The Coming Woke Catastrophe

Chris Heitzman

Description

Woke culture sells itself as the great progressive awakening of our time. Its proponents and followers believe that wokism is spreading love, defeating hate, and creating a better world without oppression of any kind. Those who refuse to subscribe to woke culture are dismissed as hateful people who must stand for the opposite of what woke culture stands for. Increasingly, anyone who questions the woke message is shouted down, de-platformed, and even cancelled. No wonder people are increasingly queuing up to be seen as woke, and to adopt its language. Who would stand against more love and less hate? And who would want to be cancelled? But beyond the superficial message, is there something less attractive about woke thinking? The Coming Woke Catastrophe is a timely exposé of what woke culture really is. It examines whether wokeism aligns with its own superficially attractive labels, or whether it is something rather darker that we all ought to be challenging rather than mindlessly adopting.

Sujets

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Identity politics
• Psychology
• Cultural Studies
• Law

Informations

• Publié par: Academica Press
• Date de parution: 15 février 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781680532753
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Coming Woke Catastrophe:
A Critical Examination of Woke Culture
Chris Heitzman
Academica Press Washington~London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Heitzman, Chris (author)
Title: The coming woke catastrophe: a critical examination of woke culture | Chris Heitzman
Description: Washington: Academica Press, 2022. | Includes references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022935214 | ISBN 9781680537901 (hardcover) | 9781680537918 (paperback) | 9781680532753 (e-book)
Copyright 2022 Chris Heitzman
Contents 1 Introduction: the world according to the woke 2 Woke language: the new definitions of love and hate 3 The fallacy of utopia 4 ‘My truth’ in place of objective truth 5 The death of reason, intelligent thought and debate 6 Seeing discrimination and oppression in everything 7 Fanatical purity’s feebleness 8 Woke culture’s use of fear: ‘cancel culture’ 9 The censorship of news and annihilation of free speech 10 Problem blindness and the collapse of standards 11 ‘You are enough’: the enemy of self-awareness and improvement 12 Humour to the slaughter: the (wrongly) accused apparatus of ‘haters’ . 13 The loneliness of empty love 14 Virtue signalling: the smug delusion of holiness by association 15 Fairness re-defined as blanket uniformity 16 Loving each other as a descent into hubris 17 Lies and deceit: the ideology exposed as mere labelling to suit its proponents’ own ends 18 A short story: utopia or dystopia? 19 Reasons for the madness: the new religion, and its other causes 20 Conclusion: the cost of being down a rabbit hole and in an echo chamber Index
1 Introduction: the world according to the woke
I trained as a lawyer and in studies and in practice I always followed the facts and evidence, considered and debated, in order to reach informed, tested and reliable conclusions. That is what the Courts do in their bid to achieve justice: the documentary evidence is made available, the witnesses are heard, and tested in cross examination, and every party has the opportunity to have their say. Democratic Parliaments are supposed to do the same: debate is had, every opinion is heard, everyone gets their say, and hopefully most of the time more reliable laws and policies are the result. It is what has set the free democratic West apart for so long: an enquiring mind, freedom of speech, and informed opinion and decision-making. What I have found myself observing recently is the emergence of an ideology we all colloquially call woke which is a challenge to all that. It represents a failure of reason – the power of the mind to think, understand and reach logical conclusions. It takes a utopian view of the world – one where division, inequality, unfairness, and other such ills do not even exist – rather than seeing the world as it is. It is more interested in labels than substance, and takes a simplistic view of the world and issues. Its principal narrative is the battle between ‘love’ and ‘hate,’ and everything is often labelled as one thing or the other. It dis-likes and avoids debate because debate detracts from the simplicity of the imagined struggle, and is un-utopian. It labels as ‘hate’ anything un-utopian and seeks interest groups or people to blame for the prevention of that utopian state of affairs, and pursues them vigorously and in unattractive ways such as seeking to having them ‘cancelled’ – de-platformed or silenced – in a bid to end free-speech and give rise in Western society to the ideology’s woke world view without dissenting voice.
That is how I first came to woke ideology, or culture: as a trained critical thinker, seeing something totally different emerge. Politicians and political commentators may have already clashed with woke ideology where it may have been at odds with certain political issues. I am less concerned with the politics of the woke and more concerned about the risks the ideology poses to freedom of speech, reason, our ability to properly debate and interact with each other, sound decision-making, and all of the ills that follow from a breakdown of those things.
But how would woke ideology introduce itself? Society is undergoing an awakening, the woke movement would have us believe. For generations before woke culture, so we are told, humanity was asleep to its ideals. We were living in the dark ages. Hate ruled over love and hope. The new ideology of the woke is a whole new way of thinking and behaving. Like the birth of a new utopian world. Hate, unfairness, discrimination, and an imperfect world are being slowly cast aside as we undergo the great awakening in which love and hope win instead. The woke message of love-not-hate is changing everything for the better, but it is not yet a battle entirely won. We must continue the fight, to supplant hate with hope! That is increasingly the accepted narrative of the woke element of Western societies in 2021. It is not hyperbole to say that a cultural revolution is going on.
Woke culture is taking over every aspect of life and society. Everything and everyone is labelled as either ‘love’ or ‘hope’ on the one hand, or ‘hate’ on the other. And the mob cult followers are out with the placards. They are marching down your high street. It’s on the front page. And leading on the TV news. Hash tag love-not-hate! Down with the haters! Spread love! It is a cult that has captured many and to which many more are subscribing all the time. It was even the theme of the two most recent US Presidential campaigns. Prince Harry recently said we are in a “global crisis of hate.” Hate must be erased. We must all have more love.
You might have already succumbed to it, for all of its superficial attractiveness (yes, more love sounds better than more hate), or you might have just seen it in the news and be curious. Either way, the time is right for an assessment of the new cult of love-not-hate that is trying to take over every aspect of society and our lives.
It is not a political party. It was not elected on a manifesto. But it is seeking and gaining new subscribers every day and it is spreading through society by word of mouth and action. It is perhaps the biggest unelected movement in modern history. And it infects society’s approach to anything and everything.
No serious examination of the ‘woke’ trend has yet taken place, and its effects have not been questioned. Yet like an unstoppable rollercoaster it daily gains pace. It might be noisy, but it has crept up on us fast, and so far largely unchallenged.
An analysis is now timely, and urgent. This book examines (for those not yet entirely familiar with the cult) what it means, how it happened, and why it is one of the biggest issues modern society is facing.
What is woke culture? In the course of writing this book and talking about its topic, I discovered that few people are able to attempt a definition of it. Anyone can be forgiven for struggling for a definition because the language of the woke is deliberately vague. Since it doesn’t really want you to see what it is really all about. After all, who stands for hate rather than hope, either now or generations before? Is its message of love and hope not a trite one? It wants to suck you in with its superficially unchallengeable labels and language, so as to be unquestioned and unopposed. By saying ‘we stand for love and hope not hate’ the cult gives itself the status of being unchallengeable, because who would go against that. But wanting love and not hate is nothing new or surprising. The woke cult labels itself as something radically new, and there is no doubt that it is. We need to scratch beneath the simple labels it uses in order to find out what its radical truth is. I would attempt the following definition: A utopian view of the world , rather than seeing the world as it is. A strongly moralising ideology which over-simplifies the world and arguments and conflates issues or topics with the people involved, so that for example woke culture would say anyone advocating that the government of a country should have the power to control the levels of immigration into that country is a hater of would-be migrants, or that anyone advocating the need for improvement to the NHS is criticising hard-working nurses. A zero-sum view of the world, ie, someone’s gain must always be someone else’s loss . Woke culture encourages everyone to identify with a particular identity group – female, minority race, or whatever – and sets those groups against others. This gives rise to tribalism, division, victim-culture and blame-game. An idea that it is discriminatory (and not to be done) to draw any comparisons between anything or anyone, or prefer one thing over another, as if by ceasing any expression of comparisons we will erase discrimination from the human mind and the planet. A total rejection of debate, analysis and reason . The utopian ideology must not be questioned, debated, and it does not need to answer for itself. It does not wish to be debated. A denial of objective truth , so that there is instead only ‘lived experience,’ ie, ‘truth’ from an individual perspective. What the cult followers see as their truth is the truth: the truth is no longer something objective to be discovered through rational thought, evidence and debate. The utopian ideal is a dogmatic ideology which its followers buy into, repeat and apply to the world. The ideology must not be questioned. Anyone who tries to disagree with or question the ideology is rejected as both an idiot who lacks the intelligence to ‘get it’ and attacked with negative labels and there may even be calls for that person or organisation to be ‘cancelled,’ ‘deplatformed’ or sacked and ostracised by society. An almost religious zealousness and fanaticism in the belief and spreading of the ideology, perhaps to (i) make up in noise for its feebleness in substance, and (ii) to try to embed it in as many institutions and societies as possible before the majority of people see it coming, have chance