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With the year drawing to a close, I've been revisiting old blog posts. It's fun to see how my writing has developed but it's more fun to see how my thinking has evolved. This past year, I've come to believe that the civil unrest of 2020 only occurred because pandemic policies squeezed the underclass. I've become more clear about US government involvement with drug traffickers throughout the War on Drugs. And I've tried to deeply consider the intersection of culture and politics in the context of rapidly increasing technological sophistication.
My own ideals have become more clear this year. In this post I wrote:
Imagine a society where everyone was both perfectly free and entirely accountable. That's where I start when I try to picture a better future.
When I try to picture a better world, I see forgiveness playing a much more prominent role in society. I wrote about this in Forgiveness Lessons from Rwanda:
Forgiveness doesn't need to mean giving wrongdoers a pass. It can mean instead a refusal to let harm beget more harm. A willingness to live and let live. An end to a cycle of violence.
Studying the control regime this year produced a good insight from this post:
The control regime, on the other hand, cannot simply change. It's not so much a person as a software running in powerful social networks. Substituting one individual for another does nothing to alter the software. I'm not sure how such software could be altered.
One of the control regime's most powerful new tools is the Woke. Fifteen years ago, Woke mostly meant accepting people and perspectives that differed from your own. But during the pandemic, Woke metastasized into something more threatening. It became a group that imposed identity politics on everyone, prescribed speech, favored increased government censorship, and used cancellation to punish its enemies.
As I've written before, cancellation is a digital mob punishing a person for being accused of some offense. Anyone can make the accusation for any reason and the truth of the matter is unimportant to the mob. Justice is irrelevant to this process. The whole point is for members of the mob to signal their virtue to each other.
The Woke formula for identity is fundamentally disempowering. Here's a quote from a post about that:
I've been thinking about how identity has increasingly been weaponized in recent years. Racial identity. Gender identity. Sexual identity. These things have become the exclusive focus of the blue bloc, which seeks simultaneously to elevate individuals with the correct identities into positions of power and to punish those with incorrect identities for their perceived misdeeds against those with the more desirable identities. Within the blue bloc, this new formulation of identity has replaced more traditional formulations of identity, which were mostly based on religion, vocation, and geography. This replacement of the basis for identity seems very disempowering. Instead of defining people by what they do, it defines them by things they have no control over. These involuntary identities are then used to prescribe political and social action.
The Woke emphasis on trans identities is suspicious because trans identities are extremely profitable for Big Pharma and industrial medicine. Here's some of what I said in a post about that:
Only 1 in 50 kids identifies as trans and up to 90% of these kids grow up to change their minds about transitioning. If these figures can be believed, that's a very small number of trans people in the population. But since gender dysphoria diagnoses tripled from 2017 to 2021, there is reason to believe the trans population is experiencing a period of explosive growth. While some of this growth can likely be attributed to increasing societal acceptance of trans people, the coinciding growth in gender reassignment drug sales and surgeries suggests that Big Pharma and industrial medicine have a strong interest in popularizing transgender identities.
From my perspective, Woke culture hates freedom and avoids responsibility. Here's an excerpt from a post about Woke Totalitarianism:
I'm familiar with the Woke Totalitarian arguments against free speech. The Woke crowd imagines that governments and big companies should be responsible for the actions that media consumers take after consuming the media. Even in extreme cases, I disagree with this premise. If someone reads racist tweets and then goes out and does a mass shooting, the fault clearly lies with the shooter, not the media platform or the author of the tweets. The deeper issue is that Woke culture as a whole is a mass avoidance of individual responsibility, coupled with the strange belief that feelings matter as much as the facts of physical reality.
In 2022 it came out that nonprofits in the US had been paralyzed by the endless petty grievances of the Woke. I posted about this phenomenon in the context of the total labor landscape. Here's a quote:
At the core of the labor market changes now underway is a new emphasis on human rights in the workplace. The Woke armies in the nonprofit world may be instigating endless pointless conflicts with their coworkers, but their tantrums don't come from nowhere. They come from a genuine desire for people to all be treated fairly. It's unfortunate that this desire is being articulated in ways that sabotage any hope of progress. I wonder how much of this sabotage is deliberate. In for-profit workplaces, people are demanding pretty basic things, like living wages and sick leave. They're demanding things that everybody deserves. I don't characterize their demands as the demands of 'labor' as a cohort. I characterize them as working class attempts to convince the managerial class to observe human rights in the workplace.
This year has highlighted the shocking extent to which the powers that be spread propaganda and censor public conversations. Intelligence agencies and government offices are in it. So are Big Tech and Big Pharma. Freedom of speech is under attack in an increasing variety of ways. Here's something from a post about that:
Our freedom of speech is being structurally limited and our information environment is heavily manipulated. It's a critical moment. How we respond to these impersonal realities will influence society's direction, for better or worse. In this, one thing seems obvious. We have to talk to each other if we want things to improve. This is true across the board, on issue after issue and crisis after crisis. There is no consensus on how best to solve society's problems. Finding and implementing solutions to these problems requires talking to each other to build that consensus. The only alternative to this is to accept the control regime's self-serving agenda.
I hope you've enjoyed this little walk down memory lane. My emphasis on the Woke mainly had to do with making sense of this group's waxing power in society. They aspire to become the new status quo and they're succeeding in some areas. I feel like I spent a lot of time this year thinking through the implications of that.
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