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This is mainly in response to this video.
(Also because I also recently rewatched the Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance miniseries, and because it looks like Tad Williams' Last King Of Osten Ard booktrilogy tetralogy is also headed in this direction thematically.)
There's a thought or a concept that's been trying to form or crystallize in my brain for a long time, and the above linked video helped me to realize what it was that bothered me so much.
One of the main themes of this video is that the concept of the Multiverse is a metaphor for living in a society interconnected by the internet, of people made aware of how everything is interconnected in our modern globalist society, and how that imparts a kind of responsibility. Knowing "how the sausage is made" might compel the people who know to do something about it. Knowing that people's comfortable lives in one part of the world may be due to the suffering of others in another part of the world - or even in a different part of the city you live in - may imply responsibility for it, or to do something about it.
This is not even new - Voltaire wrote about it in his work Candide, via "this is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe."
The "Anti-woke" movement is a white supremacist movement, to be sure: but it's also a rejection of this sense of responsibility, by doubling down on the idea that one belongs to an exalted status that is not only freed from responsiblity for their consumption; but that they're owed that comfortable status by some kind of birthright, and the people who are suffering from being exploited deserve to suffer and be exploited for their own luxury and comfort and right to consume.
There have been a lot of people, bloggers and journalists alike, who have raised alarms about the reactionary conservative white supremacists' upholding of Ronald Reagan's "Shining City On A Hill" speech as a central tenet of their narrative.
In the above video, the video essayist talks about a sense that a lot of us have that things in the world aren't quite right, almost like we're in a "wrong timeline." For a lot of us here in the USA, that feeling began on 9/11. Before September 11, 2001, it was almost as if we were living in a walled garden paradise disconnected from the troubles of the rest of the world. All of that came crashing down with the Twin Towers, and it's never returned.
(This impulse is not even just an American phenomenon; it's the primary driving motive behind Brexit. Brexiteers want the UK to be a Disconnected Walled Garden free from the responsibility of centuries of colonialism - and they definitely don't want people from the formerly colonized countries coming there!)
There was an Onion article post 9/11, "A Shattered Nation Longs To Care About Stupid Bullshit Again" that sort of exemplifies this?
People longed for that sense of blissful, sheltered disconnectedness again ("America First," anyone?) and the Onion writers knew it and riffed on it. People who have the time to engage in a moral panic over Britney Spears can do so because they don't have much of anything else to worry about.
This is all that a lot of reactionaries really want: the ability to live lives of comfortable, heedless consumption, free from the idea of any responsibility or accountability, in blissful ignorance of what is going on in the outside world. To comfortably, mindlessly, and endlessly consume and consume, without any thought to the cost or the people affected by it or the state of the world at large.
This is also responsible for the backlash against environmentalism and the need to do something about climate change. Corporations are primarily responsible, but a lot of Americans perceive the debate about climate and environment as a judgement or demand for them to personally cut back on consumption.
For all of his buffoonery, George W. Bush seems to have had a handle on this (or his handlers did, at any rate) when he urged people to "go shopping again" post 9/11.
Trying to remind the Anti Woke Brigade of that cost just makes them want to double down. We saw this in the 2000s during the war in Iraq, with jokes like "hell yeah I'm pumping Iraqi blood into my gas tank" and it just got worse from there. The surge in SUV purchases was a part of this development, as if to say "how dare you shame me for supporting this (needless, illegal) war (in which we attacked the wrong fucking country because God forbid Dubyah bring the scion of his family friends to justice.")
This goes with a larger theory that the "American way of life" (that the terrorists were said by Dubyah to hate so much) is basically consumption, or the right to consume. And if you look at people's major objection to Pandemic safety measures over the past three years, the tantrums thrown by people in restaurants and grocery stores, it mainly boils down to "but it gets in the way of my ability to consume freely."
There was a "Letter To America" in 2002 in which the motives for the attack were stated. but Bush wanted Americans feeling angry and threatened, so they would support a war in Iraq. He wanted to downplay the idea that the terrorists were attacking America for the policies of the US Government all throughout the 1990s - policies that the average American had little knowledge of or say in. But he played up the idea that the terrorists were supposedly attacking us for our ability to consume.
And that is a factor - there is the fact that the average person doesn't have a lot of say in the policies of our governments or the "captains of industry." This is the basis for the constant refrain "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism." It's the reality behind the retort "but you have a smartphone" at every "Woke" person who speaks out about the ill affects of capitalism or government policy.
People want to excuse themselves for their consumption instead of trying to make it more ethical, because sometimes it does seem like we don't have a lot of power to change the way things are going.
But the Anti-Woke Brigade just wants to go back to sleep. They resent us and the rest of the world for not just letting them have this, for not just letting them consume in blissful, uncaring ignorance like they did before. But the price for engagement in this increasingly interconnected online society is that awareness. In a word, "Wokeness." And they've willfully chosen to become monsters over it.
(Also because I also recently rewatched the Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance miniseries, and because it looks like Tad Williams' Last King Of Osten Ard book
There's a thought or a concept that's been trying to form or crystallize in my brain for a long time, and the above linked video helped me to realize what it was that bothered me so much.
One of the main themes of this video is that the concept of the Multiverse is a metaphor for living in a society interconnected by the internet, of people made aware of how everything is interconnected in our modern globalist society, and how that imparts a kind of responsibility. Knowing "how the sausage is made" might compel the people who know to do something about it. Knowing that people's comfortable lives in one part of the world may be due to the suffering of others in another part of the world - or even in a different part of the city you live in - may imply responsibility for it, or to do something about it.
This is not even new - Voltaire wrote about it in his work Candide, via "this is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe."
The "Anti-woke" movement is a white supremacist movement, to be sure: but it's also a rejection of this sense of responsibility, by doubling down on the idea that one belongs to an exalted status that is not only freed from responsiblity for their consumption; but that they're owed that comfortable status by some kind of birthright, and the people who are suffering from being exploited deserve to suffer and be exploited for their own luxury and comfort and right to consume.
There have been a lot of people, bloggers and journalists alike, who have raised alarms about the reactionary conservative white supremacists' upholding of Ronald Reagan's "Shining City On A Hill" speech as a central tenet of their narrative.
In the above video, the video essayist talks about a sense that a lot of us have that things in the world aren't quite right, almost like we're in a "wrong timeline." For a lot of us here in the USA, that feeling began on 9/11. Before September 11, 2001, it was almost as if we were living in a walled garden paradise disconnected from the troubles of the rest of the world. All of that came crashing down with the Twin Towers, and it's never returned.
(This impulse is not even just an American phenomenon; it's the primary driving motive behind Brexit. Brexiteers want the UK to be a Disconnected Walled Garden free from the responsibility of centuries of colonialism - and they definitely don't want people from the formerly colonized countries coming there!)
There was an Onion article post 9/11, "A Shattered Nation Longs To Care About Stupid Bullshit Again" that sort of exemplifies this?
People longed for that sense of blissful, sheltered disconnectedness again ("America First," anyone?) and the Onion writers knew it and riffed on it. People who have the time to engage in a moral panic over Britney Spears can do so because they don't have much of anything else to worry about.
This is all that a lot of reactionaries really want: the ability to live lives of comfortable, heedless consumption, free from the idea of any responsibility or accountability, in blissful ignorance of what is going on in the outside world. To comfortably, mindlessly, and endlessly consume and consume, without any thought to the cost or the people affected by it or the state of the world at large.
This is also responsible for the backlash against environmentalism and the need to do something about climate change. Corporations are primarily responsible, but a lot of Americans perceive the debate about climate and environment as a judgement or demand for them to personally cut back on consumption.
For all of his buffoonery, George W. Bush seems to have had a handle on this (or his handlers did, at any rate) when he urged people to "go shopping again" post 9/11.
Trying to remind the Anti Woke Brigade of that cost just makes them want to double down. We saw this in the 2000s during the war in Iraq, with jokes like "hell yeah I'm pumping Iraqi blood into my gas tank" and it just got worse from there. The surge in SUV purchases was a part of this development, as if to say "how dare you shame me for supporting this (needless, illegal) war (in which we attacked the wrong fucking country because God forbid Dubyah bring the scion of his family friends to justice.")
This goes with a larger theory that the "American way of life" (that the terrorists were said by Dubyah to hate so much) is basically consumption, or the right to consume. And if you look at people's major objection to Pandemic safety measures over the past three years, the tantrums thrown by people in restaurants and grocery stores, it mainly boils down to "but it gets in the way of my ability to consume freely."
There was a "Letter To America" in 2002 in which the motives for the attack were stated. but Bush wanted Americans feeling angry and threatened, so they would support a war in Iraq. He wanted to downplay the idea that the terrorists were attacking America for the policies of the US Government all throughout the 1990s - policies that the average American had little knowledge of or say in. But he played up the idea that the terrorists were supposedly attacking us for our ability to consume.
And that is a factor - there is the fact that the average person doesn't have a lot of say in the policies of our governments or the "captains of industry." This is the basis for the constant refrain "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism." It's the reality behind the retort "but you have a smartphone" at every "Woke" person who speaks out about the ill affects of capitalism or government policy.
People want to excuse themselves for their consumption instead of trying to make it more ethical, because sometimes it does seem like we don't have a lot of power to change the way things are going.
But the Anti-Woke Brigade just wants to go back to sleep. They resent us and the rest of the world for not just letting them have this, for not just letting them consume in blissful, uncaring ignorance like they did before. But the price for engagement in this increasingly interconnected online society is that awareness. In a word, "Wokeness." And they've willfully chosen to become monsters over it.
