Wokeism and Religion: A Studies in Religion Perspective
/ˈdɒktr(ɪ)n/
noun
…a belief or set of beliefs held and taught by a Church, political party, or other group: "the doctrine of predestination"
SUMMARY OF WOKEISM’S DOCTRINES
DOCTRINE: ‘PROGRESSOPHOBIA’
DOCTRINE: ‘IDEOLOGICAL INDOCTRINATION OF CHILDREN’
DOCTRINE: ‘IDENTITY POLITICS’
DOCTRINE: ‘THE LIVED EXPERIENCE’
DOCTRINE: ‘INFINITE GENDER IDENTITY EXPANSION’
DOCTRINE: ‘WOKE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING’ - THE OPPRESSION MATRIX
DOCTRINE: ‘WHITENESS AS ORIGINAL SIN’
DOCTRINE: ‘DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION’ - WORD GAMES
DOCTRINE: ‘EQUITY OVER EQUALITY’
DOCTRINE: ‘TRANSCENDENCE TOWARD A METAPHYSICAL UTOPIA’
DOCTRINE: ‘CENSORSHIP VIA CANCELLATION’
DOCTRINE: ‘METAPHYSICAL LINGUISTICS’
DOCTRINE: ‘SILENCE IS VIOLENCE’
DOCTRINE: ‘PSYCHIC ABILITIES - THE ALL-SEEING EYE OF WOKEISM’
INTRODUCTION
I have spent over a decade studying and 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.
DOCTRINE: ‘PROGRESSOPHOBIA’
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 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 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 and incomplete definition of the modern application of the word ‘Woke’.
Expanding on this definition of Woke, Helen Pluckrose describes the origins, development and current ideological nature of modern Wokeism in this short video.
WOKEISM - A PORTABLE DEFINITON
Wokeism is an ever-expanding and reactionary religiopolitical ideology built on a mixture of the failed aspects of Postmodernism and Marxism. Its doctrines are designed to distort linguistics in order to evangelize its socially divisive and corrosive mission, and weaponize goodwill to the exclusive benefit of its own survival and expansion. Its scriptures are a handful of books which contain mutually-supportive beliefs, and its priests are a handful of pundits who preach hate disguised as love, intolerance disguised as tolerance, fiction disguised as fact, subjective truth disguised as objective truth, and violence disguised as compassion. Its primary objective is the destruction of civilized society, which it sees as inherently evil, problematic, and irredeemably toxic.
WOKEISM HARMS WOMEN'S RIGHTS
In an article in Al Jazeera, Why Woke Became Toxic, its author Johnny Luk gives an example of the tangible 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 (I see a hymn in that title):
‘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. Tamikka Brents, the female MMA fighter who had her skull fractured in her fight against transgender fighter Fallon Fox, said after the fight:
“I’ve fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did today. I can’t answer whether it’s because she was born a man or not because I’m not a doctor. What I can is that I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life, and I am an abnormally strong female. I still disagree with Fox fighting. She can pursue any career but when it comes to a combat sport I think it just isn’t fair.”
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. A fact not many Wokeists will probably know is that the main culprits of violence against trans men and women are two other minority identity groups, Blacks and Latinos, who are overrepresented in the data. So wait, if we consult the ‘Oppression Matrix’ below, how do we Wokefully measure this incident? Blacks and Latinos are at the bottom of the matrix along with LGBTQIA+, so let me think. Got it! Patriarchy and White Supremacy did it! No further questions!
Anyway, I digress. 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 AS A 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-evidential 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 unbiased 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-evidential 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.
DOCTRINE: ‘IDEOLOGICAL INDOCTRINATION OF CHILDREN’
“Give me the child until he is 7 and I will show you the man” ~Aristotle
Most if not all religions seek to indoctrinate children. Why? Because children are far more trusting and open to suggestions made by adult role models. Also, once a person has been indoctrinated with a belief, psychological primacy along with the ego’s mechanisms of defence keep the ideology protected from outside attacks.
The indoctrination process is one in which ‘non-evidential teaching’ takes any of the following forms: ‘1. It can involve teaching which simply fails to give reasons, evidence or arguments for the beliefs taught. 2. Closely related is a preoccupation with what is taught rather than how it is taught. Green (1972, p. 37) suggests that “when, in teaching, we are concerned simply to lead another person to a correct answer, but are not correspondingly concerned that they arrive at that answer on the basis of good reasons, then we are indoctrinating.” 3. Concern about the preoccupation with learning correct answers is at times expressed in terms of an objection to mindless drill, recitation, and rote memorization which are also seen as indoctrinatory by some (Passmore, 1967, pp. 1930. 4. A final method of non-evidential teaching involves attempts to persuade the subject “by force of the indoctrinator’s personality, by emotional appeal, or by use of a variety of rhetorical devices,” rather than by reasons, evidence, and proof (Benson, 1977, p. 336)’.
Another area of Woke indoctrination lies in its perversion of the LGBTQIA+ movement, which now includes and even encourages the sexualization of children for the sake of virtue-signalling parents and other infected adults.
Take a listen to Asra Nomani’s objections to Wokeism’s attempts to indoctrinate children in schools:
DOCTRINE: ‘IDENTITY POLITICS’
The children in the above video in which they were all made to start a race based on positions ascribed by non-evidential instruction concerning the Woke ‘Oppression Matrix’, were indeed 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.
DOCTRINE: ‘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.
DOCTRINE: ‘INFINITE GENDER IDENTITY EXPANSION’
Based on the ‘Lived Experience’ doctrine, Wokeism has created a gender mill, pumping out a seemingly ever-expanding number of gender identities. These identities range from including autism as an aspect of gender to “two spirit” genders, and they just get more and more ridiculous. Here we see intersectional feminism’s influence over Wokeism, as intersectional feminism may best be defined in the following words:
Intersectional feminism considers the intersecting social structures of gender, race, social class, sexual orientation, religion, ability, and age, among others, as interrelated and shaping one another.
In attempting to counter the previously hegemonic interpretation of an overly generic “lived experience of the woman,” it has advanced an irrational application of identity politics to create a slightly less myopic view of an individual woman’s experience and added other identity markers in a bid to better explain the experiences of women-categories. It is, essentially, a fuzzy area of academia with no real evidentiary substance, but for the unreliable anecdotal accounts of women who share overlapping identity markers, and from there it has taken a giant and unsupported leap in logic to posit that it can isolate reliable data across ultimately diverse groups of individuals.
This shaky area of social science, which is far more social than science, has made its way into the religion and is now believed as gospel truth. Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently mockingly asked, “If we have 100 genders, why not 1000?” I will see Ayaan’s 1000 genders and raise her 7.888 billion genders, because the fact is, no two people experience life and society the same way with respect to any characteristic, therefore logic dictates that this ever-expanding gender mill incorporate the unique lived experiences of each individual, which at the moment stands at approximately 7.888 billion, the current approximate population of human beings on earth. This infinite expansion of gender identities only works if gender is completely stripped of its socially prescribing function and left to Wokeism to define without giving due consideration to the relationship between sex and socially agreed upon gender identities, which is still only two, men and women, according to the majority in all societies. However, in freeing gender identity from the chains of organized social structures, this doctrine of gender identity expansion taken to its logical conclusion loses all meaning and any analytical creditability.
DOCTRINE: ‘WOKE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING’ - THE OPPRESSION MATRIX
Wokeism holds group identity as being sacrosanct. As discussed above, Wokeism’s goal with respect to its employment of identity politics isn’t to use it temporarily to fight discrimination then have the constituents of the group reconnect with their larger human family - rather, its goal is to permanently cement identity politics at both individual and societal levels; because Wokeism, as an ideology, cannot survive without its cornerstone doctrine of group identity. The problem with this goal is that it relies on stereotypes and other heuristic shortcuts to thinking about actual people and the actual world within which we all live. Individuals and their unique circumstances do not fit neatly into imaginary boxes and cartoon caricatures, and neither does reality itself. Wokeism’s compulsion to paint complex individual lives into oversimplified caricatures, with straight white men being painted as the apex identity group and all other non-straight, non-white minorities being painted as perpetual victims - because constructed caricatures are far better tools for evangelizing Wokeism. Followers and believers do not need complex and nuanced narratives that leave them scrolling and clicking on something more shinny. No, followers and believers seek simple, easy-to-follow memes and beliefs.
Wokeism views the world in eerily similar terms to the old religious monarchs and aristocrats of the pre-Enlightenment. The modern Wokeist believes as did the aristocracy and citizenry of medieval Europe, that there exists a metaphysical ‘Great Chain of Being’, or ‘Oppression Matrix.’ For those unfamiliar with the outdated notion of the ‘Great Chain of Being’, it describes:
‘…the divine hierarchy that spanned from God on high to the rocks below. Every human being was believed to have had a divinely allotted position on this vertical chain that connected the lower material world to the heavenly invisible one – from divinely appointed kings to garbage-scrounging paupers. This neo-Platonic chain, as further evinced within the literature of the day, was believed to be the very sinew that kept societies ordered, that prevented the savage chaos of the animal kingdom from infecting the human one, and it fixed in place the privileged and oft-despotic thrones of aristocracy and theocracy, as well as the disease-ridden and famine-infused gutters of the poor and the meek.’
In similitude to this ‘Great Chain of Being’, the Woke ‘Oppression Matrix’ holds similarly that individuals are fixed into inescapable categories which exist similarly along a vertical chain, from top to bottom.
Where the old Europeans placed God at the top of their conceptual chain, the Woke place the straight white man at the top of theirs, and just like the ‘Great Chain’, the ‘Oppression Matrix’ delineates fixed, immutable and inescapable categories of oppression vs tyranny. The contrast between the ‘Great Chain of Being’ and the Woke ‘Oppression Matrix’ is that the Woke hate the top of their chain and revere the bottom, whilst the old Europeans revered the top and hated the bottom. This, however, is a very superficial distinction, especially when you consider that the evidence for the existence of both of these chains exists predominantly in the ideologies held sacred by both brands of believers. Because the Woke revere the bottom of their Great Chain as the sacred category, it makes sense that identifying as low as possible on this chain becomes the primary social and psychological obsession for its adherents. This obsession has given rise to what a number of commentators have referred to as the ‘Oppression Olympics,’ in which the goal is not liberation from oppression, but a kind of inverted and perverted “ascension” toward it. Take a moment to consider the social, psychological and political implications of a society full of members all fighting tooth and nail to get to the bottom. Think about the intoxicating allure of not having to take any personal responsibility for the outcome of your life down there in the twisted utopia of Wokeism’s most praised paradise, the realm of perpetual victimhood and suffering.
With the burgeoning of trans cases in the media and the glorification of transgender identity, one has to wonder how many cases have been created not by gender dysphoria, but by a need to win the praise and adulation of belonging to Wokeism’s most coveted category. Wokeism’s ‘Oppression Matrix’ gives even the laziest and most mediocre members of society a chance to claim unearned fame and success. Just scream victim, identify and express yourself in accordance with the mandates of this ideology and before you know it, you too will be surrounded by fellow perishers singing your praises and showering you with that attention you so desperately “deserve”.
DOCTRINE: ‘WHITENESS AS ORIGINAL SIN’
Resting comfortably in its doctrines of identity politics and its ‘Oppression Matrix’ sits Wokeism’s original sin, Whiteness. In Christianity, the original sin of Eve disobeying God and eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge creates a convenient conceptual framework with which Christians are able to grasp, albeit without evidence or reason, the reason for the prevalence of “evil” and suffering within the human condition. Everything bad about humanity goes back to this original sin. It is the cause of all suffering on earth. Just like Christianity, Wokeism locates the cause of all suffering today in their equally mythological Original Sin of Whiteness. Now, have people with White skin done horrendous things? Yes. Were the Americas and other European colonies cesspools of slavery, colonialism, sexism, bigotry and other crimes against humanity? Yes, they absolutely were! Does history, like an unbroken chain, have a causal effect on the present? Yes, it does. I am not denying any of these salient facts about the nature of the origins of Western democracies, but to what extent does history have a hold over the present when the pitfalls of the past have been mitigated and even remedied by the enactment of policies and laws that prevent the evils of the past? Anti-discrimination laws exist in most if not all Western democracies, and these laws empower women and minorities to live their best lives regardless of superficialities, and if you examine the demographics in the US, Asians are now at the very top with respect to wealth. To illustrate this point further, examine the historical disparity between education levels between men and women, and now examine how that disparity is almost entirely a thing of the past. In a recent Pew Research publication, Kim Parker observed:
‘The growing gender gap in higher education – both in enrollment and graduation rates – has been a topic of conversation and debate in recent months. Young women are more likely to be enrolled in college today than young men, and among those ages 25 and older, women are more likely than men to have a four-year college degree. The gap in college completion is even wider among younger adults ages 25 to 34.’
So then, if the Woke ‘Progressophobia’ holds any evidentiary currency, why don’t we see a disparity which supports an unbroken historical chain of oppression against women in education and other aspects of the public sphere? Well, because the laws, policies and zeitgeist of our time have largely remedied such a disparity. You may ask, if such laws, policies and zeitgeist can be shown to break the chain of historical oppression when it comes to women’s rights, why wouldn’t such factors be capable of doing the same with respect to the rights of minorities? Short answer? They do and they are. Whilst we still have some way to go, and as discussed above, racial equality has never been so positive in Western democracies. In fact, the worst country on earth for racial equality is Qatar. According to the World Population Review, the top ten worst countries for racial equality are as follows:
And the top ten most racist countries are:
India
Lebanon
Bahrain
Libya
Egypt
A cursory examination of these statistics and countries reveals that the worst countries for racial equality today are non-White countries and the most racist ethnicities are also non-White ethnicities. This is largely thanks to the great gains made by Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr and other American Civil Rights activists, who paved the way for a more harmonious and fairer future for all in Western democracies. So why won’t Wokeism give these founding fathers of fairness their deserved due? Again, ‘Progressophobia’ is a necessary doctrine of Wokeism to keep it in business.
Leaving aside facts and figures for a moment, let’s look at how litigating entire racial/ethnic groups for crimes committed by people who happened to share phenotypical traits in the past is not only unjust and unnecessarily divisive, but ridiculously selective. Yet as ridiculous as this doctrine of Wokeism happens to be, it is getting major traction in education and in the media. The White New York Psychoanalyst Dr Donald Moss published a paper in which he concluded:
“Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has — a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility,” an abstract of the article on Sage Journals says.
“The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world.
“Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse,”
This rhetoric from a credentialed authority sounds eerily familiar to the Nazi rhetoric which eventually saw Jewish men, women and children marched without mercy to the gas chambers in World War II. Just imagine if similarly incompetent and noxious studies like this were being done on other ethnic and racial groups. This type of thinking is what made the darker periods of human history so dark. I mean, did the mothers and fathers of the Civil Rights movement sweat and bleed to advance beyond segregation and racial discrimination only to have it rear its ugly head again?
You may have also noticed that the historical threshold for Wokeism’s litigation of history stops at a convenient juncture in which White people were the most powerful oppressors. It doesn’t examine the long history of the various intra-African slave trades, ancient Egypt’s slave industry, Genghis Khan’s near-global conquest and barbarism, it doesn’t examine Islam’s historic slave trade, and nor does it acknowledge that Whites have been the victims of slavery too. No, Wokeism’s irrationally selective narratives reflect Chris Rock’s primary objection in his latest standup, namely, it is selective outrage. It is selective because in the religion of Wokeism, it isn’t what you do, but who you do it to, and who is doing it to others, and who these others are in the scheme of Wokeism’s Western-centric ideology. It is not so much the principle of a thing which makes it outrage-worthy, but who is doing the thing and who the thing is being done to. This is what entitles the Woke to behave in inhumane ways to anyone declared an evil heretic to the ideology, and these perceived heretics include minority voices who refuse to conform to their assigned victimhood narratives.
I think one of the main reasons it has such a narrow focus is because Wokeism, like Scientology, is an American religion, with a very localized and ethnocentric view of the world. It must place the cis-white-hetero-man at the top of its ‘Great Chain of Being’, because that is what makes sense in an oversimplified, idiocratic, modern American context. Now, here is an uncomfortable truth: If you own an iPhone or Smart Phone, you are essentially a slave owner, regardless of your position in the Woke ‘Oppression Matrix’. The brutal cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo show us that slavery, even child slavery, is alive and well, and much of this cobalt is trafficked from slave owners to predominantly Chinese entrepreneurs, who melt it down, make it untraceable, and then sell it to large corporations who then sell it to you. In essence, you are getting that great new phone and mobile plan thanks to the slaves you have slaving away and dying to serve their master, you. Where is your outrage about this form of horrible slavery? Here is another painful truth about slavery: There are more slaves in the world today than there has ever been, with the UN reporting that there exists approximately 50 million slaves worldwide today. And guess what? These slaves are Black, White, Brown, Asian, men, women, children, etc… So how does this inconvenient fact fit into the conceptual framework of Wokeism’s Original Sin? It doesn’t. It demolishes it. But the Woke just rationalize these inconvenient facts away with their stock-standard technique of labelling anyone who raises them as being somehow an enabler of evil (White Supremacist Patriarchy), or at the very least unwittingly influenced by evil (White Supremacist Patriarchy). I will finish on this doctrine of Original Sin with an explanation of it by James Lindsay:
‘Functionally, privilege operates in a nearly indistinguishable way from the religious concepts of Original Sin and Depravity. Original Sin is a stain one is born with and cannot escape, and it is the reason that each individual is fundamentally corrupt and in need of engaging in a spiritual life and finding atonement. Privilege works this way as well, though the spiritual system in question is that of systemic power dynamics as understood through critical theories, and the spiritual life/work expected comes as a result of developing a critical consciousness (which is deemed as a “lifelong commitment to an ongoing process”) and taking up the related activism (see also, antiracism).
The parallelism to the (Calvinist) religious concept of Depravity is nearer to the mark with regard to the functional meaning of privilege in a “faith system” of critical consciousness. Depravity is, in brief, the desire to sin. It is having a corrupted nature that desires to sin (as a result of the corrupting influence of Original Sin), and this fundamentally fallen nature is often understood as existing outside of one’s conscious awareness. With privilege, Theory insists that people with privilege want to maintain, perpetuate, normalize, legitimize, etc., that privilege and exhibit a remarkable array of defense mechanisms to prevent having to confront it head-on (specifically, and only, by developing a critical consciousness and taking up activism).
As is seen in Calvinism, where a spiritual life is encouraged by getting people to live up to the example of the Elect, who are fated for Heaven, spiritual life among the Woke is encouraged by encouraging them to work on behalf of the oppressed in allyship and/or solidarity and to “do the work” of antiracism (through an intersectional “practice” of engaging positionality constantly and intentionally). As we read from Ozlem and Sensoy, “It is always the primary responsibility of the dominant group members to use their positions to interrupt oppression” (p. 153). One is absolutely expected to become aware of one’s privilege to use it in a critical way to disrupt the forces of systemic evil in society.’
DOCTRINE: ‘DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION’ - WORD GAMES
Peter Boghossian discusses this doctrine of deception by explaining that in the religion of Wokeism, “diversity” and “inclusion,” whilst sounding positive actually carry a completely different meaning, a meaning that reverses their everyday application to foster and propagate intellectual hegemony and exclusionism. The only inclusion allowed is that which supports its narratives, and the only diversity allowed is superficial identity markers provided the marginalized person or Woke identity vehicle, as humans are to this ideology, does not have a view outside of the narrow confines of this religiopolitical worldview.
There are some comedy clubs in the UK that now advertise themselves as “inclusive” by making comedians sign legal agreements promising that they won’t say anything that could potentially offend an identity vehicle that might be in the audience. Universities, which are quickly becoming indoctrination houses for the faithful, are also requiring comedians to sign legal agreements to not offend any of the audience. Now, you might say, “Well, what’s wrong with being sensitive to the feelings of individuals?” The problem, however, is that this is worse than a zero-sum game, because it is impossible to avoid offending people who have their own unique triggers and irritations, particularly people who have been indoctrinated to be offended at the mere changing of the tides and wind direction. Most seriously, however, this is an assault on freedom of expression, which, if undermined, even for people’s feelings, represents a threat to both human and civil rights overall.
DOCTRINE: ‘EQUITY OVER EQUALITY’
This doctrine serves as the ideology’s attempt to remedy the evil it sees permeating humanity. It’s not enough that people be given equal opportunities to achieve their potentials, no, this doctrine dictates that people must be handed the outcome based on racial, sexual, or other unearned qualities. Equality of outcome. This is what this doctrine seeks beyond any concern for the quality or merit of individual performance. It is the participation trophy handed to those condescendingly deemed unable to go out and get it themselves. This doctrine coupled with the ‘Oppression Matrix’ leads to a very confused and self-eating scenario, a scenario that has “oppressed” groups eating each other. Harvard University was recently sued by a group of Asian students who were being excluded to ensure the inclusion of another minority, Black Americans. Harvard had no good move to make in the Woke environment of today’s academic world, because on the one hand, Asians are a minority, but on the other, so are Black Americans. It was Harvard’s misguided attempt at administering affirmative action that landed them in hot water with Asian students and their parents, who, generally speaking, are very pragmatic and do not believe in hand-outs, particularly those that take away from the hard work their children have been putting into academia from early ages. And no, I am not suggesting or implying that there aren’t Black American children out there working tirelessly to achieve in academia, nor was I suggesting that there aren’t Black parents just as engaged in their children’s learning. I was merely highlighting the specific problem of the doctrine of equity as it pertains to this case and others like it. This doctrine’s attempt at “anti-racism” creates a kind of moral confusion in which judging individuals by the colour of their skin is deemed the only way to transcend racism. Read that last sentence again for me, would you? Thanks! From a Washington Post article we read:
“After six and one-half years of litigation, the hundreds of Asian-American students who were unfairly and illegally rejected from Harvard because of their race may soon have this lawsuit reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court,” the group’s president, Edward Blum, said in a statement. “It is our hope that the justices will accept this case and finally end the consideration of race and ethnicity in college admissions.”
The goal of identity-equity is a society perfectly equal at all levels, regardless of any other consideration. This doctrine strives for an imaginary utopia, but in reality it is a recipe for a dystopia, a dystopia in which inherent and unearned characteristics replace competence and hard work as the primary currencies of exchange. Equity, if the truth be told, is just a new form of well-intended discrimination replacing old tokenism. Also, think about what this type of equity does to a person’s self-esteem, when they know they got the job or scholarship not for their individual merits, but as a result of a superficial characteristic they themselves didn’t personally achieve. Yay! They hired me because they needed more Latinas! Let’s say you have two people going for an executive manager position. One is a man and the other a woman. And let’s say the man is far more qualified in every way than the woman. Now let’s imagine the woman gets the job because the company is rushing to meet quotas so it can advertise to its market-base and overseeing equity police that it is a “good” company. I say “imagine,” but this is an actual scenario I personally witnessed in the workplace. I was flabbergasted! This woman went on to prove my objections concerning the harms associated with the Woke doctrine of ‘Equity Over Equality’, as she stank in the role, her business line suffered, whilst her more qualified male colleague became disillusioned and lackluster, having been unjustly overlooked despite having more experience, putting in 10 times more work and effort and just being better suited in almost every conceivable way for the executive manager role.
DOCTRINE: ‘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.
DOCTRINE: ‘CENSORSHIP VIA CANCELLATION’
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. It has become increasingly common to have Woke students at universities practice their religious rite of shouting down and banning speakers who cause them to experience cognitive dissonance. 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.
DOCTRINE: ‘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.
DOCTRINE: ‘SILENCE IS 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.
DOCTRINE: ‘PSYCHIC ABILITIES - THE ALL-SEEING EYE OF WOKEISM’
This doctrine is largely but not exclusively the result of Woke scripture written by one of the high priestesses of Wokeism, Robin DiAngelo. In her book White Fragility, Robin pushes the unfounded hypothesis that secret subconscious racism exists hidden deep within the psyche of all white people, and that white people only identify as “Woke” to actually avoid examining their own “aversive racism.” Robin is really pushing a form of meta-Wokeism when you think about it. I mean, where does this stop? Is Robin only pushing this idea that Woke white people are unconsciously racist to avoid examining her own unconscious racism? And if someone writes about her “aversive racism” are they just doing so to mask their own “aversive racism?” You can see just how never-ending and self-refuting this illogical premise is if you just take a moment to think rather than just merely consume, believe and resell this conspiracy snake oil. According to this priestess, waking up to the conspiracy of latent and all-pervasive racism is the only way you can truly see just how deep this rabbit hole goes. The idea that only initiates are capable of beholding the mysteries that the unwashed masses fail to see is one that finds its origins in Ancient Egyptian and ancient Hellenistic cults. It is also what attracts people to similarly bizarre conspiracy theories.
The allure of the ego rewards of being on the inside of a secret is just too tantalizing for some to resist. This doctrine is also the reason why the Woke believe they have psychically cracked your mind open and “really know” why you do not worship at their alter of all-seeing Wokeism. The prevalence of the impact of this doctrine is common enough in the discourse to negate the need for insertion of further examples. I am almost certain you have probably either read a “fascist’s” mind at some point if you are Woke, or have had your mind (probably incorrectly) read by such a conspiracy cultist.
CONCLUSION
It is clear from the facts and arguments presented above that Wokeism is strongly comparable to religion. Let’s quickly revisit my incomplete definition of religion. I will break it into limbs:
1. Religion is a human institution and/or social and psychological phenomenon with identifiable rites, rituals and practices – 2. that transmits a belief-system and core set of ethics through non-evidential forms of instruction, 3. 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 – 4. 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.
Wokeism is a human institution and/or social and psychological phenomenon with identifiable rites (confessions of privilege, self-flagellation and heresy hunting on social media, taking a knee, etc.), rituals (colouring hair and shaping hairstyles to show membership, wearing of printed message clothing and carrying of placards with the ideology’s messages) and practices (de-platforming and cancelling blasphemers and heretics, indoctrinating children and adults, ).
Wokeism attempts to transmit a belief-system and core set of ethics through non-evidential forms of teaching. This can been seen in not only its ventures into the education system, but also with respect to the way in which it has coerced the private sector to comply with its assertions out of nothing more than fear.
Wokeism’s goal of transcendence to an unknowable and metaphysical utopia of perfect equity is what drives both its psychosis and its psychopathy.
Wokeism focuses on non-divine focal points to inspire/coerce members to adopt and spread the ideology by any means necessary. Historical discrimination vs an imagined utopia serve as two non-divine and juxtaposed focal points the Woke use to push their flocks to aspire to transcendence, lest these believers end up on the “wrong side of history”, which is yet another non-divine focal point of this ideology.
There is more than enough comparative material between Wokeism and traditional religion to safely argue this comparison. But do you think those intoxicated by this ideology will recognize or even acknowledge this solid comparison? No. So here goes one last final word on that subject. Don’t worry, we are almost there!
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 help you decompress.