The realization that wokeness has transformed itself into a form of pseudo-religion has become increasingly obvious to conservatives. The ceremonies and festivals that occur during the month of June make it hard to ignore as Pride celebrations are increasingly treated as a hedonistic sacrament. The fact that the United States government has heavily invested in these rituals creates an even more bewildering situation which trips the pattern recognition of those who are familiar with our mechanisms of constitutional restraint. As the Department of Defense, FBI, ATF, and Department of Education splash a rainbow across their logos and make passionate declarations of faith, many conservatives start to wonder what happened to the separation of church and state. Christians are regularly told that they must check their moral convictions at the door because they live in a secular society, but the government seems to enthusiastically declare not just its preference but its absolute dedication to the new progressive faith. The truth is that the separation of church and state did not remove the reality of conflicting moral visions. Instead, it created selection pressures that favored an ideology that could circumvent those formal restrictions.
There was, I will begrudgingly admit, a good piece written in the New Yorker about how a classically liberal and anti-woke organization seeking to replace the ACLU completely blew up and essentially became a bastion of woke ideology itself. It’s become quite obvious that all attempts by classical liberals to effectively combat wokeness have utterly failed (i.e. IDW, Heterodox Academy, University of Austin, etc.) simply because they don’t understand that there is no neutral ground or institution. When LGBT groups demand that corporations cannot be neutral, they frankly are correct.
Power abhors a vaccuum, and in a democracy there is the promise of power, free-floating like electrons, for anyone to grab and benefit from. All you have to do is utter the correct magic words and slogans and maybe you too can taste a crumb of that power!
It is man's nature to worship. We are made for it, those who think they are above worship are lying to themselves. Even if you only worship foreseen or creation, you're worshipping. Without God in our lives we are like empty vessels waiting to be filled.
A first step for a Republican House of Representatives might be to pass a bill that required the following:
U.S. flag never flown at half-mast for any reason at any federal facility.
No other flag, ever, for any reason at any federal facility.
No new federal holidays or commemoration days.
No federal or departmental or military designation of theme months of any kind.
Any other ideas that can contribute to limiting use of federal powers against a group/groups of citizens?
Equity requires/entails equal standing, and therefore privileging of any group is a violation of equity.
Of course Democrat Senate will vote down, and/or "Biden" will veto any restriction on "DEI". But Americans would see that Republicans stand for true equity.
I don't believe for a moment, of course, that Republicans would do anything so obvious as pass a bill restricting DEI hijacking of federal resources and departments.
"As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” Jesus is the foundational cornerstone, the only secure house is built upon this rock, it will be the only secure thing left standing. He is the light in the darkness, and the gates of HELL will not prevail against Him.
If even the prophet of free speech didn’t truly believe in it, but wanted to use it as a means to gradually impose radical individualism, why should we?
It’s clear everyone has a level of disagreement from their own positions they can tolerate before they see them as a threat to them and their way of life.
As a secular minded person, I might wish that the chilled out liberalism of the 1990s could come back, but I know it’s never coming back. The period from 1969 to 2013 was truly a historical aberration. Ultimately, when it comes to cultural values, it’s impose or be imposed upon.
Great article, I almost completely agree. However, I just wanted to offer some of my thoughts on the "God shaped hole" since I've had extended conversations with friends about this. You rightly say that we have a need for grand narratives to make sense of our quests for meaning, but I would say that we employ narratives in all matters. To me it's more of an epistemic necessity that we, at some point, decide we've seen enough in order to act and feel justified in our actions.
Even our most robust theories/laws in the hard sciences are stories built off of premises we call axioms, with logic bounding the ways in which the story develops. Even then, if you deal with more abstract logic (such as categorical logic), you may not have truth values falling in the binary we're accustomed to, but that's beside the point. Popper's contribution of what makes science something distinct from a religion is its falsifiability in light of empirical evidence. So you can show that things are false, but saying that something is true or "proven" is never possible in a strict sense; at some point you have enough evidence and failed attempts at falsification that you take it as effectively true. Seeing as there are undecidable statements in mathematics, it would not be surprising if there were claims which could neither be proven nor disproven. Then you're left with only being able to show that claims are false using science and a Bayesian approach to classifying things as true.
Back to my original point, even something as foundational to our modern lives as science (via engineering) requires a (low) level of faith to have any progress at all. Without that little bit of faith, we don't build anything because, not only is Newtonian mechanics an approximation of Einsteinian mechanics, but relativity is known to be incomplete because of its inability to explain black holes. So the fact that Newtonian mechanics is a good approximation of relativity in "classical" regimes doesn't tell us how good of an approximation it is to whatever the "one true theory" is. This also goes back to the axiom of human action in Austrian economics, which doesn't assume that our actions are rational but rather that our actions are purposeful. That your actions serve your ends is not guaranteed, just that given the information/experience available to you, you think your action would help you reach your ends.
When an explanation for a massively violent event and its concomitant crisis emerges as the official, unquestionable, and authoritative narrative; when it includes, and without empirical evidence or investigative inquiry, the assignation of innocence and exceptionalism of the victims, and utter depravity and terrifying power to the designated criminals; when dissent from this narrative is socially forbidden, even to the extent of legal harassment and prosecution; when it spawns behavior in contradiction with itself, such as committing acts of terror in the name of eradicating terrorism, or restricting and punishing free speech in the name of expanding and protecting it; when the narrative is immediately supported, echoed, and policed by the vast majority of the ruling classes, including both the mainstream and ‘alternative’ (gate-keeping left and right; when it successfully unites and synthesizes otherwise opposed factions of the populace—liberals with neoconservatives, libertarians with statists, humanists with Nietzscheans, theists with atheists; when rational scrutiny and frank discussion of obvious explanation holes in the narrative are forbidden; and when the ritualistic, annual remembrance of an event and recitation of its hallowed story—particularly the harrowing portrayal of the demonic villains to which it assigns all blame for both the increasing domestic strife among citizens and the perpetual Manichean war against the newest ‘enemy’—instils and evokes primordial fear and religious awe in the populace; when the narrative of an event or series of connected events possesses all of these attributes, or even just a few of them, we know we are dealing with no ordinary phenomenon.
@Auron, would you please comment on this Federalist Article regarding Apple’s new product? Thanks!
"What Crispin is describing, albeit not in these terms, is a concerted effort to monitor, manipulate, and potentially control the user, all under the guise of “predicting” his behavior. It’s not hard to imagine a near future in which AI is able to translate monitored brain activity and other biometrics into images. A user could be wearing an Apple headset that’s continuously transmitting brainwaves and images and thoughts to the cloud, where corporations could mine them for profit and government censors could monitor them for wrongthink.
This already happens now, so why would it not happen with even more powerful technology? Worse, these recorded thoughts and images could be archived the way phone and email records are now, under federal surveillance laws. We’re talking about a permanent digital record of your inmost thoughts, recorded and archived by the world’s most powerful corporations and accessible by government agencies whenever they want.
The blunt reality about Apple’s new “mixed-reality” platform, then, is that it’s designed to increase the soul-crushing isolation and loneliness of modern life while amplifying the ability of Big Tech — and hence, government — to exert control over us. The vision of the future offered by Apple is one of solitary men and women sitting alone in the darkened rooms of empty houses, their faces hidden behind shining black masks, reliving “memories” that were digitally mediated to begin with.
There was, I will begrudgingly admit, a good piece written in the New Yorker about how a classically liberal and anti-woke organization seeking to replace the ACLU completely blew up and essentially became a bastion of woke ideology itself. It’s become quite obvious that all attempts by classical liberals to effectively combat wokeness have utterly failed (i.e. IDW, Heterodox Academy, University of Austin, etc.) simply because they don’t understand that there is no neutral ground or institution. When LGBT groups demand that corporations cannot be neutral, they frankly are correct.
Nice analysis,thank you
You are a good writer. Sad though that is true.
Amen!!
Dude if we could somehow find a man that speaks like Auron but looks like Giga Chad, we would have our new Caesar and win all elections going forward.
Power abhors a vaccuum, and in a democracy there is the promise of power, free-floating like electrons, for anyone to grab and benefit from. All you have to do is utter the correct magic words and slogans and maybe you too can taste a crumb of that power!
It is man's nature to worship. We are made for it, those who think they are above worship are lying to themselves. Even if you only worship foreseen or creation, you're worshipping. Without God in our lives we are like empty vessels waiting to be filled.
A first step for a Republican House of Representatives might be to pass a bill that required the following:
U.S. flag never flown at half-mast for any reason at any federal facility.
No other flag, ever, for any reason at any federal facility.
No new federal holidays or commemoration days.
No federal or departmental or military designation of theme months of any kind.
Any other ideas that can contribute to limiting use of federal powers against a group/groups of citizens?
Equity requires/entails equal standing, and therefore privileging of any group is a violation of equity.
Of course Democrat Senate will vote down, and/or "Biden" will veto any restriction on "DEI". But Americans would see that Republicans stand for true equity.
I don't believe for a moment, of course, that Republicans would do anything so obvious as pass a bill restricting DEI hijacking of federal resources and departments.
"As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” Jesus is the foundational cornerstone, the only secure house is built upon this rock, it will be the only secure thing left standing. He is the light in the darkness, and the gates of HELL will not prevail against Him.
Completely agree with you Auron. Patrick Deneen’s essay ‘J.S Mill and the Despotism of Progress’ killed the last piece of anti-woke liberal in me.
https://postliberalorder.substack.com/p/j-s-mill-and-the-despotism-of-progress
If even the prophet of free speech didn’t truly believe in it, but wanted to use it as a means to gradually impose radical individualism, why should we?
It’s clear everyone has a level of disagreement from their own positions they can tolerate before they see them as a threat to them and their way of life.
As a secular minded person, I might wish that the chilled out liberalism of the 1990s could come back, but I know it’s never coming back. The period from 1969 to 2013 was truly a historical aberration. Ultimately, when it comes to cultural values, it’s impose or be imposed upon.
Great article, I almost completely agree. However, I just wanted to offer some of my thoughts on the "God shaped hole" since I've had extended conversations with friends about this. You rightly say that we have a need for grand narratives to make sense of our quests for meaning, but I would say that we employ narratives in all matters. To me it's more of an epistemic necessity that we, at some point, decide we've seen enough in order to act and feel justified in our actions.
Even our most robust theories/laws in the hard sciences are stories built off of premises we call axioms, with logic bounding the ways in which the story develops. Even then, if you deal with more abstract logic (such as categorical logic), you may not have truth values falling in the binary we're accustomed to, but that's beside the point. Popper's contribution of what makes science something distinct from a religion is its falsifiability in light of empirical evidence. So you can show that things are false, but saying that something is true or "proven" is never possible in a strict sense; at some point you have enough evidence and failed attempts at falsification that you take it as effectively true. Seeing as there are undecidable statements in mathematics, it would not be surprising if there were claims which could neither be proven nor disproven. Then you're left with only being able to show that claims are false using science and a Bayesian approach to classifying things as true.
Back to my original point, even something as foundational to our modern lives as science (via engineering) requires a (low) level of faith to have any progress at all. Without that little bit of faith, we don't build anything because, not only is Newtonian mechanics an approximation of Einsteinian mechanics, but relativity is known to be incomplete because of its inability to explain black holes. So the fact that Newtonian mechanics is a good approximation of relativity in "classical" regimes doesn't tell us how good of an approximation it is to whatever the "one true theory" is. This also goes back to the axiom of human action in Austrian economics, which doesn't assume that our actions are rational but rather that our actions are purposeful. That your actions serve your ends is not guaranteed, just that given the information/experience available to you, you think your action would help you reach your ends.
Here’s my take on all this: https://open.substack.com/pub/thaddeuskozinski/p/we-are-in-a-war-for-our-souls?utm_source=direct&r=24l7o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
When an explanation for a massively violent event and its concomitant crisis emerges as the official, unquestionable, and authoritative narrative; when it includes, and without empirical evidence or investigative inquiry, the assignation of innocence and exceptionalism of the victims, and utter depravity and terrifying power to the designated criminals; when dissent from this narrative is socially forbidden, even to the extent of legal harassment and prosecution; when it spawns behavior in contradiction with itself, such as committing acts of terror in the name of eradicating terrorism, or restricting and punishing free speech in the name of expanding and protecting it; when the narrative is immediately supported, echoed, and policed by the vast majority of the ruling classes, including both the mainstream and ‘alternative’ (gate-keeping left and right; when it successfully unites and synthesizes otherwise opposed factions of the populace—liberals with neoconservatives, libertarians with statists, humanists with Nietzscheans, theists with atheists; when rational scrutiny and frank discussion of obvious explanation holes in the narrative are forbidden; and when the ritualistic, annual remembrance of an event and recitation of its hallowed story—particularly the harrowing portrayal of the demonic villains to which it assigns all blame for both the increasing domestic strife among citizens and the perpetual Manichean war against the newest ‘enemy’—instils and evokes primordial fear and religious awe in the populace; when the narrative of an event or series of connected events possesses all of these attributes, or even just a few of them, we know we are dealing with no ordinary phenomenon.
—Thaddeus Kozinski, Modernity as Apocalypse
I’d be happy to come on your show to discuss.
@Auron, would you please comment on this Federalist Article regarding Apple’s new product? Thanks!
"What Crispin is describing, albeit not in these terms, is a concerted effort to monitor, manipulate, and potentially control the user, all under the guise of “predicting” his behavior. It’s not hard to imagine a near future in which AI is able to translate monitored brain activity and other biometrics into images. A user could be wearing an Apple headset that’s continuously transmitting brainwaves and images and thoughts to the cloud, where corporations could mine them for profit and government censors could monitor them for wrongthink.
This already happens now, so why would it not happen with even more powerful technology? Worse, these recorded thoughts and images could be archived the way phone and email records are now, under federal surveillance laws. We’re talking about a permanent digital record of your inmost thoughts, recorded and archived by the world’s most powerful corporations and accessible by government agencies whenever they want.
The blunt reality about Apple’s new “mixed-reality” platform, then, is that it’s designed to increase the soul-crushing isolation and loneliness of modern life while amplifying the ability of Big Tech — and hence, government — to exert control over us. The vision of the future offered by Apple is one of solitary men and women sitting alone in the darkened rooms of empty houses, their faces hidden behind shining black masks, reliving “memories” that were digitally mediated to begin with.
It’s a profoundly anti-human vision, and we should resist it with all our strength. “ https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/07/apples-new-mixed-reality-headset-is-designed-to-isolate-and-control-you/