14 Dec Aufheben der Kultur – Cancel Culture – Part 4: Social Justice, Political Correctness, and the Woke Menagerie
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: this triptych succinctly defines the attractiveness and superiority of Western civilization.” Ibn Warraq
We are in a battle, one of wits, words, and betrayal. Soon it will become even more deadly than it is now. We must win this war, because there will be no room for a do-over if we lose. The loss will not only be homes and lives, but the flame of freedom across the entire world.
While we are fighting this asymmetrical war, we must retain our morality, which will not be easy because we are up against those who want us dead, removed from the face of the earth, and our ideas and ideals erased. How did Cultural Marxism change our culture and worldview from one of reason and logic, from Western culture, to humanism, from individual freedom to communitarianism and slavery?
Four Legs Good, Two Legs Bad
As I explained in Aufheben der Kultur, Part 1, political correctness is the modern term for cultural Marxism. It is also a major tool being used to achieve the totalitarianism planned to control the world through the Hegelian Dialectic. The presupposition is that the proletariat are good, the bourgeois are bad, and the global Marxists need to be in power – to control all. Which will mean destroying the bourgeois, the small business and manufacturing people. And do away with property rights, and thus individual freedom. The cultural Marxists do not want to own the world, just have power over it. And Social Justice will go a long way toward giving them that power as an antithesis, a tool to attack government to dilute the rights and freedoms we have still been able to retain after years of being chipped away.
Deconstruction and Critical Theory
We are seeing it, and have been for decades, in the tearing down of society itself. We are seeing the replacement of objective truths with subjective truths (that change with the political weather). It is the destruction, or as Jacques Derrida, a well-known Algerian-French philosopher who was prominent in the 60s counterculture scene, termed it, “deconstruction” of Western values. He wrote, “in Western culture, people tend to think and express their thoughts in terms of binary oppositions (white / black, masculine / feminine, cause /effect, conscious /unconscious, presence / absence, speech/writing). But, per dictionary.com, deconstructionists say we must question “all traditional assumptions about the ability of language to represent reality and emphasizes that a text has no stable reference or identification because words essentially only refer to other words and therefore a reader must approach a text by eliminating any metaphysical or ethnocentric assumptions through an active role of defining meaning, sometimes by a reliance on new ‘wordconstruction’, etymology, puns, and other word play”. In other words, gobbledygook works as well, actually better than, logic.
Critical Theory, like all things Marxist, uses moral relativism as a basis for all judgments; insisting that everything is only true or false relative to a particular point in time (and that is even subject to be discounted). It rejects the existence of universal principles, and all history is the history of oppression. Therefore, it is imperative to tear down the status quo as well as all social norms and rules. Everything in our worldview – our traditional concepts of right and wrong, society, social institutions, is wrong and must be destroyed to make the world safe for the proletariat, who are, at best, useful idiots to the ruling Marxist globalists. Their entire reason to exist is to tear down, not to build up. It is about class struggle against the existing power structure of freedom and property. There are not to be political parties, no elections, no bicameral legislative bodies, only a Marxist elite.
Social Justice as well described by Dr. David Randall, PhD, in his report “Social Justice Education in America”: “Justice traditionally judges freely chosen individual acts, but social justice judges how far the distribution of economic and social benefits among social groups departs from how they “ought” to be distributed. … (it) justifies the exercise of the state’s coercive power to distribute “fairly” goods that include education, employment, housing, income, health care, leisure, a pleasant environment, political power, property, social recognition, and wealth.” Redistribution means the state takes from the producer to buy the support of the non-producer, eventually destroying the producer’s incentive to produce anything, creating poverty for all; this is what they call equality — equally poor.
This is manifestly at variance with the values we Americans hold to, and the Constitution was written to uphold. And, it is cultural Marxism. Dr. Randall explains that these tools, social justice, political correctness and so on, are part of a “…process that requires constant, incremental changes to our culture through its institutions which also includes changes of meaning for terms and labels.” i.e., NewSpeak.
Critical Race Theory contends that whites are racist and oppressors, and blacks are the oppressed, that this has been the raison d’être for the entire history of the United States, and is in every aspect of society – social, political, and economic. Whiteness, according to Psychology Today is a “forced group membership that originated by oppressing people of color. And, it causes psychological and spiritual damage to White people just as it damages non-Whites.” Whites can only shed their “whiteness” by shedding their oppressor status, become consciously anti-racist, and combat real “and perceived manifestations of white privilege or white racism expressed by other whites,” according to Dr. Carol Swain.
In Swain’s article, “Critical Race Theory and the Decline of American Justice”, she points out, “The tactics of critical race theorists include shaming, destruction of property, violence, and denial of science and facts in favor of emotional outbreaks and chaos. Today we see this played out most prominently in the actions of groups such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa, which are filled with ruthless social justice warriors. Critical race theory, once confined mostly to university campuses, has departed from the campuses and been embedded into corporations; governmental agencies at the state, local, and federal levels; churches; and other institutions. It is a sociological pandemic aimed at disrupting America.”
Wokeness is well defined by James Lindsay in his book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody. It “is a fusion of the critical theory school of neo-Marxism, which is a form of identity politics, and radical activism that has a very particular worldview that separates the world into liberationists versus oppressors or oppressed versus oppressors. It marries that, Lindsay said, with postmodern theory, which holds that “all applications of truth are actually applications of politics by other means. In other words, the truth is malleable, based on power and who drives the narrative of what truth really is. In effect, the truth is replaced by my truth.”
If you feel, not for the first time, that you have fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole again, you aren’t alone. It is hard, nay, impossible for a logical thinker to wrap one’s mind around this tommyrot. Only if you want to be a mindless drone, can you spout this drivel. But it is drivel that is designed to erase the individual, along with the Constitution and Christianity. And, it is moving forward with very little pushback until quite recently.
Jarret Stepman of the Daily Signal notes, “Wokeness” has become the nomenclature for the ideology or mentality of radical leftist activists on college campuses, at protests, and on social media. But wokeness isn’t limited to just a handful of activists. It’s becoming a dominant mindset in the American workplace, in both the public and private sectors, as a method to promote “anti-racism.” Angela Sailor, vice president of The Feulner Institute at The Heritage Foundation, said that “pervasive trends under the guise of equality makes diversity training in government, and corporate America, and schools, destructive, divisive, and harmful.”
The above tools are being used as needed, alone or together, to decimate our tradition beliefs in individual freedom and the concept of private property – those things that hold our society together — Judeo-Christian traditions that promote economic freedom, universal truths — are anathema to cultural Marxism which is working to foment class warfare. Only Western culture is on the chopping block. If they destroy Western civilization, the world is theirs.
How do we take action? Right now, we start calling it out when we see it. We need to shame and embarrass those who are doing these things, whether it is individuals or groups. This is one of the things we need our own news outlets for.
Next, as we are taking back our cities and towns, we set up taskforces to go through the existing laws and regulations for those that are Agenda 21, Marxist, or otherwise unconstitutional and get them repealed. None of this is easy, but it is absolutely necessary to preserve our republic and freedom.