THE WOKE AND THE UNWOKE

By paulosophicalvimplications on November 30, 2020 • ( 2 )

There’s the woke, there’s the yet to be woke, and then there’s the out-of-my-cold-dead-hands unwoke. I think I’m the latter. And, as could have been expected, our numbers are growing.

The counter-revolution needed spokesmen – notice the unabashed performative sexism there – and it’s recruited some pretty respectable personages: Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt … We’ve picked up a few embarrassments along the way too, as does any movement – or in our case a counter-movement: Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Alex Jones … But to be fair, so has the woke side. Greta Thunberg may mature into an AOC, but more likely she’ll go the way of Nicholas of Cologne’s father. She’ll be lynched upon her untriumhpant return by the people of her own village.

On the surface it’s about pronouns. Just below the surface it’s about censorship. But plumb deeper and you’ll find the real casus belli. Because of social media, people who’ve been victimized – or at the very least disadvantaged – have been able to elicit the virtue-signalling solidarity of people who aren’t. But because the latter haven’t lived that disadvantage, in expressing that solidarity they get the accent on the wrong syllable.

They think it’s about unarmed black men being gunned down in the streets by white cops, when it’s really about being too terrified not to say ‘sah’ when stopped for a traffic check. They think it’s about white anthropologists telling them their ancestors came across the Bering Strait, just as ours came across the North Atlantic, when it’s really about there are no bookshelves in their homes. So instead of calls to reform the police we get calls to defund them. Instead of putting books on shelves we get fist-pumping against the imposition of the colonizer’s version of history.

At some point African Americans and indigenous Canadians are going to tell their virtue-signalling white ‘friends’ to fuck off. We’ll know that day is coming when, like the rest of us, they can afford to pick their friends “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” When they can honestly say, “Some of my best friends are white!”