I read this on backshift when it first came out. I thought that it was funny but I also thought the most excessive ideas would burn out. I should have kept in mind that the structure of revolutionary movements is to be taken over by their most radical factions. We see this playing out right and left, for every would-be Il Duce there is a wanna-be Robespierre. And worse, there is no shortage people lining up to the next Reinhard Heydrich or Laventry Beria. History doesn’t repeat, it regurgitates.
As much as I like Phoebe and her diagnoses, neither she nor the work she reviews gets to the root of the problem: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. PC culture and wokeness only exist because that act endows certain groups with *legal* claims, and encourages others not mentioned at the time to lobby for similar protection (gender dysmorphics, for example).
There's a vast difference between advocating to protect animals from harm and cancel culture. A few years back, an obnoxious woke activist reached out to the animal protection organization I work for to demand a pro-black lives matter statement, that we commit thirty-three percent of our resources to diversity issues and while we're at it, change our board to people of color, irrespective of their experience. We didn't comply. In my forty-plus years of animal advocacy, we've never made such a demand of another organization working on different issues. We didn't cancel or threaten anyone who said they "owned" their dog and refused the "companion animal" suggestion. In today's woke world, many who don't comply lose their job, career, or whatever standing in society they enjoy.
good write up! maybe some of what i'm saying is fear based, but here goes. I was around for the 90's pc mania and this time feel worse. I fear that this time, our minds have been hacked by social media and big tech. As someone who is RELIGIOUSLY devoted to fair play for both sides, the active manipulation of views/attention/eyeballs by sites like youtube is appalling to see. But, like any true believers, on they go.
It will take a generation to install a parallel infrastructure of alternate cultural outlets. Substacks like this one who are We are already seeing a pullback in viewership of "legacy" outlets like CNN etc. but it's going to take time. And this is not accounting for the educational factors.
One good thing? People on the ground - everyday people like you and me who DON'T make our living as cultural expositors, AREN'T this woke. And we, the people (most especially those on the center-left like this newsletter and on the center-right like me), provide the ballast to all of this top-down cultural cramdown.
One last thought, if I may. I think we are entering a new era of advocacy journalism. Gone are the presumptions of fairness and neutrality. That business model is done with. We're back to the old days of broadsheets and hit pieces. Just my 0.02. :)
Don't DEI people prefer diverse street gangs to hero-normative excessively white police? Aren't voters worried about protecting pregnant men from climate change? Isn't it a fact that everybody wants to open our borders and jails, and close our schools?
If one looks at how totalitarian states control people generally, it is by simple coercion and fear.
If you don’t conform, sanctions of varying degrees follow.
In democracies we have constitutions that stipulate the laws we must conform to but those laws also stipulate our rights.
We have the right to protest when we feel the laws that govern what we can’t or can do are not being observed by government.
Free speech is, by and large, a right.
In totalitarian states there are are no such laws and there are a agencies empowered to ensure that citizens do not protest, criticize or voice opinions that run counter to what a regime deems acceptable.
In spite of their constitutions and mandated rights, however, the Western Democracies are experiencing a social phenomena created by a class that totalitarians have traditionally sought to eliminate for their non-conformist behaviour: the intellectual class.
In a remarkable turn of events, the intellectual and academic classes of the democracies, who had heretofore been the most ardent guardians of free speech, have become major arbiters of what can be spoken freely.
Many academics charged with education have abandoned the notion that liberal inquiry is an essential part of the student experience - indeed education in many institutions has been replaced by indoctrination which, if rejected or questioned, results in sanctions including failing evaluations and intellectual shunning.
What was once the enforcement domain of secret police forces has moved into our schools and universities.
While the more brutal suppressions are not present, these institutions have the ability to coerce conformity by using the evaluation and grading system as enforcement - if students don’t subscribe to the accepted line, it may result in their failure.
Given the value of a diploma or degree, it is understandable that few students want to swim against the progressive and woke tides flowing against them.
Progressive and woke government do not need the service of police agencies to enforce conformity to their agendas.
It is now done for them by the very people who once were one of the least conforming elements within our society.
Political correctness was a peculiarly white middle-class affectation, as was the loud contempt for political correctness back in the nineties. Not surprising that universities (the nurseries for middle-class post-adolescents) have served as its incubator, turning a virus into a pandemic that has spilled out into media, human resources and politics. The virus needed a catchy name (Political Correctness was too ambivalent) and Woke fitted the bill. Ridicule has always seemed to me to be the best way of deflating woke posturing. See "Agenda2060: The Future as It Happens" as a satirical treatment of the subject.
History is the story of the Right predicting a left-wing absurdity, the Left defiantly insisting that the Right is engaged in ludicrous slander, and then the Right's prediction coming true.
I’d say it’s definitely similar but this Wokeism has evolved into the religion of the Left and not in the best ways of the word. Their faith is based on some really dangerous tenets. I do think that the observations here tying the mentality to a Revenge of the Nerds is very on point from my perspective. Most of them never fit in and their Frankenstein creation reflects that reality.
I just recently found an even earlier example, where the current epidemic of wokeness/PC was foreseen, when I watched the Monty Python classic "The Meaning of Life" from 1983.
In one scene it showed the execution of man by getting chased over a a cliff by a couple of dozen naked young women. The crime he got sentenced to death for: Telling a dirty joke.
I thought how remarkably well that scene captured things that were to come several decades later, long before there was the first Twitter mob going after "sexists"......
Nah. Just shows that ginned up moral panics run in cycles.
I read this on backshift when it first came out. I thought that it was funny but I also thought the most excessive ideas would burn out. I should have kept in mind that the structure of revolutionary movements is to be taken over by their most radical factions. We see this playing out right and left, for every would-be Il Duce there is a wanna-be Robespierre. And worse, there is no shortage people lining up to the next Reinhard Heydrich or Laventry Beria. History doesn’t repeat, it regurgitates.
As much as I like Phoebe and her diagnoses, neither she nor the work she reviews gets to the root of the problem: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. PC culture and wokeness only exist because that act endows certain groups with *legal* claims, and encourages others not mentioned at the time to lobby for similar protection (gender dysmorphics, for example).
There's a vast difference between advocating to protect animals from harm and cancel culture. A few years back, an obnoxious woke activist reached out to the animal protection organization I work for to demand a pro-black lives matter statement, that we commit thirty-three percent of our resources to diversity issues and while we're at it, change our board to people of color, irrespective of their experience. We didn't comply. In my forty-plus years of animal advocacy, we've never made such a demand of another organization working on different issues. We didn't cancel or threaten anyone who said they "owned" their dog and refused the "companion animal" suggestion. In today's woke world, many who don't comply lose their job, career, or whatever standing in society they enjoy.
PC = Cancel Culture without social media. Solution - ditch social media and be happier.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleanna_(play)
Sadly, Mamet is now a Trumpist...
good write up! maybe some of what i'm saying is fear based, but here goes. I was around for the 90's pc mania and this time feel worse. I fear that this time, our minds have been hacked by social media and big tech. As someone who is RELIGIOUSLY devoted to fair play for both sides, the active manipulation of views/attention/eyeballs by sites like youtube is appalling to see. But, like any true believers, on they go.
It will take a generation to install a parallel infrastructure of alternate cultural outlets. Substacks like this one who are We are already seeing a pullback in viewership of "legacy" outlets like CNN etc. but it's going to take time. And this is not accounting for the educational factors.
One good thing? People on the ground - everyday people like you and me who DON'T make our living as cultural expositors, AREN'T this woke. And we, the people (most especially those on the center-left like this newsletter and on the center-right like me), provide the ballast to all of this top-down cultural cramdown.
One last thought, if I may. I think we are entering a new era of advocacy journalism. Gone are the presumptions of fairness and neutrality. That business model is done with. We're back to the old days of broadsheets and hit pieces. Just my 0.02. :)
PC is no longer and has been usurped by ridiculous political rhetoric
Don't DEI people prefer diverse street gangs to hero-normative excessively white police? Aren't voters worried about protecting pregnant men from climate change? Isn't it a fact that everybody wants to open our borders and jails, and close our schools?
If one looks at how totalitarian states control people generally, it is by simple coercion and fear.
If you don’t conform, sanctions of varying degrees follow.
In democracies we have constitutions that stipulate the laws we must conform to but those laws also stipulate our rights.
We have the right to protest when we feel the laws that govern what we can’t or can do are not being observed by government.
Free speech is, by and large, a right.
In totalitarian states there are are no such laws and there are a agencies empowered to ensure that citizens do not protest, criticize or voice opinions that run counter to what a regime deems acceptable.
In spite of their constitutions and mandated rights, however, the Western Democracies are experiencing a social phenomena created by a class that totalitarians have traditionally sought to eliminate for their non-conformist behaviour: the intellectual class.
In a remarkable turn of events, the intellectual and academic classes of the democracies, who had heretofore been the most ardent guardians of free speech, have become major arbiters of what can be spoken freely.
Many academics charged with education have abandoned the notion that liberal inquiry is an essential part of the student experience - indeed education in many institutions has been replaced by indoctrination which, if rejected or questioned, results in sanctions including failing evaluations and intellectual shunning.
What was once the enforcement domain of secret police forces has moved into our schools and universities.
While the more brutal suppressions are not present, these institutions have the ability to coerce conformity by using the evaluation and grading system as enforcement - if students don’t subscribe to the accepted line, it may result in their failure.
Given the value of a diploma or degree, it is understandable that few students want to swim against the progressive and woke tides flowing against them.
Progressive and woke government do not need the service of police agencies to enforce conformity to their agendas.
It is now done for them by the very people who once were one of the least conforming elements within our society.
Political correctness was a peculiarly white middle-class affectation, as was the loud contempt for political correctness back in the nineties. Not surprising that universities (the nurseries for middle-class post-adolescents) have served as its incubator, turning a virus into a pandemic that has spilled out into media, human resources and politics. The virus needed a catchy name (Political Correctness was too ambivalent) and Woke fitted the bill. Ridicule has always seemed to me to be the best way of deflating woke posturing. See "Agenda2060: The Future as It Happens" as a satirical treatment of the subject.
I teach in a school with mostly all Latino students who think "Latinx" was created by some crazy white person. THEY never use that word.
I just purchased the book; it looked so funny!
History is the story of the Right predicting a left-wing absurdity, the Left defiantly insisting that the Right is engaged in ludicrous slander, and then the Right's prediction coming true.
I’d say it’s definitely similar but this Wokeism has evolved into the religion of the Left and not in the best ways of the word. Their faith is based on some really dangerous tenets. I do think that the observations here tying the mentality to a Revenge of the Nerds is very on point from my perspective. Most of them never fit in and their Frankenstein creation reflects that reality.
I just recently found an even earlier example, where the current epidemic of wokeness/PC was foreseen, when I watched the Monty Python classic "The Meaning of Life" from 1983.
In one scene it showed the execution of man by getting chased over a a cliff by a couple of dozen naked young women. The crime he got sentenced to death for: Telling a dirty joke.
I thought how remarkably well that scene captured things that were to come several decades later, long before there was the first Twitter mob going after "sexists"......