How I adopted a social justice warrior mentality long before it became fashionable and then grew out of it.
If the global boiling alarmists are correct and humanity is doomed unless we drastically reduce our collective carbon footprint, don’t blame me. I’ve long cycled or walked to work, share a car and only fly around once a year. During my 7 year stay in London I survived carfree and I didn’t buy my first motor vehicle until the age of 26 in provincial Italy. If mainstream historians, after the demise of Anglo-American exceptionalism, accuse British and American corporations of committing heinous crimes against humanity on an unparalleled scale, don’t hold me responsible. I’ve opposed every single UK military escapade in my lifetime. I would have opposed British imperialism and the 1914-18 Great War. Only British involvement in the Second World War had a moral justification. The Nazis had to be defeated, but who funded them?
Don’t pick a fight with me if Uganda kills gays or California legalises paedophilia. I’ve merely explored the malleability of human behaviour with a special regard to the alienated misfits among us. I embraced neurodiversity in a good way before I realised the WEF-aligned Biotech Mafia exploited mental health to manipulate the underclasses in the age of AI bots. My only regret, in terms of my humble low-level political activity, is to have voted for lying politicians in the vain hope they could undo some of the damage caused by other professional purveyors of mistruths.
Of late I’ve reached the conclusion that climate alarmism as well as virus scaremongering serve only as narratives to justify a massive transfer of power to the technocratic elites. That doesn’t mean we don’t face environmental challenges or there are no limits to growth on a finite planet, but that the world’s powerbrokers now view most of humanity as superfluous. There is a big difference between investigating the long-term impact of our industrial activity to avert catastrophes and dystopian outcomes on the one hand and exploiting fear of pathogens or extreme weather events to consolidate your control over the rest of humanity on the other.
I’ve always believed we should live with nature and not subvert it, but I’ve also had to reassess many earlier stances I openly espoused that in the light of new evidence when earlier assumptions turned out to be based either on flawed analysis or on wishful thinking. No matter how much we may want to change the world around us, we have, as isolated individuals, limited means to override the fundamentals of geophysics, human biology or complex societies that evolved over millennia. Larger groups can over time change society for the better, but the ideas and technologies we need to improve the lives of future generations usually come from a relatively small subset of intellectuals and inventors.
Idealism stems from a deep sense of injustice on a personal and communal level, often combined with a perception of powerlessness or alienation from our wider circle of close relatives, friends and neighbours who might help us find our way within the current system. Your success in life may depend on natural traits such as your physique, health or intellectual aptitude as well as environmental factors like inherited wealth, economic opportunities, caste or socio-economic infrastructure (schools, roads, welfare provision etc.). Some factors such as personality or emotional wellbeing depend on a mix of nature and nurture. We may attribute someone’s lack of success to their immutable inherited traits, their behaviour and/or their integration in wider society, but whom or what do we blame for personal misery? Idealists blame society either for suppressing personal freedom and creativity or for failing to empower disadvantaged citizens. Pragmatists take into account human nature, which thrives on social competition favouring the survival of the fittest.
There’s a big difference between counterculture idealism, however impractical, misguided or open to manipulation it may be, and mainstream idealism, actively marketed to gullible students and wishful thinking middle managers by powerful lobbies who hijack progressive causes to justify more top-down social engineering. We cannot compare a revolutionary socialist in 1930’s America at the height of the Great Depression with a loyal communist party member in the Soviet Union of the same era. The former stood up against the concentration of power in big banks and corporations, while the latter worshipped the new ruling class. Institutions with ulterior motives can easily co-opt virtuous causes to pursue hidden agendas. In many ways woke totalitarians, with their intolerance of intellectual diversity and traditional values, follow in the footsteps of Soviet-era Bolshevik activists in wanting to suppress all reactionary opposition to the ongoing cultural revolution, for the greater good. We need merely substitute humanitarian NGOs and spurious campaign groups like Extinction Rebellion and Antifa for the Communist Party. They see dissidents as traitors to the causes of environmental sustainability, pandemic preparedness, sexual liberation or the equality and diversity cult. Just like religious fundamentalists, they chastise anyone who fails to sing from the same prescribed hymn sheet or is somehow out of tune when it comes to the latest pronouncements on identity politics or medical treatment. If you dispute the new orthodoxy on a sensitive issue, the ultimate arbiter of truth is not open debate, but the Ministry of Truth camouflaged as fact-checkers.
As an adjective woke comes from African American Vernacular English and means awakened or aware of social injustice in terms of economic deprivation and racial discrimination. However, in the 2010s the trendy left adopted the term in its new culture wars against traditional societies. While the epithet embraced the struggle of a rainbow coalition of real and perceived victim groups, its new adherents are mainly affluent upper-class students, young professionals and celebrities with an over-representation of white Americans. Post-modern wokeness combines white guilt with moral superiority over the reactionary working classes.
Woke warriors have hijacked old struggles against racism or fascism to justify a new form of ecological and biomedical totalitarianism. They are often at loggerheads with many of the communities they claim to support. How can you preach diversity when you do not respect diversity of thoughts and beliefs? How can you preach equality when you turn a blind eye to the biggest transfer of wealth to the hyper-rich in history while scapegoating small business owners for their failure to comply with new health and safety edicts? How can you care about black lives if you don’t support the self-determination of African people without interference from globalist NGOs? The list could go on forever, but you get the picture.
Woke cultists have adopted a potpourri of virtuous causes that are often mutually exclusive. How can they champion free movement across national borders, but not outside your 15-minute neighbourhood (unless you have enough social credits)?
Today’s self-identifying wokerati support all causes that suit the hidden agendas of billionaire technocrats intent on weeding out most plebeians alive today.