Woke is an anomaly. Adversity for individuals, groups, tribes or nations is usually inflicted by an external agent. War, sickness, political or economic change. People and nations make stupid choices and suffer adverse consequences. If they survive, they usually change their behaviour. Rarely do they compound the adversity by continuing to make stupid choices. We are living through one of those rare times – the age of Woke.
It’s been a while since I published a blog post. The Yakking Show has been taking up a lot of my time. Now that we have decided to reduce our publishing schedule for the show to one guest and one live episode a week, I will be publishing here more frequently. It is pleasantly surprising that despite the lack of new content, this blog continues to get new visits and views every day. Some of my posts from 8 and 10 years ago are still being found and read. That’s the value of evergreen content.
Anyone who had been in a coma for 20 years and who had woken up in 2023 like a modern-day version of Rip van Winkel could be forgiven for thinking that he or she had been transported to a different planet
Canada – and most of the Western world has changed so much in the 19 years since I moved here that it seems to me that I am living on a different planet.
The Pendulum Theory Revisited.
Indulge me for a moment as I yet again refer to The Pendulum Theory as described in the book “Pendulum” By Roy Williams and Michael Drew. I have written about it several times since first reading it in 2012 when it was published. Here and here for starters, so I am not going to go into detail again now.
Suffice it to say, that the authors predicted personal freedom would get restricted and authoritarian control (or attempts to control) society would get more onerous until the end of the current cycle in 2023. Many of their predictions now appear to have been uncannily accurate.
Two paragraphs from page 197 of the book:
“Our current globalization is the globalization of a caste system that results in the erosion of national interests. American manufacturers no longer struggle to manufacture their products in the United States They’re no longer worried about employing Americans. They just want to make money. American companies are just as happy to create jobs in China or India”
“We are seeing the gutting of the middle class. We can no longer expect to live like our parents did. They could live on one salary while the other parent stayed at home to take care of the kids. We no longer have that expectation, and we’ve continued to lower our expectations for the past several years.”
Those words were written in 2012
Society Divided
In nearly 70 years of cognitive life (some may dispute that) I have never experienced a division in society as deep and wide as that which I see today in most of the Western world. As a child in Southern Rhodesia, there was a small liberal fringe that thought our government should surrender to the demands of a handful of communist sympathizers and condemn the population to the horrors that were beginning to unfold in the newly independent African states to the North. However, members of that fringe still spoke to the majority with respect and were able to debate their opinions without resorting to accusations of hate. People with vastly different opinions still went to the same churches, played in the same sports teams and socialized quite normally.
In my teenage years in Rhodesia and more so after our Declaration of Independence in 1965, most of the liberal fringe had departed to live in welfare states in Europe. Sanctions, patriotism and the fight for our survival united people. Differences in opinions were more concerned with the degree with which we should retaliate against the neighbouring countries’ support of terrorist incursions than whether we should surrender. Should we remain largely defensive or should we adopt an offensive strategy, destroy the support bases and infrastructure outside our borders.
Despite strongly held opinions, supporters of both policies could still have a beer together and talk about the options without resorting to violence or relationship-ending arguments.
Hotheads and Zealots
There have always been small groups of hotheads and zealots for or against every cause, fad or flavor-of-the-month crusade under the sun. But with few exceptions, they have remained just that, small groups conveniently ignored.
Until the last 20 years. The last part of the “We” swing of the pendulum. 2000 or more years of customs, conventions, and covenants turned upside down. Same-sex marriage, gender confusion, erosion of parental rights, censorship of dissenting opinion, militarisation of police forces, indoctrination of children, mutilation of healthy children. More recently, authoritarian leaders locked up millions of people, destroyed thousands of businesses, forced people to wear useless masks, injured or killed hundreds of thousands with unsafe drugs, and deliberately exterminated thousands of old people. All triggered by the pronouncements of unelected medical officers with a mission to rebrand a type of flu as a deadly disease of epidemic proportions.
Now the lunatics are running the asylum, the hotheads and zealots have weaseled their way into positions in health, all levels of government, school administration, and the legacy media. So effective has their propaganda been that a significant segment of the population has been brow-beaten into believing in stuff that was inconceivable even 10 years ago.
Normal people who question these tactics are censored and villifed, have their reputations destroyed, their rights to continue their professional careers terminated, and even imprisoned.
The Result of Woke
The art of debate has been lost.
Despite the huge campaign by a small woke minority and a compliant media, 76% of Canadians are not convinced that it is right for schools to confuse children about their natural sex, encourage them to consider castration or other surgical or chemical mutilation of healthy bodies, and keep secrets from their parents. Contacts in the United Kingdom tell me that there is a rising wave of opposition to these and other attacks on ordinary people’s freedoms.
Now that the “silent majority” is no longer silent, as shown by last week’s hugely successful protests in many Canadian cities under the “Million4Kids” banner, the fringe is getting increasingly violent and in an exquisite act of hypocrisy accusing parents of hate, right wing-white-supremacy and a whole alphabet of phobias. Hypocrisy magnified because the protests were organized by concerned Moslem parents and attended by parents, grandparents, children and supporters of all races and faiths.
Having attended one of the protests, the only hate and intolerance I witnessed came from a small group of noisy, mainly white “counter-protestors.”
It was a first for me to see traditionally dressed Moslem and Mennonite women walking for the same cause.
Woke Elsewhere
Residents of increasingly woke London, England, are thwarting the city’s attempts to restrict the movement of vehicles by destroying surveillance cameras and license plate recording vans.
In Cleveland, Ohio, the Catholic school district of 100 schools has banned any reference to names or gender other than that which a child was born with. All other forms of sexual indoctrination of children have been banned.
In many other parts of the world, people are pushing back against woke ideology, alarmist and exaggerated claims of climate change, global warming, and the supposed virtues of “smart” or “15-minute” cities and cashless societies.
Conclusion
I do not believe the human race has lost its collective sanity. Many factors have got us to where we are.
- 70 years of relative global peace since WWII
- Rising affluence
- Feelings of entitlement – across many generations
- Families needing 2 incomes to afford the consumer lifestyle
- Breakdown of traditional support systems
- Decadence and dependence on drugs
You can probably add to the list.
It’s similar to the factors that caused the decline of the Roman Empire, and it has some parallels to the fall of the Egyptian civilization.
The pendulum will start swinging back, and common sense will prevail. In 40 years’ time, my grandchildren will be complaining about the effects of a “Me” society as the pendulum reaches the other end of its swing. Woke will have as little relevance then as the belief in witches does now.
The alternative is too awful to contemplate. A woke, gender-less society cannot reproduce. The birth rate in many Western countries is already below that needed to maintain a stable population. Given the increasing numbers of my, Boomer, generation now dying from old age, many observers are predicting under, rather than over-population being a major concern.
This too shall pass.
Or are we in the end times as described in Revelations? Is the woke society providing a pasture for the Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse to gallop across?
What do you think? Leave a comment.
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Yes, Albrecht Dürer’s etching of the 4 Horsemen is particularly appropriate I think Peter. Death, Famine, Pestilence and War are riding rampant over Western Civilization. Woe, woe, woe.