Late fall and winter continue to become more disconcerting for me. I wore shorts through the entire month of December. The sun and the moon told me it should be cold and time for a nice fire; the weather said it was spring.
On the topic of wokeness as a esoteric mystery cult, I read this article over the weekend: https://phys.org/news/20…
Late fall and winter continue to become more disconcerting for me. I wore shorts through the entire month of December. The sun and the moon told me it should be cold and time for a nice fire; the weather said it was spring.
On the topic of wokeness as a esoteric mystery cult, I read this article over the weekend: https://phys.org/news/2022-01-rationality-declined-decades.html. I think the shift in language usage is pretty fascinating. The shifting from rational to emotional language and collective to individual could be an important element in what's going on in American society.
Wokeness hits many of the key elements in this sort of environment in some of its incarnations. The individual's feelings are paramount; whatever you feel is what is true. Broad identities can be eschewed in favor of ever more individualistic ones with long bullet-pointed lists in people's online bios. Like you point out, "systemic" and "structural" can be slapped on everything much like green*. It also enables people to identify some hidden collective working to oppress them and further galvanizes the individual's complex identity in a way similar to the common Christian persecution complex. "Privilege", likewise, becomes useful primarily as an ad hominem deflection against any critique. The rational, material, or empirical is often rejected outright and attempts to interrogate or quantify issues are taken as existential attacks.
*Just noting that I do believe there are actual systemic and structural issues, lest my comment here be construed otherwise. I just don't think, generally, that the current social justice movement in the United States has much to offer in analyzing and working to address these issues.
Late fall and winter continue to become more disconcerting for me. I wore shorts through the entire month of December. The sun and the moon told me it should be cold and time for a nice fire; the weather said it was spring.
On the topic of wokeness as a esoteric mystery cult, I read this article over the weekend: https://phys.org/news/2022-01-rationality-declined-decades.html. I think the shift in language usage is pretty fascinating. The shifting from rational to emotional language and collective to individual could be an important element in what's going on in American society.
Wokeness hits many of the key elements in this sort of environment in some of its incarnations. The individual's feelings are paramount; whatever you feel is what is true. Broad identities can be eschewed in favor of ever more individualistic ones with long bullet-pointed lists in people's online bios. Like you point out, "systemic" and "structural" can be slapped on everything much like green*. It also enables people to identify some hidden collective working to oppress them and further galvanizes the individual's complex identity in a way similar to the common Christian persecution complex. "Privilege", likewise, becomes useful primarily as an ad hominem deflection against any critique. The rational, material, or empirical is often rejected outright and attempts to interrogate or quantify issues are taken as existential attacks.
*Just noting that I do believe there are actual systemic and structural issues, lest my comment here be construed otherwise. I just don't think, generally, that the current social justice movement in the United States has much to offer in analyzing and working to address these issues.