Is it Communism? Is it fascism. Is it just radical liberalism? ZMan walks through the origins and the functionality of wokism for the members of the elite and their lackeys.
And here’s the kernel of it:
“That is the key to understanding Wokism. It is not so much what it is but what it does for the people who embrace it. For the managerial elite, it provides a sense of legitimacy to their place atop the social hierarchy. For the climbers dreaming of a perch at the top and those who gain satisfaction aping those at the top, it provides an ever-changing set of cultural fashions. Primarily, Wokism provides a way to distinguish who is inside and who is outside the dominant social group.”
Well that’s clear enough. In his essay he fleshes out how and why this happened along with why the other labels are inaccurate. If you want to know what wokism is, the link follows.
Here’s a definition I poached off a chat group.
“Woke; a political and cultural philosophy in which personalized leftist/marxist ideology drives perception, policy, and decision making despite abundant evidence over the last century of human history. The ideology malignantly ignores facts and reality. Woke implementation centers on framing all human interactions and outcomes through a narrative of victimization versus oppression, promotes the rewarding of mediocrity and lack of personal responsibility, and attributes the value of human behaviors in society through an antagonistic approach to logic based policy development, decision making, and governance.”
That’s pretty good.
My take on Wokism:
A continually changing set of rules based on intersectionality of grievance groups and perceived victimization.
The rules are always changing so that any group can be pushed out and no one can predict who will be on top tomorrow.
This is a feature.
Note: The left laughs that the right cannot define Wokism while the left cannot define a woman.
Chemist:
In defense of the Left I guess I can’t perfectly define a woman either. But luckily for me I know one when I see one. I also know what isn’t a woman pretty definitively. And Dylan Mulvaney is definitely not.
Hi Photog, ZMan, as a rule, is an excellent observer and commenter on the moral and social decline of the West. That being said, his over confident analysis of the psychology of woke is subjective and full of unsupported allegations. I’m not going to try and write a comprehensive critique but I do want to point a couple of things out that are worth considering. I know James Lindsay and Paul Gottfried got into a dust-up but haven’t followed it closely. I don’t have, and won’t have, a Twitter account so I couldn’t follow the discussion. This statement by ZMan… Read more »
Hey Glenn: Yes there is a lot of subjectivity on our side of things. Not to mention a lot of infighting. And as you say even those who have excellent insights into some things have definite blind spots that are probably colored by personal history and emotion. ZMan and Michael Anton are an example. I guess Lindsay and Gottfried might be another although I haven’t looked into that one. I guess I take from each source what I think are his best ideas and leave out what I don’t agree with. So I’ll read ZMan and Anton and a dozen… Read more »