Wokism as a Deconstruction of Institutions
Discussion
(Please read the whole, fascinating essay)
Alexander Beiner:
"The strength of our institutions is woven into our psychology. The way we encounter others, the way we move through a multicultural and hyper-mobile world, rely on outsourcing our trust to institutions because we can’t outsource it to tight-knit kin groups.
So what happens when we begin to deconstruct those institutions? This is what we’re seeing now. As postmodern values and critical theory take over the political parties, the media, the entertainment industry, tech companies and HR departments globally, these and other institutions are eating themselves from the inside.
The urge to deconstruct and challenge is a necessary developmental step. It helps us question fixed narratives, for a start. Deconstructing rigid structures brings a necessary flexibility and allows culture to regenerate itself from the margins it was previously ignoring or suppressing, However, it has to be mediated by a transcendent ideal or purpose, and move toward something deeper than perpetual deconstruction.
To make matters more complex, Wokeism, the simulated religion that surrounds this deconstruction, has now become the easiest voluntary association to make in our culture. The rules are simple — all you have to do to belong is to agree with what is ostensibly a reasonable premise (oppression is bad), and learn the lingo that signals you’re a member. It’s a linguistic religion that relies not on action but on words — the policing of them, and the use of the correct ones — so has relatively few barriers to entry.
Wokeism is just one tribe among many filling the vacuum of meaning and belonging left by the decline of religion and trust in the state. Peter Limberg has called these memetic tribes, as they each contain their own value system that they are trying to embed into the world. In the process, they compete with one another for narrative control. The online world has become a battleground of these warring ideological tribes, as well as governments and private companies.
Misinformation abounds as they conduct a total war to control narratives of belonging. The void of meaning in our culture is so deep and our need to fill it so profound that new tribes are forming all the time. Most notably, the strange alliance of the New Age and the far right who have come together around overlapping conspiracy theories — a term now known as Conspirituality and recently popularised by Jules Evans. Faced with this ideological battleground, as WEIRD individuals we nonetheless have to exercise our voluntary association. It’s built into our cultural wiring. But what happens when we can’t find an institution or group we can outsource our trust to? When the Church no longer fills our spiritual void, the State is corrupted by market forces, universities and the media are in the grip of Wokeism and a virus ravages our supply chains and our way of life, what’s the step forward? What happens when there is nowhere to belong?" (https://medium.com/rebel-wisdom/indigenous-narcissism-social-media-belonging-weirdness-6063ac6f9aa)