#2 – Woke Supremacy
Weekly Review #2 – Woke Supremacy, The Week in Books: Mishima, Thirst for Love, Sun and Steel, Feeding the addiction
Woke Supremacy
“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”
– Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit.
In recent years, a peculiar ideology born on the left managed to fuse itself with established power. It has picked up the name of ‘Wokeism.’ The word woke was snatched from the cultural ether and affixed to a set of beliefs and behaviours, to an ideology that as of yet had no name.
Some saw it as a mere software upgrade of the old ‘political correctness’ program which had been installed in the minds of all those who regarded themselves as the good and the just; but it was clearly something more.
It was distinct from Generation X’s brand of leftism that the Unabomber described in his manifesto. The impact of technology had accelerated the psychological trends he outlined, ramping them up now to next-level extremity.
It was not liberalism, though liberals were being easily duped by it, avidly adopting its language, its formal set-pieces, proclaiming themselves ‘allies’, and exercising its gamut of signs and slogans to signal their prestige. More than any other ideology, it would be liberalism that facilitated its ascension, excused its excesses, and piggybacked it to the heights of power.
It did not place absolute emphasis on class or the economy, as old left-wing socialist movements had done. Some even questioned whether it could be called ‘left-wing’ at all, since it had almost seamlessly merged itself with managerial capitalism, to the extent that its messaging and diktats were soon being transmitted across the entire Western corporate world, even so far as to be used as recruitment agitprop by the CIA.
Some of its acolytes styled themselves as ‘literal communists’ and ‘trained Marxists’, but it was hardly a fierce full-blooded communism, for its manifestations in public life resembled the very things Lenin excoriated in ‘Left-Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder.’
It did not seek to overthrow the dominant mode of production through unceasing class struggle; most of its stalwarts were too weak or flabby for that. Instead, it sought to wipe the system’s slate completely clean and administer it according to its own twisted moral framework, all whilst benefitting directly from the corporate payroll.
Its most devout practitioners carried a Stalinist instinct to purge and punish, a Maoist drive to wholesale cultural revolution and ‘re-education’, and a Pol-Pot-like desire to reset the clock back to Year Zero. Those that failed to mouth the new oaths were to be labelled ‘far right’ and lambasted as ‘Fascists.’
Of all the intellectual tendencies it harboured, postmodernism was perhaps its strongest. But the new creed was too rigid, too dogmatic, too certain of its own grand narrative to truly embody a discipline that had once declared the falsity of all grand narratives, leaving itself stranded in a cul-de-sac of deconstructive masturbation.
It had an almost quasi-Christian ethos, a moral puritanism combined with an authoritarian bent reminiscent of the Inquisition, not to mention a will to instill a sense of guilt in its enemies, to extract confessions of sin, excommunicate heretics, and condemn infidels to exile.
In no way could it feasibly be called Christian; in its eyes those who went against it were beyond redemption, and it possessed no mechanism of forgiveness. Some depicted it as a neo-religious Gnostic cult, but gnosis was only the first rung on its flimsy rope-ladder.
For a time, commentators used a catch-all term and called it ‘identity politics’ but catch-all terms like this blur more than they clarify, and it ended up ensnaring the identitarians of the right in their tow, with no clear way of distinguishing the identity-thought of the two opposed sects.
And so, parts of the right resurrected the old ‘cultural Marxism’ moniker, but this had a muddying effect. The dominance of woke values and beliefs, their adoption by banks, corporations, even intelligence agencies, was nothing if not proof that Gramsci was right: a ruling class will absorb and assimilate ideas that are superficially ‘opposed’ to it, and then pump these back out at the population as propaganda, as ‘common sense.’ They even start to believe this ‘common sense.’
Online, its advocates were pilloried as SJWs (Social Justice Warriors) but again, this designation grew to seem too juvenile, too simplistic and coached in slang, too narrowly concerned with the narcissistic campus cults, the ‘snowflakes’ who were more a source of raucous amusement than anything that might snowball into some sort of cultural avalanche.
Those of a more Nietzschean bent saw in it a nihilist ethos: it sought the obliteration of old symbols and meaning structures, celebrated ugliness, applauded the butchering of the body, and reformulated riotous destruction as righteous rage, all whilst being knelt before by establishment figures. Yet its all-consuming sense of self-certainty disqualified it from any truly nihilistic stance.
Indeed, it resembled a hissing cauldron into which all of these ingredients had been thrown. It swiftly became its own unique recipe: a stew of symbolic markers, ‘exosemantic gang signs’, signals, slogans, ‘theories’, a vocabulary and an overarching political project, which was then dolloped out for mass consumption by the most powerful institutions in the West.
And again, its believers, its conscripts and its proselytisers seemed to vary in degree and gradation as to just how invested they were in the whole thing. Some denied that they were under the sway of a new ideology, that the existence of something called ‘wokeism’ was all a load of codswallop cooked up by neo-Nazis as a codeword for ‘degeneracy.’
Some were unbridled True Believers whose every thought and action embodied the creed. Some ticked certain boxes and flirted with specific stances but weren’t fanatical in all spheres. Others just put pronouns in their social media bios and went on as if it were business as usual for left-liberalism.
Wherever it went, it rejected attempts to name it. It repudiated all efforts to classify its traits, instead preferring to conceal itself in the shadows, costuming itself behind lofty words like ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’, ‘justice’ and ‘equity’, ‘altruism’ and ‘empathy.’
It dismissed the notion that the cold civil war, this ‘culture war’ which it had ignited, was a matter of any serious concern. ‘The covering over, the disavowal of civil war, the assertion that civil war does not exist, is one of the first axioms of the exercise of power,’ said Foucault, ironically, about dismissals of this ilk.
It reassured us it was merely endowed with an extrasensory perception of social injustice; it could see clearer; it was more alert, more awake; it could penetrate to the heart of things, unveil the unspoken social codes, and cast light on the corrupt structures that lay at the base of Western moral machinery.
What was noticeable to anyone outside of this matrix, who were not part of the left, or who were but for whom this ideology had now rendered them an exile, it was something that built on the trends of yonder but was identifiably new and different, more extreme, a chimeric mishmash of doctrines that they could no longer tolerate nor support.
Others on the left made the transition to the new faith almost imperceptibly, and it soon seeped into every crevice of their thought. Every political problem would now be interpreted through the Holy Trinity of Wokeism: race, gender, and sexuality.
Some leftist and liberal exiles found themselves in a state of bemused aggravation, abandoned by their tribe, confused, ‘politically homeless.’ The Red Top press had a field day fishing for its excesses, of which there was little shortage, but they were no match for the much more powerful liberal outlets that in some way or other, had seemingly all succumbed to it...
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The Week in Books
This week I finished Yukio Mishima’s Thirst for Love.
This was an earlier work of his. Its theme is jealousy in human relationships.
It tells the story of Etsuko, a woman whose husband recently died. He was a serial philanderer who instilled in her great pain and longing, a cheat whom she never had the courage to leave. When he succumbs to typhoid fever, she is surprised to find herself relieved, at last freed from the throttling pangs of jealousy.
With nowhere to go, she is invited to live with her dead husband’s family at their estate. Her wrinkly, wizened old father-in-law, Yakichi, at first sought merely to make use of her talent for cooking. But now she finds herself in a situation where she must also cater to the old man sexually.
Secretly, she develops a desire for one of the household’s servants, a muscular youth called Saburo. She fantasises about him and attempts to engineer ways of winning his affection. But when it transpires that he has impregnated one of the servant girls at the estate, a new cyclone of jealousy consumes her.
The book is slow-moving and ponderous for the most part, dealing mainly with Etsuko’s psychological distress. Towards the end, the writing accelerates and the pace ramps up to a brutal finish.
I felt the quality of writing in Thirst for Love wasn’t as powerful as The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (which I wrote about last week) – the ideas in it weren’t as engaging.
Once I finished Thirst for Love I immediately moved on to Sun and Steel.
This is a recount of Mishima’s intellectual journey.
At first, he was a bookish child, shy, indoorsy, averse to the open air. His youth was punctuated by an impulse to manipulate words and weave them into fictions. His first book was published when he was still a teen. But he later reached a point where he recognised he had neglected the demands of the flesh: his command of language was robust and beautiful, but his body was feeble and decrepit.
Infused with the Japanese samurai morality, which set forth the ideal of the warrior intellectual, he set about forming his own outlook in response to this. He would carve his body into a work of art in the same way he’d carved words into great fiction.
In the West, our conceptions of warrior and intellectual are kept separate. Intellectuals do the thinking, warriors the fighting. In Japan, samurai morality decreed that the two must be combined, or else one would ‘have their fighting done by fools, and their thinking done by cowards,’ as Thucydides put it.
Mishima selected two concepts to embody his new thought: he placed emphasis on the Sun, that is to say the nourishing power of nature, light and the open air, and the Steel, symbolising the weights that would sculpt his physique, and the blade that would drill his reflexes.
This sort of thought is foreign to our reclusive age of tech-addiction, where the Netflix-binging, virtual-videogame-world-inhabiting, junk-food-indulging, WFH lockdown-mentality reigns supreme. Our intellectuals are often frail and vampiric, and our gym bunnies are largely a bunch of dolts. Mishima sought a return to the spirit of the samurai, in which a human being might embody both fitness and intellect, striving to push each to its ultimate aesthetic peak.
Feeding the addiction
These are the books I acquired since January 1st.
I am currently halfway through Matt Alt’s Pure Invention.
It is the story of how Japanese tech and pop culture conquered the West. From toys, the Walkman, karaoke, emojis, tamagotchis, manga, anime, Godzilla, ninjas, Hello Kitty, Pokemon, Power Rangers, Dragonball Z, Nintendo, Mario, Zelda, the Playstation, internet bulletin boards – the West has been awash with Japanese cultural forms and fantasies. Throughout the book, the economic and political history of Japan stirs in the background. From the atom bombs to the American occupation, to Japan’s dramatic economic rebound and then the 90s stock market crash, all the way through to the modern day, it is an extremely interesting spin on the history of postwar Japan, told through toys and comics, games and shows.
Due to Mishima, I have suddenly been inspired with the impulse to read up on Japan. I bought this short history as a simple primer.
The following books were bought extremely cheap in charity shops.
I found Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Hope, which is a sequel to his most famous work – Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
I am not familiar with Freire’s writing, but he’s a name that pops up now and then regarding wokeism’s influences. Freire was a ‘progressive educator.’ The introduction calls for ‘an education in hope’ in an effort to ‘re-create the world.’ He regards hope as a human requirement, ‘an ontological need.’ But hope is easily shattered; alone it cannot change anything. It must be anchored in practice. If not, it is liable to bring paralysis, immobilisation, and a sickly fatalism that further inhibits the ability to act.
Hopelessness and despair are both the consequence and cause of inaction or immobilism.
I will read further and report back at some point.
This Ryan Holiday book is one of those mega-sellers that even Suzie at the office has read. It contains a gobbet of Stoic thought for each day of the year.
I have wanted Claeys’ book on Dystopia for a while now, as it goes in hand in hand with some things I’m interested in. This earlier book on Utopia I got second hand for a couple quid.
This is a good little book and record shop in Chester. The guy keeps the books at bargain prices. Records are dearer. He sells a bunch of graphic novels too. It’s a mix of stuff in there.
I bought a copy of Steinbeck’s East of Eden for £2.
I read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy years back when the film came out. I never read any of the others, so I scooped these up for £2 each as well, all of them brand new.
Finally, I bought Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed online since it is relevant to the things I wrote above regarding wokeism, and a couple days later I saw his Economic Facts and Fallacies in a charity shop.
If you got this far, let me know what books you’ve bought or have been reading recently.
Thanks.
Very good explication, Aaron. Wokery doesn't give any emphasis on Class anymore, it has fallen off their agenda. Your NYT graphs show that. Very convenient. Hence the lack of attention given to the systematic rape in English towns of underage white working class girls, for instance. I have had a short piece about Queer Theory published recently. https://countrysquire.co.uk/2022/11/30/the-queer-is-dead/