Slavoj Zizek article - Wokeness is here to stay

At the heart of the woke movement is a desire to bully and control. Also, a longing to smash things up. You find exactly the same desire among those on the hard left. In my early twenties, I was in a relationship with someone on the far left and got dragged to all kinds of meetings and get-togethers. The thing that struck me most was the hatred. None of them seemed motivated by love or compassion - I mean, by a desire to make the world a better place. What they really wanted to do was hurt ‘rich’ people. A lot of them had never grown out of the adolescent rebel stage.

Like all bullies, the woke mob want power. And, again like all bullies, that longing for power is bound up with sadism (I control you, and it gives a thrill to know that I can hurt you any time I like). I’m convinced the majority of them couldn’t really care less about the things they oppose. The cause is irrelevant. If they’d lived in Tudor England, they’d be hunting down Catholics (or Protestants, depending on who was in power). What they really enjoy is provoking people. They love to get a reaction - to see people angry when they demand that Nelson’s Column is knocked down, or that bookshops stop selling novels by Kipling, or whatever. They don’t really care about Nelson or Kipling. It’s the thought that someone is upset that thrills them - it’s knowing they have the power to do that. Like all bullies they will keep going, and things will keep escalating, until someone stops them.

Could it be created by a vacuum, a removal of other pre existing forces?

Yes, that's the question, DemiColon.

It's possible that the ideology was created almost accidentally by various social forces (academia, the arts, culture) but is now used as a vehicle that offers a convenient cover for misogyny, homophobia, and racism. Plus academia and the arts seem to me to be mostly reactive forces. Who is actually actively pushing this stuff?

It makes me uneasy that nobody is really able to explain clearly where these 'strictures' are coming from. It reminds me of when liberal feminism rails against 'the patriarchy' but refuses to name males as the source of that oppression.

I'd like more clarity.

One theory for these events is based in good-old Marxist class war.
Because in the end everything is about the money.

Starting in the US, with the Democratic party, but also in other industrial western countries, the parties of the left, supposedly the parties of the working class, have lost touch with its roots. They have become defensive of its money. Democratic/Left voters, especially the middle class who dominate the parties, gave up on economic reform, not wanting to actually give up their position of economic privilege. So they have latched on to 'identity politics' as a new way to distinguish themselves from the right.
By making the argument all about identity and prejudice, they no longer need to give two hoots about economic justice.

I think there is a mistake in viewing this as a youth led counter culture which the establishment is colluding with.

It is in fact the establishment that has led and enforced it.

It's actually odd that young people are seeing themselves as saving the world by agreeing with the mainstream policies of most western governments and global seats of power e.g the WEF.

There is nothing subversive or revolutionary about wokeness it's the safe acceptable face of the establishment.

It's the equivalent of young people promoting the doctrine of the church 200 years ago and claiming moral virtue for this. Hardly brave or challenging the status quo.

What's odd is that young people are so conformist to the message of the powerful. Where are the young revolutionaries. It's not Greta. The establishment love, fête and use Greta.

We have unusually conformist moralistic young culture at present it's just the doctrine they adhere to is queer theory, anti racism and climate apocalypse.

Sometimes I think feminists are just upset that it's not the patriarchy doctrine that's most prominent and miss the central point that any ideology based on a power struggle narrative will require enforcement of language & thought to allow it to dominate.

I can remember as a young person being very self righteous about a number of things. I was perhaps lucky that not just my parents but some of their friends also would challenge me. Sometimes a bit patronisingly, but they did wait for me to respond. And it certainly made me think I couldn't just announce x was y, because that's what I thought, but would need to be able to explain why I thought that.

I dont know enough about history, but in the last 100 years or so each generation has had an issue that younger people have been passionate about. Whether disarmament / CND, civil rights, alternative life styles and so on. And through the older generation interacting with that some part of each phase has been taken into the main stream.

The difference is that somehow in the last 10 or 20 years, not just parents (but lets blame them!) but the media have sort of accepted totally the view point of what isn't even the attitude of all young people.

How or why did that happen.

So I suppose what I am saying is a better article would be what is going on with the parental generation. Do they feel their world is a void and young people are helping them "understand"?!

This may seem a poor analogy but bear with me. Friends and I often go to a nice cafe for lunch. But the occasion is frequently spoiled by mothers, and sometimes fathers, who bring their small children and allow them to shout, bang the tables and generally be disruptive. They may occasionally say shush with no conviction at all, but never enforce it, and never remove the disruptive child from the situation.

I and my friends were generally what you would call easy going parents but all of us agreed that we never allowed our children to behave that badly. As my own grown up daughter said to me - there is no discipline and other people's rights simply don't matter to these parents. They are indulging their little would-be monsters.

Essentially that is what older people are doing to these young woke people, indulging their fantasies and skewed views. The problem is that the adults have left the room.

By except women, I meant they are the one oppressed group "woke" people never try to ingratiate themselves with! In fact the opposite.

What I was really saying that what we now call "woke" has in the past being younger generations challenging the older one, but what we have never had is the older generation totally submitting to the thought process and belief of the younger one.

So wokeness (hippies being "with it") isn't the issue. The issue is the wholesale acceptance of young, immature people's view of the world.

Is it just that the current generation of grand/parents just want to be liked by their children?

I think that this may make sense to some, but what is clear is that "wokeness" is about performative politics.

This is mainly practiced by white middle class young people, who desparate to obscure their privilege take every opportunity to publicly signal their alignment with (actually patronising of) oppressed groups. (Except women on course) And means that as mere gestures, rather than actual change, their privilege is never undermined.

Added to which social media helps the contagion spread.

What the article doesn't address, because each of us in our youth probably thought we knew better than the generation before, is why older generations are colluding in the charade. The article just doesn't deal with that. It exists outside of political reality.

I did start a thread about a BBC series which looks at how "woke", which had real signifigance for African Americans experiencing racism, just became a meme. www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4750349-woke-the-journey-of-a-word

I see wokeness as the monopolization of progressive causes, I hate to feel old but it is a stark contrast to my younger days when I joined on campaigns when debate and discission were an integral part of campaigns. Now it feels like a secular church with an elite with connections to charities sponsored by big businesses that are lecturing to everyone else. Stonewall is just the most obvious example.

That's a really interesting article. Vivek as ever loses me a little sometimes because he's too clever.

But I really enjoyed these bits:

'the forces at work have a momentum that far exceeds the views of individual politicians and the dynamics of particular institutions. If anything, individuals and institutions are constantly attempting to accommodate themselves to strictures coming from elsewhere, rather than imposing them top-down. It is therefore certain that similar scandals will continue to multiply.'

'Wokeness operates as a secularized religious dogma, with all the contradictions this implies.'

'this new cult combines belief in fixed, objectivized dogmas with full trust in how one feels ... A critical confrontation of arguments plays no role, which implies that “open debate” is a racist, white-supremacist notion.'

'The more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are. ... What they really want is what they are achieving: a position of moral authority from which they may terrorize all others, without effectively changing social relations of domination.'

And the end conclusion is interesting, if tricky to parse!

thanks, will read.