What explains this amorphous leftish coalition? It's not random - a particular ideological understanding of the world unites these issues. THREAD
These seemingly different interest groups are held together by Woke Identitarian ideology, which has a grand unifying theory of oppression called "Intersectionality". Here's an explainer montage I cobbled together from different NGO resources. 2/n
Like many words in the Internet era, the term "ideology" has gotten flabby. It’s commonly used to describe any collection of political ideas at all but this bloated definition deprives us of an important tool for pointing out a particularly destructive form of thinking. 3/n
In its narrow sense, an ideology is a set of political stories a group of people tell to facilitate mass action. They're quasi-religious oversimplifications of reality that possess dogmatic believers to interpret themselves & the world around them through a fixed schema. 4/n
In his book Alien Powers, Kenneth Minogue studied a range of different ideologies in an attempt to identify their consistent features. He saw them as part philosophy, part science, & part spiritual revelation that offers believers a sense of purpose in overcoming oppression. 5/n
He found similar patterns of ideological thought in Communism, Nazism, certain feminisms, & even strains of libertarianism. They all proposed that people were governed by hidden systems of oppression, they just had different ideas about who the oppressors were. 6/n
Each ideology studied a particular class of people & claimed they were living in a false consciousness that served the interests of another class. The task of the ideologue was to liberate the oppressed population by educating them about the yet-to-be-seen tyranny. 7/n
Minogue called these educators 'Custodians of Ideological Consciousness' & they're an unmistakable feature of the Woke movement, which found its early success in developing teaching methods & adapting educational institutions to their consciousness-raising effort. @SRCHicks 8/n
The term “Woke” itself was coined by its true believers and it refers to the feeling of awakening from false consciousness to see the hidden systems of oppression they believe govern the world. 9/n
What differentiates Woke Identitarian ideology from its predecessors is the fluidity of its oppressed class. They have tenaciously adapted the core doctrines of "systemic oppression" to many different identity groups. 10/n
Ideologies of the past worked on behalf of a single, cumbersome block of people - the workers (communism), the Aryan race (Nazism), the female sex (radical feminism), but Woke equips many classes with sub ideologies & unifies them with Intersectionality. 11/n
Anywhere a social grievance can be found, an academic franchise can be built using core "systemic" doctrines - Black people are oppressed by whites through systemic racism, women by men under systemic sexism, gays by straights under heteronormativity... 12/n
... trans people by gender conformists under cisnormativity, disabled by the abled under ableism, fats by thins under thin privilege, all the way down to left-handers being oppressed under the brutal reign of right supremacy. 13/n
One consistent feature of ideology that Kenneth Minogue identified, was that they claim the social order they seek to depose is itself an ideology. Take this description of Cisgenderism for example, where "cisgender" just means someone who isn’t trans. 14/n
They claim those who are comfortable with their biological sex, & value their normative identity more than trans identities, which is most people, have been inculcated into a systemic ideology. The only way to escape this ideology is to adopt Woke ideology & work on its behalf. 15/n
Each "system of inequality" can be loosely described as normal patterns of behaviour & thought. They trace all social inequality to the fact that most people do similar things & there are expectations, laws, & institutional practices built around this reality. 16/n
The bell curves of social behaviour are seen to inherently oppress the outliers, & "equity" is the social engineering enterprise of flattening out norms so that new ways of living can be discovered & practised unencumbered by the oppressive gaze of cultural values. 17/n
So then, who is in the grip of an ideology and who is in touch with reality? 18/n
I’ve come to realise the foil for Woke ideology is a simplistic reduction of our Western cultural heritage. Through relentless ideological critique, they’ve managed to reduce our diverse legacy of customs, beliefs, political procedures, & ethics to a “systemic ideology”. 19/n
A civilisation is neither a system nor an ideology. It’s an evolved ecology of meaning & practice that can’t be dismantled & rearranged at will to produce desired outcomes. This reductive, mechanistic conception of culture is Woke’s biggest tell. 20/n
Underneath all the hypnotic academic jargon lies the same simplistic model, repeated again & again - Cultural norms are "systems" that produce disparate outcomes & we need to reengineer our "system" to produce more equity. 20/n
I've written more about this here - michaelnayna.com . 21/21
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