toward racial equality, not that the woke, with their “progressophobia” as Stephen Pinker coined it, would have you believe. No, according wokeists, racial inequality in the US has never been so bad! But there appears to be a functional reason the woke remain wilfully blind to the objective truth concerning the actual progress that has been made - and is being made - with respect to racial and other forms of social equality. To acknowledge such progress would be to deny the very premise upon which the entire foundation of modern wokeism rests and reproduces. What need would there be for the dismantling of Western societies and their systems if these societies and systems are actually moving in a positive direction? There would be no need for this attempted destruction, and more frighteningly for the woke, there would be no need for wokeism.
Its progressophobia is both its evangelical tool and its survival mechanism, just as Christianity’s evangelical tool and its survival mechanism is its eschatology. Like the Christian evangelist, the woke evangelist believes with all their heart that they are in a life-and-death struggle against largely unseen forces of evil (White Supremacy and Patriarchy). They are trying to save us all from our sins, because we are all ignorant of the truth of the evil which surrounds us. They envisage an impending apocalypse and the coming of the End of Days, when the forces of the righteous believers will overthrow the Anti-Christs and usher in a grand and spectacular utopia. But before paradise is reachable, you must obey and have blind faith in the messengers of wokeism, who are attempting to open the non-believer’s eyes to the idea that the system has us all hoodwinked, and that the evil doers are great and powerful deceivers out to deliberately oppress minorities with colour-blindness, diversity of thought and heterodox opinions, which will land these evil doers on the “wrong side of history”, the woke orthodoxy’s version of Hell. These metaphysical doctrines, coupled with their other core dogmas and tenets, give wokeism a very religious appearance.
Despite wokeism’s exclusively Black American roots, it has recently been hijacked by predominantly pink-haired, privately educated, privileged white social justice warriors, and it has expanded to include all areas of philosophically flawed Critical Social Justice, and in a way that is harming the independent causes it uses to bludgeon those who refuse to conform to its ridiculous narratives. Peter Boghossian offers the following brief yet admittedly incomplete definition of the modern application of the word ‘woke’.
In an article in Al Jazeera, Why Woke Became Toxic, its author, Johnny Luk, gives an example of the measurable harm that wokeism has caused by infecting the trans movement and pitting trans women against biological women, who, ironically, are also the “helpless” wards of the mighty woke soldiers of righteousness:
‘Wokeness can also shut down good causes. In 2019, Canada’s oldest women’s domestic violence shelter, based in Vancouver, was stripped of local authority funding because it refused to accept trans women (who were biologically male). Perhaps the shelter should have handled the issue differently, as the local authority won a short-term victory in the name of “inclusion”. But the crippling of an essential service only meant further division and long-term damage to the cause.’
Similar examples of female disenfranchisement as a result of wokeism’s infectious invasion of the trans-rights movement are sadly increasing, with male rapists being housed in female prisons, male MMA fighters crushing the skulls of their female opponents, women’s sporting spaces being opened up and dominated by male competitors, etc. Why? Because of the woke dogma that “trans women are women”, which is either accepted entirely without critique or question, or else serving as licence for the woke to completely cancel and dismantle the lives of those who dare to express even mild curiosities and/or objections to this sacred dogma policed largely by the Social Media Ministry of Truth.
To balance my critique, here comes my obligatory yet sincerely honest virtue-signalling. Brace yourselves. I believe that the trans-rights movement is an extremely necessary one, one that is having a positive impact on the lives of those who suffer gender dysphoria. Trans men and women have suffered horribly, and continue to suffer horribly, as a result of ignorance and bigotry. Rates of violence against trans men and women are at an all-time high, and we could explore both religious conservatism’s and wokeism’s dual and tandem roles in these burgeoning rates in another piece, but the fact remains, gender dysphoria is a natural phenomenon which still makes its sufferers the targets of ignorant bigots. There needs to be a trans movement, because a trans person’s rights are human rights. I can hear the blood pouring out of the ears of the woke reader at this point, as well as the screams of “WOKE!!” coming from hyper-Conservative readers. What most compassionate and rational people object to is the injection of woke doctrines and woke methods of enforcement into the trans movement. So, what are these woke doctrines, and how does wokeism compare to religion? Let’s now move on to examine a more concrete comparison between wokeism and religion.
WOKEISM AND RELIGION
When I was undertaking my Master’s in Religion, one of my supervising professors tasked me with precisely defining ‘religion’. I entered the task far more confident than I left it. It was only mid-way through writing a definition that I discovered that my professor had stitched me up, so to speak.
Philosophers and theologians have struggled in vain over the centuries to adequately define ‘religion’. What is religion? We have no trouble identifying a religion when we see one, but defining the essential qualities, components and characteristics of religion has proven to be a virtually impossible task. Definitions thus far have generally suffered from gross ethnocentrism, like that of the 19th century religious philosopher James Martineau, which holds:
“Religion is the belief in an ever-living God, that is, in a Divine Mind and Will ruling the Universe and holding moral relations with mankind.”
Other definitions have been either too exclusive (monotheist/polytheistic) or too inclusive (Anything garnering popular attention and a following). An example of a popular definition of religion which also suits our comparative purposes here is that of philosopher John Hick’s application of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” approach. Wittgenstein’s model, which he applied to language, is based upon the premise that family members do not share every single feature – members may share eye colour, build, hair colour, etc., yet despite the differences which exist between them, they share certain characteristics and are a definable group – a family, or religion in this case.
To date, no one has proffered a precise definition of religion, but here is my own attempt at cautiously yet imperfectly defining religion:
Religion is a human institution and/or social and psychological phenomenon with identifiable rites, rituals and practices – that transmits a belief-system and core set of ethics through non-evidentiary forms of instruction, the goal of which is generally the transcendence of the individual and/or group beyond the observable and/or measurable human condition toward some unknowable, but generally believed, metaphysical end – and which, frequently but not always, focuses on and/or worships some divine or non-divine figure(s) or focal point in order to compel the individual and/or group to aspire to achieve the aforementioned transcendence.
I don’t think even the staunchest of wokeists would argue that the Critical Social Justice movement (wokeism) is neither a social nor a psychological movement. Its social qualities hinge on mobilizing societies to adopt revolutionary models which are aimed at transforming the psychology of both the society at large and the individual. One example of this is found in wokeism’s application of Critical Race Theory beyond its original legal domain. A woke aberration of CRT is now being pushed and peddled in schools, and despite claims to the opposite, this woke perversion of CRT attempts to employ the woke doctrine of ‘progressophobia’ to obliterate the distinction between the past and the present. Proponents of CRT beyond its legal domain argue that all they want is a true teaching of history, but this is a slight-of-hand argument. Many rational and compassionate parents opposed to the insertion of CRT in schools are not opposed in any way to the teaching of the more ugly aspects of history, such as slavery, colonization, segregation, female disenfranchisement, etc. Hyper-Conservatives, on the other hand, seem to be the exception here, as their goal does appear to be the whitewashing of history for no other reason than to mythologize their nation’s history in order to control the narrative they seek to vomit everywhere.
You can teach unbiased history without a woke CRT being espoused that seeks to brainwash children through indoctrination (non-evidentiary form of teaching) to unquestionably accept the idea that white students are necessarily privileged over and above their minority classmates via a kind of metaphysical oppression matrix, which is yet another woke ideological doctrine. Here is where the metaphysics of wokeism plays a disingenuous, divisive and harmful game with the minds of children, who sit with innocent and open minds, looking up to their educators with a complete and unquestioning trust that what they are learning is 100% true and accurate. In this way, education institutions have become the churches and houses of worship in which the rites and rituals of wokeism are being practiced by preacher-teachers. In the video I am about to show you, please observe the very religious nature of this exercise. This is akin to a religious practice in which children, who seem to most frequently be the victims of religious abuse, are made to undertake a ritualistic exercise to “educate” them with respect to this metaphysical doctrine of wokeism. Observe the children’s faces and ask yourself, would these possibly formerly united classmates ever coalesce and come together as fellow classmates in the same manner after being subjected to this form of ritualistic, woke child abuse?
The boundaries and extent of “white privilege” are not decided matters of fact, but matters of belief and opinion. This is a fact. It is against the law to discriminate against people based on their skin colour, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or any other superficiality of the human condition. Yes, we have statistics to demonstrate that to a certain extent, some white people have it better in some ways than some minorities, but the opposite is also true. And before you say, “Well the numbers….” Numbers don’t mean shit to a poor person of any colour struggling, unless those numbers are on dollar bills and those dollar bills are in their pockets. Like it or not, for better or for worse, money is the deciding factor between the haves and the have nots and between substantive privilege and tangible disempowerment.
This has all been some really heavy lifting, so let’s take a quick comedy break.
THE WOKE DOCTRINE OF ‘IDENTITY POLITICS’
The children in the above video were subjected to ritualistic child abuse as a result of wokeism’s doctrine of obsessive identity politics. As an expressed concept, the notion of identity politics has been around since the 1980’s, and as a concept it does have value. It can be used in circumstances of overt oppression of an identity group to allow such groups to band together and mobilize to ensure that its constituent members can fight their way out of identity politics, and once again return to being seen as individual human beings. The goal of identity politics should always be its own dissolution. This is not, however, the way in which the woke use it. Wokeism has turned identity politics into an eternal doctrine in which a person can only be seen as a member of a group, and this bleeds into an individual’s psychology, whereby they become incapable of viewing themselves beyond their group’s identity. Their beautiful individuality is lost to the banality of superficiality. They internalize the group identity in a kind of pathological manner, eternally dividing them from their larger family, the human race. This divides classrooms, boardrooms, sporting teams, friend-groups, and even families, particularly mixed-race families. Just imagine the heartbreak of a loving White mother whose darker skinned mixed-race teenage son becomes incapable of viewing himself or his mother in any other way other than through the lens of this divisive woke doctrine? What was once a happy and united family has now become a group divided along the lines of the delusional woke oppression matrix. In this way, there is a kind of similarity to the way in which cults practice isolating new members from their previous social bonds in order to gain full control over their adherents. Now, you can rationalize this away by arguing that this is just a hypothetical scenario, but given the increased prevalence of this doctrine in elementary schools, high schools and universities, and given that mixed families are becoming a much more common reality, is it really a far-fetched hypothetical?
Discussing the divisive nature of identity politics, political philosopher Sonia Kruks describes it as:
‘The demand is not for inclusion within the fold of “universal humankind” on the basis of shared human attributes; nor is it for respect “in spite of” one’s differences. Rather, what is demanded is respect for oneself as different.’
Another problem with the obsessive identity politics doctrine is that it commonly substitutes character for costume. People begin to incorrectly believe that the group is what provides them with their value as an individual, rather than their own achievements and merits as a unique individual. I think this video sums up the problem with this woke doctrine in words far more effective than my own.
THE WOKE DOCTRINE OF THE ‘LIVED EXPERIENCE’
The doctrine of the elevation of the subjective lived experience over the empirical is one which has come out of the halls of sociology. The Oxford reference Guide defines the lived experience as:
1. Personal knowledge about the world gained through direct, first-hand involvement in everyday events rather than through representations constructed by other people. It may also refer to knowledge of people gained from direct face-to-face interaction rather than through a technological medium.
2. In phenomenology, our situated, immediate, activities and encounters in everyday experience, prereflexively taken for granted as reality rather than as something perceived or represented: see also natural attitude.
3. From Althusser's structuralist Marxist perspective, all human activity, which he emphasized is not a given or pure ‘reality’, but a ‘peculiar relationship to the real’ which is ‘identical with’ ideology.
Yes, we can gain some valuable data from subjective experiences, but there are obvious limitations when attempting to export the subjective experience of individuals onto large and inherently diverse identity groups. This evidentiary gap leaves room for the insertion of unreliable social and political narratives, and these narratives seem to now be held in almost scientific esteem by believers. The primary narrative-device inserted by the faithful is that we exclusively interact in society through the sole lens of our ascribed identities, thus making this a kind of Marxist sub-doctrine to the other Marxist doctrine of Identity Politics. Wait. Stop. Shh. I am not against all aspects of Marx’s philosophies, and it may shock some to discover that I was born a third-generation Communist. My grandparents were placed on the ASIO watchlist in Australia for being card-carrying Communists, and my grandmother even visited China and watched Mao speak in person. I am not a Communist myself, because my indoctrination just didn’t take and I value individual human rights over and above authoritarianism and collectivist delusions of reality, which, as history has clearly demonstrated, ends in disaster, tyranny and atrocity. Anyway, I digress.
The irrational elevation of the subjective lived experience over that which can be reliably and objectively established with empirical evidence has crept out of the dreamy lecture halls of sociology and into the common discourse of the laity. The video below shows a group of South African university students arguing for the “decolonization’’ of science. They argue that in order to decolonize science, which is “just a product of Western imperialism”,, science must be scrapped entirely. One student also attempts to argue for the inclusion of African witchcraft into science, because this doctrine holds that, what is subjectively believed to be true for an individual or group must necessarily be objectively true. This is obviously not rational, because it were, I would be Brad Pitt in real life.
In my former role as the Executive Director of Atheist Alliance international, I was fortunate enough to have a number of meetings with the Nigerian professor and rationalist, Leo Igwe, who is fighting tooth and nail to educate his fellow Africans on the absurdity and dangers of believing in witches and magic. In a number of African countries, people to this day are still being hunted down and murdered because they are believed to be witches. So, how does the elevation of the subjective lived experience help activists like Leo combat such inhumanity and superstition? It doesn’t. Instead, it unwittingly elevates and justifies such ignorant barbarism.
TRANSCENDENCE TOWARD A METAPHYSICAL UTOPIA
The goal of wokeism is a noble one. But then again, so was the goal of the cult leader of Heaven’s Gate, who convinced his followers to commit mass-suicide in service to his utopian delusions. The goal of wokeism is to live in an imagined yet unknowable utopia in which everyone can equally share in the fruits of humanity. If history has taught us anything, it is to beware of those who preach an unknowable utopia, because in the end the end ends up justifying whatever means those in control of the ideology deem necessary to bring about this imaginary paradise. Idealism must be balanced with rationalism, or else the ideal itself becomes a highly addictive and destructive drug, and drug addicts when left no other choice, will naturally commit crimes and atrocities to ensure they get their fix. This fact goes some way to explaining the vicious and relentless nature of wokeism’s methods of ideological enforcement.
THE WOKE DOCTRINE OF ‘CENSORSHIP’ AND ‘CANCEL CULTURE’
Ideological movements need to establish strict fences to maintain their structural integrity. These fences must be zealously policed and if a patroller notices someone climbing over the fence and attempting to live freely on the outside, sanctions must be swift, severe, and advertised to dissuade others from trying to live beyond the confines of the ideological compound. These fences also serve to divide humanity into two competing categories, insiders and outsiders. Woke ideological authoritarianism uses cancel culture as a punitive measure by which both escaping insiders and heretical outsiders are publicly punished to coerce widespread conformity. Here we encounter a prima-facie distinction between other cults like Scientology, who primarily seek to control insiders through fear of degradation and banishment. However, in similitude to wokeism, Scientology is also notorious for harassing and litigating its critics.
James Lindsay argues that the woke tend to police each other more heavily than they police the non-woke [citation pending]. If true, this would go some way to mitigating my distinction between wokeism and cults like Scientology, but it wouldn’t eradicate the distinction entirely, as there is a growing number of examples of non-woke outsiders to the movement being targeted for cancellation. I think the reason for this could be, wokeism is largely, yet not exclusively, an online socio-political religious movement, which gives it an extended capacity to enforce its dogmatic worldview on both insiders and outsiders.
Cancel culture is spreading throughout all of its host-societies’ institutions, from entertainment to academia. Most notably of recent, comedians are bearing the brunt when it comes to the implementation of this doctrine.
You must be exhausted reading all of these heavy concepts. I know I am. Let’s take another comedy break, shall we?
Regarding cancel culture’s impact on society, Jordan Peterson correctly observed that today’s comedians are the “canaries in the coal mine“, so to speak. The reason for the woke moral panic surrounding comedy will be discussed below, however, in the conceptual framework of woke orthodoxy, jokes, words and phrases all have near-supernatural powers, and where rational people see a harmless joke, the woke see a violent and dangerous thought-crime capable of creating real atrocities, and so cancellation of the expresser is seen as the only safe remedy. But what is cancel culture? Let’s start by clarifying what cancel culture is not. It is not someone receiving public criticism for saying something that offends the norms of the society. Let’s just get that meme out of the way. The term can be applied in different ways and exercised to varying degrees, and against various targets, from people to anything at all the woke find “problematic” and worthy of erasing for the rest of us. Brooke Kato of the New York Post defines ‘cancel culture’ in the following words:
‘…the phenomenon of promoting the “canceling” of people, brands and even shows and movies due to what some consider to be offensive or problematic remarks or ideologies.’
The woke defend this mechanism of control by arguing that they are just innocently and justifiably “holding people accountable for their violence”. As will be discussed, to the woke, “violence” can be something as innocuous as an innocent and non-violent act, omission, symbol, breath, or comment capable of being misconstrued in a manner that goes against this hypersensitive cult’s neurotic dogmas. As an example, the ‘OK’ hand gesture, despite being important to the deaf community, is now considered by the woke as a symbol of hate, simply because some alt-right activists used it. On the New Discourses website, Lindsay said of cancel culture:
‘Because of the cultural power held by Social Justice ideas and activists and the fears of organizations that they will be deemed racist, sexist, or transphobic, etc., these attempts at cancellation are often successful (see also, hegemony). Various factors, including the popularity of the individual (thus their potential influence on the discourses), the seriousness of the problematic speech or behavior, and the “wokeness” of the individual’s audience or that of the organization for which they work, decide whether that individual is ever able to redeem themselves or will be forever “untouchable.” The goal of a cancellation is usually to remove the targeted individual from status-bearing jobs, particularly ones that have the capacity to create or influence the discourses of society.’
The list of cancelled people and things grows at an increasingly rapid rate. Not even cheese is safe from cancellation. A famous brand of cheese in Australia has been pulled from the shelves and rebranded due to its “offensive” name. Coon Cheese, named after American cheesemaker Edward Coon, is now ‘Cheer Cheese’ after an uproar by the woke orthodoxy in Australia. Coon, however, is not a racial slur in this context at all – it is a Scottish family name of Gaelic origin. Nonetheless, this family name was deemed cancel-worthy due to its fortuitous phonetic transliteration into English.
DE-PLATFORMING HUMAN RIGHTS
De-platforming is one of the ways in which the woke orthodoxy employ cancel culture to assert control over speech. This is potentially one of the woke orthodoxy’s most nefarious doctrines, because those who control speech control the narrative, and those who control the narrative control truth, or at least the subjective and collective perceptions of the truth. It is no logical fallacy to observe the slippery slope this creates toward useful mass-ignorance and tyranny. Information and thought control have been a staple for all tyrannies of the past and present. Just as one example from modern history:
‘in the early twentieth century, before the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Empire of Japan (1868–1947), in 1911, established the Tokubetsu Kōtō Keisatsu (‘Special Higher Police’), a political police force also known as Shisō Keisatsu, the Thought Police, who investigated and controlled native political groups whose ideologies were considered a threat to the public order of the countries colonised by Japan.’
I could go on to cite the Nazi’s book burnings, Stalin’s secret police, who were responsible for reporting thought crimes, as well as a plethora of other examples in North Korea, China, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Just as reporting an employee to his/her private employer for unsanctioned expressions of thought, de-platforming seeks to silence heterodox speech by coercing social media and mainstream media platforms to de-platform commentators who commit the sin of ‘woke blasphemy’. As is the case with traditional blasphemy, woke blasphemy attacks the two cornerstone human rights of freedom of thought and freedom of expression, without which the very foundations of human rights crumble, along with the civilizations these rights uphold and protect. However, the woke clergy argue that de-platforming is not a human rights issue because it doesn’t seek to legally prevent someone from freely expressing themselves. They argue that such people can still go out into the streets with signs (for now) that express their opinions, and that private companies have every right to decide to whom they provide their platforms and services. I agree. Legislating restrictions that would protect the principle of free speech at the expense of freedom of association and the freedom companies require to decide who they do business with would be like biting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. It is, however, a point of irony that some woke believers promote freedom for some private companies whilst also arguing against such freedom for others. Where the woke zealously defend the autonomy of companies like Twitter and Facebook, they preach government intervention when it comes to Christian bakeries who would rather not provide their services to same-sex weddings. I am not arguing in favour of these bigoted bakeries, but it is certainly an interesting conundrum for the woke orthodoxy, and illustrates Chris Rock’s criticisms concerning selective outrage. To steel man this point, you could argue that this example relies on a false equivalence between identity and speech. That is to say, being gay is not always a choice, but what you say is always a choice, therefore the former deserves unequivocal protection whilst the latter does not. The woke might also argue that if the speech hurts someone’s feelings (“speech is violence”), regardless of how important that speech is to the identity of the person expressing it, then that speech should not be protected whereas someone’s sexual identity should always be protected. But aren’t both of these rights equally important to maintaining a free and harmonious society? I think most human rights lawyers would probably argue that the right to express yourself via your sexuality is just as important as the right to express yourself via your opinions, thoughts and beliefs. In fact, it could be easily argued that freedom of expression underpins gay rights, and that any assault on this foundational freedom has the potential to dangerously undermine the freedom of all expressions, whether those expressions involve dildos or microphones.
Once censorship takes root in society it is very difficult to uproot, because censorship is self-protecting, and what the woke orthodoxy fail to appreciate is that there is no guarantee that the dominant political philosophy of the day will remain in power. What if the far-right rises to power? Don’t you think they would benefit from the Left’s zealous erosion of these two fundamental human rights? Of course they would! I would warn the woke to be very careful what they wish for, because before you know it, you’ve just unwittingly dug mass-graves for all those principles your well-intentioned ignorance has sought to protect.
Whilst cancel culture and de-platforming are not strictly considered human rights issues, their application generally have the same stifling impact on freedom of thought and expression. In a hyper-sensitive and hyper-reactive environment, where one could lose one’s livelihood and be unable to feed themselves and their family, self-censorship becomes the most logical behaviour, and once this behaviour becomes the norm, freedom of expression and thought may as well be illegal. In this way, the woke orthodoxy are threatening the existence of human rights in countries that have enjoyed immense progress as a result of these rights.
THE WOKE DOCTRINE OF ‘METAPHYSICAL LINGUISTICS’
This prominent doctrine of wokeism concerns the belief in the metaphysical power of words. Words alone are believed to have almost supernatural powers. For the non-woke non-believer, it is the expresser’s intention and the context of use that supplies words their meanings. For the woke, however, the words themselves hold autonomous magical powers. The idea that words are magical underpins the origin of that which we now popularly refer to as the ‘curse word’, which has all but lost its supernatural meaning and become a synonym for ‘swear word’.
The concept of curse words finds its origins in the ancient superstitions of our comparatively ignorant ancestors, who believed that the utterance of certain words and phrases could invoke the wrath of gods and even summon forth demons and evil spirits. It was believed in many earlier civilizations that it was possible to “curse” a mortal enemy with the simple expression of a word or a phrase. Drawing upon the works of various scholars in the relevant fields, Steinbach-Eicke and Eicke observe:
‘In ancient sources, we find the invocation of supernatural entities (e.g. gods, demons) or initiated human specialists (e.g. priests, magicians) who performed a ritual for the client. Thus, cursing was a religious or magical action with a distinct, violative but defensive aim.
A few recent publications on curses in the ancient world illustrate this characterisation: in her book about cursing in cuneiform and Hebrew texts, Kitz (2014: 3) defines curses as “petitions to the divine world to render judgement and execute harm on identified, hostile forces”. At the beginning of her overview of Ancient Greek and Roman curses, Eidinow (2013: 1877) describes such curses as speech acts “invoking supernatural powers and reinforced ritual”’.
There are many examples throughout history which demonstrate that people believed, and some still do, that the mere utterance of words can metaphysically affect corporeal reality. In The Oxford Handbook of Taboo Language, Allan writes:
‘For Ancient Hindus, Sanskrit vedas had to be in the pure form (suddah) described by Panini in the…(fourth century BCE), ‘A mantra [hymn] recited with incorrect and “careless” arrangement of varna (letters) [reacts] like a thunderbolt and gets the reciter destroyed by the God Indra’ (Kachru 1984: 178, quoting a sutra). Why? Because it is blasphemous to deviate from the prescribed rendition of the holy text. At about the same period, Plato warns against speaking ill of the gods…’
To offer up an entire corpus of examples from every religion and culture from the ancient world to the modern age would fill volumes of books, so I will give you one last example from Christendom.
In medieval Christianity, it was considered dangerous blasphemy to utter phrases which included God, Christ and body parts. For example, it was believed that by merely saying “by God’s bones” or “by God’s nails” out loud, Christ would actually be torn to pieces in heaven, as such phrases were seen to have served as a kind of reverse eucharist, capable of disassembling the ethereal body of Christ.
As bizarre and ridiculous to the modern mind that such concepts seem today, the belief in the metaphysical power of written or phonetic expressions of arbitrarily constructed characters (words) persists as a key doctrine of wokeism.
Here we see a throwback to the more superstitious origins of the concept of the curse word. An example of this, and there are plenty available in this growing climate of political correctness and wokeness, can be found in the reaction to a tweet I posted which referred to religion as a ‘retarded relic’. The word retarded, although not applied to people in my post, was seen by woke commentators as being somehow endowed with a metaphysical ability to disenfranchise vulnerable people with learning and/or physical disabilities, regardless of the intention or application of its use. It was deemed almost magical in its ability to harm or curse the afflicted group by virtue of nothing more than its expression. Critics of free speech appear to be arguing that if we allow the popularisation of such words, which were used as discriminatory pejoratives in more ignorant times, then we will bring back those times and cause the regression of society. But do such words, in and of themselves, possess this spell-casting power to make entire societies unlearn all we have learned since those more ignorant times? Is our scientific understanding of the heliocentric solar system at peril each and every time we use the expression ‘sunrise’, given that we now understand that the sun doesn’t actually rise? Might the words we use in different social and historical periods and circumstances also have different applications and meanings? Could calling someone a “funny cunt”, which is a compliment in Australia and other countries, advance gender-inequality, for example? I guess what I am really asking is, do words have supernatural powers that can affect corporeal reality? Can a word, by itself, alter reality? I think most sane and rational people would agree that words do not have this type of magical agency.
This metaphysical belief in the power of words has popularised the woke sub-doctrine of ‘violent speech‘. There are categories of speech which can be rationally considered imminently violence-inducing. If I call on my friends to physically attack someone standing in front of me that I do not like, then such speech might reasonably be considered “violent.” However, the context of the idea of violent speech has been warped and extended beyond its sane and functional parameters, and this insane extension of the notion could be argued to hinge on the woke doctrine of the metaphysical power of words.
THE WOKE DOCTRINE OF ‘SILENCE AS VIOLENCE’
Another related doctrine of wokeism has taken this insanity to new levels, claiming that not only is speech violence, but so is silence. Again, silence *can* result in violence, just not to the same extent proposed by this sub-doctrine. If, for example, a man is holding a gun to someone else’s head and issues the ultimatum, “Give me the code to your phone or I will shoot this guy in the face”, then my silence here would provide the potential catalyst for a violent act. However, as with the ‘speech is violence’ doctrine, this has been taken to insane yet functionally useful extents for the woke orthodoxy. It is functionally useful for the religious orthodoxy of wokeism because it reinforces those heavily policed fences. These two doctrines (‘speech is violence’ and ‘silence is violence’) work together to ensure control not merely over a target’s use of language, but also over their right to remain silent. “You’re either with us or against us, and you must immediately drop what you are doing and tell us you stand with us, or else we will cancel you”, is the Orwellian message intended to be conveyed by these tandem human-rights-infringing doctrines. Thus, it becomes clear that the purpose of these doctrines is to exert control and amass power over the infected society and its members.
DECONSTRUCTING AN ILLOGICAL WOKE MEME
[IMPLIED] FALSE DICHOTOMY FALLACY
The primary message of this meme seems simple, but please feel free to correct me if you believe I have committed a strawman fallacy. The message is, “wokeism is beautiful because the “absolute worst” people use it to describe “everything” that is good.” I hope I am reading this right. Therefore, this argument posits that woke must necessarily be a beautiful thing because bad people hate it and use it to describe “everything that is good”. This presents as an implied false dichotomy between woke, which is taken to describe everything good, and anti-woke, which describes things held dear to “the worst people on earth”, i.e., bad things. A false dichotomy fallacy is best described in the following words:
‘A false dichotomy is presenting two choices when more than two choices exist.’
Firstly, if we accept this illogical premise, then we can use it to argue that Stalin was good because he hated and opposed Hitler. Stalin, for those who are historically illiterate, was an authoritarian Communist tyrant who was responsible for approximately 40 million deaths in Soviet Russia. In his article ‘How Many People Did Stalin Kill’, Journalist Palash R. Ghosh writes:
In February 1989, two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, a research paper by Georgian historian Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev published in the weekly tabloid Argumenti i Fakti estimated that the death toll directly attributable to Stalin’s rule amounted to some 20 million lives (on top of the estimated 20 million Soviet troops and civilians who perished in the Second World War), for a total tally of 40 million.
I think it is fair to say that just because bad people dislike something, it doesn’t necessarily make that thing good. Like the Hitler vs Stalin analogy, it is not an either/or binary, because we know from history that the third option not factored into the false dichotomy happens to be true - that they were both bad. Bad people hate being poisoned, so does that make being poisoned a good thing? To summarize, it is logically possible that both wokeism and hyper-Conservatism are both bad, which is the third option ignored by such a false dichotomy.
[IMPLIED] POISONING OF THE WELL FALLACY
Secondly, Jason’s statement serves as an implied ‘poisoning of the well fallacy’. When someone presents adverse information about, or associates unfavourable characters, characteristics or qualities with, a targeted person, or in this case, “the worst people on earth” who use woke pejoratively, with the intention of undermining it, this is known as poisoning the well. Put simply, Jason argues that being woke is beautiful because “the worst people on earth” use it to describe good things, thereby inferring that good people are woke and the worst people on earth are anti-woke, which is why he finishes with the virtue-signalling commandment to “stay woke”.
FALLACY OF COMPOSITION
‘The Fallacy of Composition involves taking attributes of part of an object or class and applying them to the entire object or class.’ Cline spells out this fallacy in the following words:
This is the general form that the Fallacy of Composition takes:
1. All parts (or members) of X have the property P. Thus, X itself has the property P.
Here are some obvious examples of the Fallacy of Composition:
2. Because the atoms of a penny are not visible to the naked eye, then the penny itself must also not be visible to the naked eye.
3. Because all of the components of this car are light and easy to carry, then the car itself must also be light and easy to carry.
Jason associates wokeism with “everything that is good”, thereby inferring that woke describes everything that is good, ignoring the more toxic aspects of wokeism discussed above. Yes, trans rights, women’s rights and minority rights are a good thing, and yes, wokeism promotes these rights, but does that mean that because these positive attributes exist within the corpus or framework of wokeism, it is positive/good as a whole? No. Put simply, just because wokeism contains positive/good components, this does not logically mean that wokeism itself must also be a positive/good thing as a whole.
A FINAL WORD
One thing I have observed time and time again in my years researching religions, cults and ideologies, is that they tend to negatively impact on the way in which people process information. In my first book I discussed the impact of cognitive biases and cognitive dissonance on the minds of believers. Cognitive dissonance essentially describes the situation where pre-existing beliefs are challenged by new information/evidence that contradicts them, causing a kind of internal war in the mind between competing ideas. This war creates psychological discomfort, so we have an internal drive to resolve this dissonance as quickly as possible to prevent this unpleasantness. Frequently, the ego will employ defence mechanisms to protect pre-existing belief structures so as to protect the perceived integrity of the ego.
The father of Cognitive Dissonance Theory, Leon Festinger, observed this phenomenon with respect to his study into an American UFO cult. The leader of this cult promised her adherents that a flood would come on a specific date and wipe out the USA. The promise to her followers was that if they had faith, the aliens would rescue the believers aboard their alien spacecrafts, leaving the rest of the US to perish. The date of this localized apocalypse came and went without incident. Naturally, some left the cult once this event didn’t happen as promised. But other members stayed and became even more convinced of their leader’s relationship with the non-existent aliens. So why would some members not only stay, but develop a more zealous and entrenched faith in their ideology? Social scientists who were planted in the cult to study them witnessed these remaining members employ a rationalization to keep their belief intact. They rationalized that the USA must have been spared by their unrelenting faith. In so rationalizing, they were able to quickly resolve the discomfort of their cognitive dissonance and also keep their existing belief structures in place, thereby preserving the perceived integrity of their own egos.
I finish with this because I know from experience, that no matter how well you argue, and no matter how much evidence, logic and reason you unload on true believers, they will preference their own egos over the enlightening suffering of growth, learning and change. Their own selfish feelings will always trump their intellectual integrity. In short, people reading this who identify as woke, and who have not only adopted that ideology but also incorporated it into their very identity, and we know how much this strain of believer loves identity, they will not be moved in the slightest by anything I have presented here. Instead, they will find rationalizations and excuses to keep their internal and subjective models of reality protected from new and uncomfortable information.
Thank you for reading this very long-winded piece. Since you have all been so attentive and well-behaved, here is a little Ricky Gervais to decompress.