Wokeism heaps absurdity upon absurdity

Machiavelli: People yield so readily to the desires of the moment... Photo: PxHere

The stark nature of the hold Wokeism and its intolerant ideology have over professionals such as doctors and teachers, and especially over the cultural elite, grips American literary critic and non-fiction author David Rieff with a mounting concern. He comments on one absurdity of the outcome:   

Hannah Arendt wrote that, “Social non-conformism as such has been and always will be the mark of intellectuals, be they artists, writers or scholars. Intellectually non conformism is almost the sine qua non of achievement.”

But what has been growing in importance over the course of the past half a century at least, and has by now acquired a hegemonic authority in arts, culture, and the Academe, is the ‘massification’ of non-conformism. 

But of course if everyone is a non-conformist, then no one is, and if everyone is part of the avant-garde, then by definition there will no main body of the force, and no rear guard, even if this obviously means there can be no avant-garde either, at least in either the connotative or the denotative meaning of the term.

As for Arendt’s holding up of the concept of achievement, she meant achievement in the sense of accomplishing something ‒ producing a wonderful work of art, writing a brilliant essay, etc. But in the 21st century, achievement is not understood as accomplishment except in the very different sense of self-fulfillment. 

And in principle everyone is capable of that, not least because the only legitimate judge of success is...oneself and [there is] absolutely no question of a recusal.

In a later entry in his Desire and Fate Substack Rieff writes of a second absurdity:

The prevailing conformism of the Academic-Cultural-Philanthropic Complex is non-conformism. Since this is a contradiction in terms ‒ and somewhere deep down even the so-called non-conformists of our day must realize this ‒ the only way to keep the charade going is to weaponize it with speech codes and bowdlerized language so that the words needed to express the blindingly obvious facts of the matter are no longer accessible to us. 

ChatGPT, with its well-documented refusal to countenance the unpleasant or the disturbing, offers a glimpse of how this world of bogus non-conformity, of bureaucrats who think they are Spartacus, will be ordered.

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