As I was re-reading my last article and cogitating over the responses, several thoughts struck me.
There has been an almost complete colonization of educational institutions (both higher and ‘lower’), government institutions, corporations etc by the ‘woke’ - which is often typified by the HR policies around DIE1 and the mandatory training one must endure to face, for example, one’s supposed white guilt.
There has been a subtle2 shift away from notions of personal responsibility and, everywhere, we are being encouraged to ascribe many of our current woes to external factors.
The worries and anxieties of everyday life, once thought to be absolutely normal, are now seen as some terrible mental health burden3 which requires extensive mollycoddling and praise for the bravery with which you face your daily existence4.
The woke emphasize power and its all-important influence whilst, themselves, playing power games. They like power and the benefits it brings - they just want to be the ones with it.
I first encountered the work of Jordan Peterson when listening to the astonishing ‘trial’, conducted by an academic committee, of Lindsay Shepherd. Her crime as a post-graduate teaching assistant was to play to the class, without comment, a clip aired on Canadian public TV of a debate between Peterson and another academic. Both expressed their views and disagreed with one another.
If you’ve a mind to, you can listen to the full ‘trial’ here (42 mins)
During that inquisition one of the witch-finder generals made a comment about Peterson that made him out to be some incarnation of Hitler.
Her ‘crime’ was to not portray Peterson in a bad light. Her crime was that of neutrality.
Of course, I kind of like weirdos, and so I simply had to go and find out for myself just how whacky was this whack-job Peterson?
At this point in time I had no idea who Peterson was, what he did, what he had said that was so beyond the pale5.
Well, bugger me backwards with a barge pole, as not many people say - I found that, contrary to the dire warning of this witch-finder general, the guy actually talked a fuck-ton of sense.
There was a disjoint between a claimed ‘reality’ and the reality I could see, and hear, for myself. Far from being some completely vicious rabid lunatic, Peterson said some really interesting things that made me think a great deal - and I, for one, could discern nothing even remotely resembling ‘hate’ after watching many hours of his lectures and interviews.
Early on I speculated that a good deal of the negativity towards Peterson was not really about any specific (allegedly) hateful thing that he had said, but that his central message was not the one the ‘woke’ wanted to emphasize.
This very smart Canadian Professor of Psychology was very critical of communism, scathing about post-modernism and critical ‘theories’, and expressed his views on these matters with considerable intellect and robustness.
But that wasn’t really it, I felt.
Peterson’s advice, much misunderstood and maligned by some, to “clean your room”, which he meant in both a literal and metaphorical sense, pointed to a way of thinking and being that the ‘woke’ definitely weren’t, in my view, happy with. They sensed a danger to their whole colonization program.
Peterson advocated that taking on personal responsibility, being responsible for yourself and your own feelings, was, if not the key to ‘happiness’, the best way to carve out a greater level of contentment in your life, and to act as a foundation for progress and improvement.
But ‘woke’ is not about contentment or being at peace with oneself; it’s the opposite. They definitely don’t want you to feel content, or at peace. They want you to feel constantly victimized if you’re one of the lucky ‘marginalized’ (so as to accrue the greatest social cachet). Or they want you to feel inordinately guilty and subservient for being the ‘oppressor’.
It would be a woeful misunderstanding of what Peterson was saying to suggest that he was advocating for a kind of “be happy with your lot in life”, or that we should ignore injustices or true oppression. He was advocating for a way to navigate those injustices and inequities, that we have little control over, that led to a more healthy (and productive) individual way of being. And maybe, as a result, some of those inequities (particularly economic ones) could be alleviated or mitigated as you ‘got your act together’ and cleaned your room, your life, and your feelings.
Good advice? Almost certainly, in my view. But hardly ‘hateful’.
One of the things that characterizes ‘woke’ thinking is this insistence that we are all helpless and hapless players in this game of oppressor vs oppressed. The agency that we once thought we had is but an illusion, as we are hurled about by invisible systemic forces beyond our control.
Everything must be “dismantled”, they say.
And replaced with what, exactly?
Something that is fair and equitable and just.
And what IS that something, precisely?
Big on the nice and fluffy rhetoric, small to the point of non-existence on the actual detail.
I remember trying to figure out what the term “systemic racism” actually meant. OK, I don’t understand something. Let’s look for examples. Let’s take some “system” - maybe an institution - and let’s see which bits (maybe all of it) are “racist”. Where, in these systems, does the racism reside?
I didn’t know it at the time but I was completely blinded by my white privilege because I came up short; I just couldn’t find where this systemically racist beast lived anywhere I looked. Where was its lair?
I was told time and time6 again, that it existed. Institutions were falling over themselves to proclaim themselves to be “systemically racist”, in a kind of weird parallel to the #MeToo movement, so if even they recognized it and admitted it, why wasn't I able to find it?
And of course in a spectacular collective mislaying of every marble we once had, the death of George Floyd set everything on fire (literally and metaphorically as mostly peaceful protests erupted all over the west). Although this terrible example of police negligence7 has been widely claimed as an egregious act of racism, it has never been shown to be so.
We had to kneel, raise our fists, put black squares on our internet profiles, profess allyship and, of course, donate lots of money to BLM so that they could buy some really nice houses do all sorts of good things.
But again, as much as George Floyd’s death was a wrongness and should never have happened, to what extent was he personally responsible for his own demise? If he’d not had enough Fentanyl on board to slay a herd of pachyderms, or he hadn’t tried to pass off a forged note, would he still be alive today? As much as I can blame the police for what happened (and they do bear a significant blame here) I can’t render George Floyd entirely ‘innocent’ either.
Lousy situation exacerbated by all the players involved - and very sad indeed.
This rejection of personal responsibility implicit in much of the woke messaging is a problem. There are injustices and oppressions that we need to tackle. Absolutely there are. But not everything in our lives is beyond our control and if we want to minimize the effect of those external forces on our lives we have to take responsibility for the internal forces we do control.
I hope my words haven’t ‘harmed’ you (sarcasm).
Or, more accurately, I hope you haven’t allowed my words to harm you. Maybe I shouldn’t have said certain things, but we’re both complicit in any subsequent harm.
Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, or as I like to say, Derangement, Invidiousness and Excoriation.
And maybe not so subtle. In Canada, for example, you can, if you’re black, get some lawyer to write up a piece for the judge explaining how centuries of oppression, and the current systemic injustices that make your life an absolute living hell, just rendered you completely incapable of NOT robbing someone at gunpoint. We understand. It wasn’t you, it was the system. Here, have a candy and 100 hours of community service.
One might point out here the universities who offer counselling services for those who might have attended a ‘traumatic’ lecture.
This is not to suggest that abnormal levels of anxiety are to be dismissed. This level of anxiety IS a mental health issue and it can be very disabling. But it’s also true that you can kind of ‘think’ oneself into a disabling mental condition, if you’re not careful. If you don’t see yourself as having some degree of agency over your situation and your thoughts and feelings, it can lead to a bad place of hopelessness and anxiety.
Am I allowed to use that clichéd expression these days?
and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time and time . . .
I don’t subscribe to the view that this was a murder. The police had a duty of care to their suspect and they failed miserably in that regard. Punishment was certainly warranted. But murder? I don’t see it.
The core of woke—as reverse behavioural therapy—is an inculcated, crippling level of resentment. What an awful way to go through life. Resentment is poison as well as crippling. No one can build on it. Quite the contrary: it hands control to grifters.
Have you noticed the shift— and when did it begin?— from using the words “I think” or “I believe” with “I feel”?
One other thing I’ve observed is that I can’t have a conversation these days with another mother without having her relate how she tries to “honor” her child’s feelings. Typically this means she didn’t make him do his math homework, or eat his broccoli, or apologize to a peer he’d whacked with a stick.
The problem with making “feelings” a priority is that it incentivizes people to become more childlike and less thoughtful in their approach. If my child learns that crying about doing her math homework will get her out of it, why would she ever move on to rational debate, or even a nascent form of reasoned civil disobedience?