#Perpetual Revolution

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Wokal Distance

Published: Oct 28, 2022

One aspect of woke ideology which flies under the radar is that wokeness has no stopping point. That is, there is no norm, value, idea, concept, expectation, standard, moral, or theory that wokeness will not dissolve, dismantle, deconstruct, and get rid of. What this means is that there is no point at which wokeness stops; it is like an acid that is so powerful that dissolves any container that tries to hold it. As such nothing, not math, not biology, not engineering, not religion, will avoid being obliterated once wokeness gets a hold of it.

There are two reasons that wokeness has no brakes and no stopping point.

The first is that there is an ethical imperative in wokeness which requires the subversion, deconstruction, dismantling, and "calling into question" of any and every narrative, paradigm, ideology, worldview, value set, ethical system, or cultural belief that gains cultural prominence. Anything that becomes the "status quo," is widely accepted in society, or becomes the dominant narrative in society must immediately be subverted, dismantled, deconstructed, challenged or "called into question."

The second reason wokeness has no brakes is that the ideas, concepts, philosophies and theories that make up wokeness will dissolve anything that sets itself up as a boundary, limit, or stopping point.

I will explain both of these points in turn.

1. The moral imperative of Critical Theory.

The moral imperative for wokeness to never stop comes to us from the Brazilian Marxist educator and Critical Theorist Paulo Freire. Freire thought that educators (that is, teachers, including teachers in k-12 public schools) "ideally become partners in this self-emancipation process, contributing to what he sees as a struggle toward perpetual revolution and universal liberation."1

Freire wanted a "perpetual revolution," a revolution which never ends. Freire thought that as soon as a revolutionary movement came to power it would immediately become the status quo and the dominant power. In order to avoid this, Freire thinks we must always and forever approach the world with "Critical Consciousness" in order to avoid becoming and oppressive dominant hegemony. For Freire and other critical theorists Critical Consciousness is: "to have taken on a worldview that sees society in terms of systems of power, privilege, dominance, oppression, and marginalization, and that has taken up an intention to become an activist against these problematics. To have developed a critical consciousness is to have become aware, in light of this worldview, that you are either oppressed or an oppressor—or, at least, complicit in oppression as a result of your socialization into an oppressive system."2

The woke theorist is thus morally required to always be looking for oppressive power dynamics and must dedicated to be dismantling, deconstructing, subverting and otherwise challenging anything that becomes the status quo. This means that as soon as some idea, paradigm, convention, ideology, truth claim, or narrative becomes dominant they must immediately begin to interrogate it for anything that might resemble an oppressive power dynamic.

In the woke worldview any form of social, economic, or political inequality is viewed as oppressive, and anything that results in unequal outcomes is necessarily “problematic.” Further, because the woke theorists always think in terms of “systems,” anytime inequality of any kind shows up woke theorists will immediately assert that this inequality is the result of systems of power, privilege, and domination. For this reason they will subvert, dismantle, deconstruct, and challenge any system that allows any inequality of outcome at all.

Because the woke seek absolute social and economic equality of outcome, and because some people will always achieve greater outcomes than other people for a variety of reasons (talent, drive, work ethic, luck, etc) this process of criticism never stops. It goes on indefinitely.

2. The acid of postmodernism.

I very often see people attempt to push back on the claims made by wokeness by attempting to appeal to something that they think is beyond contention, or something they think provides and objective view of the facts in play. They are attempting to put the brakes on wokeness by establishing some objective facts which they think will show that the woke view is wrong. For example, in universities when woke people attempt to say men can give birth people will appeal to biology for a clear definition of what a biological female is. They think that science can settle the issue in an objective way. Another example of this is when woke Christians claim men can become women, non-woke Christians will quote say “we ought to use the Bible to build our ideas about the world” and then quote Genesis 5:2 (“He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them “Mankind” when they were created”) in an attempt to establish that Christian doctrine ought to say that men and women are different. So the University professor will attempt to stop the march of wokeness by appealing to scientific facts, and Christians will attempt to stop wokeness by appealing to facts about what the Bible says.

In this example both the Professor and the Christian are attempting to put the brakes on wokeness by using established objective facts (the professor appealing to biological facts, the Christian appealing to facts about what the Bible says) to set a limit on how far wokeness can go. In this way people seek to establish a sort of boundary that wokeness cannot cross.

This won't work, and I'd like to explain why.

The core of woke ideology is thoroughly postmodern, and that means it comes with a set of theories, concepts, and tools which when taken together are capable of dissolving anything.

First off, the postmodern theorist denies the possibility of objectivity. On a postmodern view of the world there is simply no way for anyone to have an objective view of anything. All viewpoints are merely a view from a point. Postmodern thinkers believe is not possible for anyone to get outside of their cultural upbringing and the way they were socialized. As such the biases, interests, and prejudices that everyone must have inevitably make their way into every judgement, decision, appraisal, analysis, observation or evaluation that occurs. This means no one can never arrive at a truly objective account of anything.

On a postmodern view of the world there are no objective interpretations of either language or the world. Everything can be interpreted and understood in a nearly infinite number of ways, and there is no objective way to decide which interpretation is correct. Any statement put forward as a “fact” can be interpreted in any number of different ways. For example most people would view the statement “men are stronger than women” as an objective statement about the average height of men and women. However, the postmodernist could reinterpret that statement and view it as a way of asserting that women are weak with the goal of establishing male dominance. On a postmodern view there is no objective way to decide which interpretation is correct.

Thus, even if we could get a truly objective view of the world (which they believe we cannot) whatever description of the world we provide can be reinterpreted in any number of different ways. It would not be possible to provide an absolute, objective, universal description of anything. Whatever description of the world that we give can be interpreted in many different way and there is no objective way to decide which one of those interpretations ought to be considered “correct.”

The postmodern thinker does not think of truth as “a description of the world which corresponds to reality.” Postmodern thinkers believe that what is true is matter of who gets to decide what is true, and how the get to decide what is true. In other words there are certain people in society who are given the privilege of getting to decide what is true because they have the validity, credibility, legitimacy, social status, and trust that is required to be believed, and thus the things they say are “true” are then accepted as “true” by the society at large. On the postmodern view, a statement becomes “true” because the people in society with the power to decide what is true have said a thing is true. Whether a claim actually matches the world is not what matters. The only way claim X gets to have the status of “true” is when the people in society who have the power to decide what is true have chosen to say that claim X is “true.”

The catch here is that the postmodern person will assert that the people who decide what is true have their own hidden agendas, ulterior motives, cultural biases, and self-interest. As such, the agendas, motives, biases and self interest of those who decide what is true warps their judgement such that when they decide what is true they do so in a way that serves their own interests. Those who dicide what is true only decide that a statement is true when it is in their own interest to do so, or when it aligns with their agenda and motives.

The same goes for knowledge. Knowledge is not a matter of having an awareness of understanding of the way the world really is. For the postmodern thinker knowledge, like truth, is matter of who has the power to decide what counts as knowledge, who is believed, who has credibility, and who has legitimacy. What matters is not what actually corresponds to reality, what matters is who in society gets to decide what counts as knowledge. And, like truth, the people who decide what counts as knowledge do so in a way that benefits themselves and which serves their interests.

To oversimplify the matter for the sake of brevity, the postmodern person thinks that knowledge and power are two features of the same object, and these two features mutually reinforce each other. The people who have power get to decide what counts as knowledge and truth, and the people seen as having knowledge and truth are given additional power. The people who have the power to decide what is true use that position to increase their power, to benefit themselves, to serve their own interests, to maintain their social position, and to increase their social status, social prestige, and clout.

3. Postmodernism and critical theory are one hell of a drug.

The alloy of Critical Theory and postmodernism that we typically call wokeness believes that power dynamics are present in every single situation. There is no social interaction in which power dynamics do not play a role, and there is no social structure, convention, institution, or arrangement which is not permeated by power dynamics. Once the alloy of Critical Theory and Postmodernism comes together it creates a worldview that deconstructs, dismantles, and subverts everything it touches.

Rather than going through all the ways that it does this, I’ll just provide some examples of what it looks like. If you have ever seen woke activists attempt to attack something, you will no doubt recognize the wording and rhetorical moves.

Take for example a couple deciding who should drive to the theater. The average person would see this as a simple matter of trying to figure out which person should drive, and that this can be resolved without one person oppressing the other. The postmodern theorist would say that whoever drives is the one in charge of the vehicle which is a matter of power, that there is a social trope about women being bad drivers that is reinforced when the man drives, and that if the man assumes he ought to pick the woman up that he is assuming that it is his job the lead the date and that is a power move which oppresses the woman by placing her is a subserviant position. Further, postmoderns might say that the patriarchy has created an expectation of male driving in order to reinforce the idea that men should be “in the drives seat” when dating a woman. All of this is, of course, problematic, and must be taken into account when deciding who will be driving.

Here is a another example: When a person claims that a certain person is “beautiful” the woke theorist does not take this as a mere statement of preference. Rather, they would seek to ask: by what standard is the person beautiful, who made the standard, why was the standard made, who benefits from the standard, who gets prestige and clout from being considered beautiful by the standard in question, whose interests are served by the standard of beauty, who is left out of the beauty standard. The question would be asked which groups stand to benefit from being considered beautiful, why are we fixated on beauty, why does beauty matter, what assumptions go into our ideas of what beauty is? The woke activist is going to fixate on the fact that being beautiful increases a persons social status, dating options, prestige, ability to gain clout in social media, ability to gain modeling work, and a host of other advantages.

We could even use a silly example of a truck. You might say you want a new truck. The woke activist will respond with questions and arguments like: why do you want a truck not a car? What is the purpose of the truck? Why do we have individually owned vehicles of transportation and not public transportation. Is the system of private transport a product of capitalism and does privately own transportation reinforce a capitalist ideology?  Trucks are associated with masculinity and the advertisements for the truck contain themes of traditional masculinity while excluding images of gender non-conforming people; thus trucks discourse is transphobic. Is your desire for a truck the product of the advertising agencies which have created a discourse in which trucks are seen as a symbol of strength and power. Does the desire for a truck that is advertised in this way reflect your desire for power? Is the Truck built in a way that is inaccessible to disabled people? Does the truck, with it’s design features for manual labor implicitly privilege manual labor (done by able bodied people) over and above the contributions of the disabled? Does the frequent appearance of pick-up truck in country music mean that the truck is designed for and built for white people while ignoring the needs of Indigenous people and people of color? Trucks are associate with cowboys, and it was cowboys and frontiersman who colonized America at the expense of indigenous people. Thus the truck needs to be decolonized by being redesigned in a way that disassociates it from masculinity, ableism, sexism, transphobia and colonialism.

See how this works?

The Critical Theory and postmodernism work together to create a worldview that cannot in principle be limited. There can’t be any stopping point because on the one hand Critical Theory requires critique to continue endlessly, and on the other hand postmodernism will act as a universal solvent that will dissolve anything that wishes to act as a limit, restriction, check, boundary, cap, or stopping point for wokeness.

4. How do you stop a universal solvent?

So the question is how do we stop the universal solvent from dissolving our entire society and civilization?

The answer to this requires it’s own article, but I will give two brief answers here.

Learn the linguistic, social, and rhetorical tactics of wokeness so that you can spot them and disarm them when you see them. Wokeness does not seek to win on the grounds of logical argumentation, or by providing evidence for its assertions. Rather, woke activists win socially by attacking the legitimacy, moral authority, credibility, social status, and public standing of their opponents. They gain control of the conversation and place themselves in the position of being the person in the conversation or debate who is taken seriously, believed, differed to, listened to, and seen as a good person. If you can learn how to combat these tactics you can neutralize them and steer the conversation back towards facts, reason, evidence, logic, and argumentation.

The second key is to reject the underlying assumptions and premises of postmodernism that they use to dissolve everything. By pointing out the flaws, errors, and mistake in those underlying assumptions you can show that the conclusions of wokeness are not on solid ground. The key is not to attack the woke person’s credibility, but rather to focus on their assumptions, presuppositions, and underlying premises and show that they are deeply flawed and ought to be rejected for intellectual reasons. Refocus the conversation back towards truth.

Wokeness has no stopping point and it cannot be appeased, satiated, or bargained with. Accepting their worldview and trying to set limits will not work. For that reason you must neutralize the rhetorical tactics and then show the underlying worldview is wrong. If you don’t, wokeness will dissolve every aspect of our society and civilization.

Thank you for reading.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.

-

1 Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change," Ed. Henry Jenkins, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Sangita Shresthova. (New York University Press, 2020) p.117

2 https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-critical-consciousness/

[specialagentartemis]

I do have Sevika character thoughts though, and I'm really interested in where season 1 leaves her. Sevika is loyal to Silco, but doesn't like Jinx. She's frustrated with Silco giving Jinx such leeway to do What Ever Violence she wants, and compromising his ideals for Jinx, and letting her make trouble for everyone and not doing anything to rein her in. The chem-barons weren't able to convince her to betray Silco for that, but the fact that she's near boiling over with frustration over this state of affairs was obvious to them!

Sevika believes in Silco's goals and grudgingly tolerates Jinx for that. Jinx doesn't seem to believe in much of anything except getting to face the world that hurt her and hurt it back. And now Silco is dead, and Jinx is throwing away any semblance of politics to launch a rocket at the Piltover Council, and I cannot imagine that Sevika will have any loyalty to Jinx at all. I'm hype for a season 2 power struggle between them for the remains of Silco's grip over the Undercity.

[pythiaswine]

thinking about how difficult it must have been for Rachel Fawcette [Hamilton] to leave her firstborn behind in order to safely remove herself from Lavien's house. how much it must have eaten her up inside and how there was nothing she could do because her husband owned her and he owned their son and he owned everything that was hers and if she stayed, there's no telling what could have happened to her. And she lost her firstborn son over it, fuck the rest of everything she lost and how people treated her, she had no claims to her son who clearly grew up to resent her for what she, if we think critically for a moment and look at the context and the subtext and hey, let's face it, the TEXT, likely had to do. how women were constantly pitted in the most volatile of situations in those days and how she did the difficult thing and saved herself.

but yeah sure let's reduce her to Whore because that is so much more impactful through a modern lens, like sure let's give her disgusting husband, and every other fucking man throughout history, the glory of successfully making the women they hurt out to be cheating whores. let's tell her son's story by calling his mother a whore every other fuckin song. let's act like "son of a whore" at the end of all things is more of an insult to him than it is to his mother, the so-called whore who clearly had it so bad at Lavien's that she fucking left. do we not realize that by reducing her to that, we let Johann Michael Lavien fucking WIN? i'm sick. so fucking sick to my stomach I hate it here

[number1villainstan]

sometimes i think about it and i'm genuinely surprised that there isn't more gear symbolism in utena

[maneslion2]

So, everyone is just not gonna talk about how Jojo Siwa and her mother Jessalynn Siwa absolutely exploited child actors and their families during the production of Siwa’s Dance Pop Revolution show?

We're not going to mention how Jojo continues to defend and associate with proven child predators and groomers Colleen Ballinger and James Charles??

We're not going to mention that Jojo defends the abusive coach of Dance Moms, Abby Lee Miller?

No? Just gonna talk about the obviously manipulative and calculated rebrand designed to cover up and drown out the serious accusations of abuse of children and their families?

Okay, yeah, cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool cool co-

[zeebreezin]

Shaw being a Rook on the chessboard is funny because he’s so goddamn raven coded on accident, however it’s really funny to me because despite being represented by a castle, I would argue that a primary thematic of this man is breaking foundations he has built up over time.

[starlit-mansion]

i liked the fact that hbomb pointed out that in the absence of money, social capital still drove copying and stealing. a lot of times, you get the "(pulls mask of bad thing) it was capitalism the whole time!!!" moment in video essays but it really doesn't cover like. the general human capacity to do these things at small scale for no or negative monetary benefit

[thekimspoblog]

Demon trying to feed on my insecurities: "You're a bad driver"

Me: "Of course I am. I hate driving. Going 80 mph surrounded by tons of metal is nerve-wrecking. I try to do it as little as possible. Of course I'm bad at it"

Demon: "You're a bad writer"

Me: "Well that part's simply not true. I never claimed I was the greatest author of my generation, but when I put pen to paper I know what I want to communicate and I usually do it well. If someone isn't impressed with my work, that's unfortunate but they're entitled to their opinion"

Demon: "You're a bad leader"

Me: "Well I don't know about that! I mean there was that one time when... Ok look just because people don't see me as an authority figure doesn't mean... 😠 You know you can be a real asshole, demon!"

[badolmen]

I really feel like some of you genuinely think that if all billionaires died tomorrow the world would magically be a better place. Their wealth doesn’t come with a will ensuring it’s redistributed fairly across the planet - it goes to their kin or organizations of their choice. The systems that allowed such vile people to maintain their status will still exist. 4 dead billionaires isn’t this victory you think it is - there’s 4 new billionaires inheriting their wealth and status. Killing every billionaire would just shuffle the pieces and players, it wouldn’t change the game.

[strixhaven]

truly nothing irritates me more than the mythologizing of the french revolution. the legacy of the guillotine and terror but zero awareness about the actual realities of what that entailed and Why it occurred. do you even know about the war in the vendee that killed hundreds of thousands of people and was a huge factor in fueling the terror. the september massacres and the killing of prisoners that preceded the terror. the wars france was fighting externally at the time. this occurred for very specific sociopolitical reasons guys please try to get a bit of context for everything that went down instead of just having a perpetual hard-on for you political killing fantasies.

[paopuofhearts]

So I keep seeing this going around and I'm like.

Look. I get it.

We all get it.

And yet many people very clearly don't.

I've had students and adults sit here and tell me to my face that Jews never originated in the Middle East because Palestinians have been there since time immemorial as the only people of that land. I've had students and adults tell me that Israel is a name that was specifically created in the 40s to push the idea that Israel had always existed when it never existed as a concept before the 40s. I've had students and adults tell me all Jews are White Europeans that are only seeking to exploit and control the Middle East. I've had students and adults tell me that the Middle East belongs to the Muslims and they were pushed out by White Europeans and Jews are the ones who have caused American military policies of interventionism. I've had students and adults tell me thus Jews control all media around the world in return for financial resources from major Western countries.

These are from a wide spectrum of people who are indigenous to the US, people who have lived here all their lives, people who have moved or immigrated or sought refuge or sought asylum from other countries, people who have lived in Israel and Palestine, people who are still learning basic media literacy skills, people with PhDs, people who have spent decades doing activist work - all of them repeating this kind of White Supremacist rhetoric because they want to prove they're on the Right Side of Free Palestine.

And you see those exact same posts cropping up all over social media, of people perpetuating ahistorical information and falsifying facts because they think a more dramaticized and extreme story of Israel and Palestine is necessary to bring more attention to the genocide currently happening.

It's not really about "unless you know things shut up".

It's really about "you don't need to be spreading lies that get people killed to bring awareness and demand change".

Because doing that is antisemitic - and antisemitism isn't something people make up just so they don't 'feel guilty' or 'redirect' or 'erase' the opportunity for conversation or whatever else people justify that as in their minds.

And antisemitism is a proponent of genocide.

[tamaharu]

yjh could turn into a car if he wanted i think

[transmascutena]

the idea of eternity in utena is so interesting. initially "there is no such thing as something eternal" is the thought that sends utena spiraling into suicidality, which is understandable, since the idea that everything will end someday is terrifying. especially to a child. especially to a child who just encountered one of the most traumatizing and violent "endings" possible, the deaths of her parents. but then she's shown that apparently something can be eternal. and that something is pain, which is even worse, but at least gives her something to live for. and then by the end of the show it's like. no, pain isn't eternal either. "there is no such thing as something eternal" is reframed as a positive. eternity is Not Good. eternity is everything staying the same forever, never changing for the better. it's the opposite of revolution. it's what akio wants, perpetuating the system that benefits him at the cost of everyone else forever and ever. and no matter what utena might have thought, it is not what she wants.

[girl-debord]

on the topic of trains and the role of technology in ongoing atrocities, i think something to consider if this is shocking to you is that the development of all technology since the start of the industrial revolution (and a lot of it before that tbh) has been dictated by the needs of capital. trains wouldn't exist without the reign of an economic system that demands mass circulation of commodities. the world has not been shaped by what's best for everyone but what's best for perpetuating that economic system. as Debord says about media technology, "it should be understood that this apparatus is in no way neutral and that it has been developed in accordance with the spectacle’s internal dynamics" (The Society of the Spectacle, thesis 24).

[allaboardthechuchutrain]

obsessed with how Utena uses both definitions of revolution: a change, a spark but also rotation, circular movement that repeats and repeats (a perpetual motion machine). change vs staying the same (not growing up)

thinking about how Akio is associated with rotation (the carousel, maybe even the Ferris wheel?) how when the road he drives on appears curved, circular

how he takes the students in his car on this road after they give up on the duels, not allowing them to escape/stop participating in the system, trapping them in this cycle

if the road is circular, it doesn't go anywhere. It eventually comes back to where it started (how the characters regress sometimes). It also means Akio isn't taking them anywhere, he's just tricking them (bc he's a manipulative piece of shit + shows how he's giving them a false sense/idea of adulthood since none of them actually graduate aka grow up)

thinking about how he claims that Utena didn't bring revolution while he's preparing for the next set of duels (he completed a revolution, now it's time to start over)

Yet while Akio tries trapping them in this eternal cycle, he fails. The ending (will get to that later) but also the students grow and develop. They are not the same people they were at the start of the show. You know who doesn't change though? Akio. On to the ending: I love the ending of Utena so much. The students are talking about growing up, about changing!! The student council, Tsuwabuki, Kozue, Shiori, Wakaba have all clearly changed. They are no longer partaking in the same behaviours they kept repeating throughout the show (all their relationships are noticeably healthier, no one is obsessing over anyone anymore, hanging out w/out animosity between them). Utena and Anthy escape and leave!!!!! Anthy is no longer trapped in the cycle of abuse Akio put her through. Anthy is no longer going to keep playing the role of the rose bride, Akio is free to continue playing prince (revolving), but she has to go now (revolution).

[waterloggedsoliloquy]

what the fuck is utena about

revolutionary girl utena is about the way patriarchy creates spheres of violence that are self-perpetuating on the way to its objective, which is just its expression of itself. and the consequences it has on adolescence, and how romance and relationships foster under these power structures, and the profound love gives opportunity for profound hurt. its about a girls revolution, a positing "what if?" of pushing against that sphere of violence and rejecting it altogether. its about how its impossible to be a good person when youre a teenager and not even considered a person. its about how to try to be a good person anyway. its about forgiveness and bittersweetness and crimes and horrors and something we call family. it's about a school bully being turned into a cow.