How to defeat wokeism, with Helen Pluckrose

How to defeat wokeism, with Helen Pluckrose | Fire at Will

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@angryherbalgerbil 3 ай бұрын

Trying to get left leaning liberals to see the problem in identity politics is a difficult one. I saw the priblem as I went through college and uni between the years of 2010 to 2015. They allowed the social activism that was necessary in the 60s to morph into a form of secular idolatry. The left liberals didn't identify that Liberalism, Marxism, and Feminism were fundamentally incompatible. Worse still it seems anathema to them that reducing people to their surface-level traits that need defending *is* just as bad as reducing people to surface level traits which (by a polar extreme political stance) need removing. Liberals used to defend free speech and judging people by the content of their character... And we'll not go into *why* judging people by their character is just as problematic here in order to avoid digression, but it's still better than reducing people to skin colour, race, genitals, or any other profile category of intersectionality. The pernicious double-speak within inclusivity and diversity dialogues and the hypocrisy of the stance that it's advocates are taking is like watching a cult manifestation. Consider this as just one example of how upside down it gets: Terry Pratchett, a well know British author and satirist was well known for writing strong female characters, being a progressive, and a humanitarian. One of his Discworld novels "Monstrous Regiment" even has an entire military platoon of fantasy characters turn out to be women after disguising their gender in order to enlist in an army. When American studios were given the rights to do a TV series by Rhianna Pratchett (The now custodian of the Discworld franchise) based on the Guards series of Discworld novels, the studio decided to change the gender of one of the most integral male characters: The Patrician. The Patrician was always a portrayal of the Machieavellian ruler archetype, shrewd, articulate, clever, but with a sense of political insight to maintain his despotism in a sort of balanced and fair way. He was always placed in juxtaposition to Commander Vimes who headed up the Guards of the town, depicted as a working class every-man Clint Eastwood type of chatacter. The characterisation and plot devices worked due to this dynamic. The studio in question did a token gender-swap just to appease our political climate... To a body of works that had already emphasised female strength and progressivism... That's how utterly upside down people's understandings have become around the ideas that formed the necessity of the social activism in the 1960's. Now it's just the "done thing" to swap out skin colour or gender in film adaptations of earlier works...Secular idolatry and zealotry in action. No thought given as to whether it adds anything to the text or alters the plot in any way or even any consideration of the author of the works. Terry Pratchett was as post-modern and progressive of an author as you might find. But that still wasn't enough... Neither were the protestations of Rhianna Pratchett: a highly successful woman in her own right within the video games industry. Ironically her best friend was a lecturer at my uni. Her "Characterisation in Games" module was all the woke talking points that effectively have resulted in the failure of TV series of a much loved British author. The liberal progressives succumbed to a Frankenstinian monster of their own creation. Unable to see what would happen when their ideas and ideologies go too far or become co-opted and inverted by economic and political forces which might utilise their momentum for power, control, and profit. Wokeism is the idolatry of 60s social activism. Just one example of what happens when you place symbols and effagies in place of a higher ideal or concept. The only antidote to wokism, or any form of idolatry or zealotry *is* open discourse and the free sharing of ideas that cam be scrutinised and contrasted with opposing ideas. Something which liberals used to hold up as a fundamental ideal that was integral to civil liberties and human rights. Left/Progressive liberals failed to understand the inherent evils within Marxism, Fabianism, communism on the left, but likewise we saw a political blindness to technocracy and corporatism overall in society, both of which are usually considered as having more far right associations. Ultimately this is down to a lack of historical education, political education, and philosophical education in society. We aren't raising people to think through ideas or understand the roots of the origins of any such ideas (at least not in public education). Worse still we are infantilising people long into adulthood. This is how you arrive at two-tier societies: The political class that are privately educated, and the public class which are publically educated. The latter are the majority of the nation. When public education becomes indoctrination, and when it intentionally hobbles reasoning skills. Then you will have no economy or prosperity overall within a nation. What we also see in the UK are the effects of the aristocratic war against the poor and working classes. Something which is now yeilding poor dividends for everyone in the nation. The complexities of the phenomena niw colloquially reduced to wokeism *are* in-fact a more interwoven set of circumstances that are linked back to the World Wars and their consequences. It could infact be argued that the roots of this problem go back to the enlightenment era, the arrival of organised religions and the back and forth between the polarities of needs bewteen the majority governed and the minority governing classes. Stephen Fry was right when he said "We have lost our capacity to play with ideas gracefully"... That loss is due to the erosion of reason and the infantilisation of the majority. Technocratic progress gave the false-illusion that technology improves lives and results in "wise philosopher kings" and an egalitarian paradise where heavy labour is minimised or eradicated and liesurely scholar and creativity becomes the norm for everyone. But what we see is that technology only increases the capacity for oligarchs and tyrants to become even more authoritarian. Wokeism is infact a number of elephants the room that no one wants to acknowledge. As a left-liberal and a traditional liberal I now have no political home in an allegedly democratic nation. Many conservatives likewise feel the same. And why? Because there is no representation of the working class, the poor, and the average person in politics. Labour looks and sounds increasingly upper-middle class and acts more like Thatcher every second. Worse still globalism has been the biggest ruse that European nations have fallen for. With figure-heads like Klaus Schwab persuading nations into avenues that have had a net-negative result for Western European nations. Wokeism is one means of attack on Western society by insurrectors and puppeteers that have used well intentioned ideas and turned them into a means of weaponisation against the ideals which once saw a coming together of nations after WW2. Peace, understanding, and wisdom are increasingly under duress until the technocratic dilemma is resolved. Wokeism and the Information/Culture war are interlinked and until the wheat is separated from the chaff in terms of which agendas are intentionally malevolent in the world and which are simply well-meaning but misguided then we will descend further into this morass of dark age descent into unreason and de-intellectualisation. We used to be able to understand nuance within ideas. Many today can't understand the nuance within bugs bunny cartoon let alone a disection of socio-political twists and turns over the last 300 to 2000 years. Wokeism is a symptom of multiple problems that coelesce, but it isn't a causal problem to the contemporary decline of society.