The Final Solution of Woke
depoliticize your soul
I am trying once more. It will certainly not be the last time. I have always experienced life as a constant call to understand, and I still have trouble when I seem to perceive it is not experienced the same way by everybody else. Or maybe people do feel the need to understand, but they undertake to do this by folding and shelving reality in the cabinet they found sitting in their living room one day. Rather than figure out who put it there, or wondering who keeps reducing its size and the number of its compartments, they have passively accepted its presence and started to make do with it. And it does not challenge our intuition to assume that as reality, out there, becomes unrulier, the benefits of fitting all of it in that cabinet seem greater by the day. If you want me to keep trying to demolish that little cabinet and return things to their proper, and meaningful, disorder, please consider becoming a (paid) subscriber to this Substack.
We have always had our socio-cultural organizers. It was family or tribe since a very distant past, along with other biological dividers, offering us both the automatic membership of a group and a component of our own identity. It is tempting to explain more intricate identifiers as the product of civilization, providing ever more abstract and artificial criteria for us to organize around, such as a common profession or guild, a shared preference for a style of music, or the particular borough one has residence in. But that matters are not as simple as that is shown, on one end of this biology-culture axis, by the fact that individual animals in a pack will display similar preferences as we do when it comes to consorting with some over others. On the other end – and this is what today’s piece of questioning is about – we see that our identifiers have become the object of a mechanized (and by now automated) process that is far removed from the smells, movements, touches, and dives in each other’s eyes that have ruled human connection through the ages. Now, identity and fealty have to be declared constantly, on a set of binary choices that is fed to us – seemingly from the void – while we are summoned to assume a position, which does not only exclude the sole other, but requires its condemnation and vilification.
We can describe this phenomenon as the politicization of everything, but at the same time, we should acknowledge that this constant signaling of abstract markers apparently responds to a deeply felt need of humans – at least under certain circumstances. Over the past couple of years, I have written a number of pieces in which I try to identify where this urge comes from (you are welcome to read The Angorithms and the Socio-media Path-forms, for example, or The Endemic Hypo, Revenge of the Nerds, or The Master and his Remote Control). I am not the only one who has noted the hysteria in our society and many have offered their ideas regarding origins and solutions. Some focus on the ideological brainwashing that has prepared at least a generation and a half for life as non-debating screechers. Others have paired this explanation with the endless flows of funds from sources such as the CCP and Qatar. Others still have searched for explanations in our web-based order, or in the world of the puppet masters seeking control over the sheeple. Probably, all these elements are playing their part. And personally, I still believe the societal histrionics could only have developed with a biological predisposition and cultural preparation in that direction. But maybe we should just pause a moment and observe.
Product marketing has become the staging ground for socio-cultural virtue signaling. Instead of being offered a superior product, you are nudged to partake in a brave new world. How do you respond to trans beer? Is declining to buy it all you are going to do, or are you primed for a reaction? The personal space in which you could have decided on your choice for a pleasantly refreshing drink has been invaded by a socio-political narrative. Some products do not feel quite so personal, perhaps, because they are the product of a much more abstract, and rationalized, decisional process. This does not alter the fact, however, that the vagaries of the Tesla in the public imagination show the absurdity of the infusion of products with a purpose for life with moral-political meaning. From being venerated for fealty to the climate narrative – yes, how could we forget about the mother of all Malthusians? – to becoming an idol of hatred for symbolizing the current administration. We are watching closely to see if the breakdown of the Trusk bromance will lead to another 180-degree change in appreciation. Apparently, these are all binary choices. It is either, or. For or against. Pretty much like elections in a two-party system. Good against evil. Us against them. Which reminds us of the quintessential of these narratives, making it impossible to unsee the constant searching for an out-group as part of a much wider phenomenon: the ‘rona.
If an identifier in essence is an analytical tool, a (sub-)dividing aid, the ‘rona was (and is) an unprecedentedly effective sorter of the whole of society, across many organizational levels. What made it so effective – I have surmised – is the wiring for invisible danger we have carried with us through evolution. But institutions, cultural narratives (‘the science’), and ideology itself (think of the Left’s forgetfulness of corporate capture) all reorganized in conformity with this grand and all-pervasive narrative. If we think of the opposition this wave of single-think encountered, we can see now at least that at a level of fundamentals, establishment and opposition did not have a very different view of the world. The icon of sanity and salvation of the jab was countered with the one of the pure bloods. The fantasy of total control of public health figures and institutions was countered with theories of… total control by those same people and organizations or their supposed puppet masters. The fear porn regarding the virus was countered with the fear porn of the shot.
Are we constrained to deal with our own life and the lives around us as if it was just another two-party electoral cycle? Or have we fallen into a trap? Maybe the only way we can conceive of, now, to climb out of it is digging us in deeper. The more excited we get about binary, all-encompassing choices, the less we are able to re-dimension politics and ideological narratives to their proper size and reclaim our own lives. That is hard to do if we continue to believe that what we are facing is the battle of our lifetime, but maybe it is this mechanism that is breaking us.
When this great scission ravaged our social world, we had all been well-practiced in the self-certification required of us in the virtual world: a flag, a symbol, or other sign of belonging had to be posted on our virtual door so as to signal to everyone whom they would be dealing with. At least two wars have triggered the same flagmania since, of course, and the same mantra-slinging is flooding the highly orchestrated digital marketplace of ideas. Again, what we see is not the exchange of ideas or the determination of facts, but the headless repetition of slogans. What was ‘safe and effective’ has become ‘genocide’. What was the facemask has become the flag of Filistine. There is nothing there to anchor you more solidly in a world you’d like to save and keep. It all only tells you whom to hate and how everything, surely, is under someone’s control. And whomever is outside of the ingroup should be hated, cancelled, and final-solutioned.
What I would hope is that those currently aware that the woke right exists as well as the woke left take a step back, or dive a bit deeper. It is our culture as a whole that has a problem. We all feel pressured to take political stances because the upholding of moral truths is supposed to save our soul. But maybe it is our recruitment in the ranks of the armies of the politics of everything that is killing us inside. Once you’re dead inside, do you reckon you will be willing to save the world out there? Maybe you’ll be ready to do the killing, though. And I see plenty who are almost there.