THE WOKE MOVEMENT IS SO SCARY YOU MAY NEVER TRULY SLEEP WELL EVER AGAIN

What’s happening to the western world? Is it transmogrifying into an everyday waking nightmare version of the village of the damned?

The woke movement is to the mind and brain what Covid-19 is to respiration, potentially terminally inhibiting.

Is it well-intentioned? Is the idea to drain all the venom from every form of prejudice by displaying an absolute fiery prejudice against it to the extent that it gets cancelled out, much like the burning of witches in the Middle Ages to cleanse the land of their unwanted influence? If so, where does it stop, or does it stop at all?

How far do we want to go with the witchfinders of woke, the little red guards of what is okay and what is not? How many false idols must be overthrown, how many McCarthyite purges must there be? How many inquisitions? How many metaphorical guillotinings? And once it has all been done will those left live in freedom from all that or fear that they might show telltale signs of unwokeness?

As I have asked in a previous piece, who are the brain police? Who will be those so without error that they will be first to throw stones? How many will wonder if their glass houses are quite strong enough for those stones to be thrown without a thought? Sociopaths will have no fears, nor will those who belong to elites immune to comebacks if they decide to throw a few.

The antecedents to this phenomenon are not too hard to find. Elements of them are to be found in the earliest extremist phase of feminism where, to a minority in the movement, men became superfluous, if not outright objectionable, almost suitable cases for euthanasia. But even the milder forms of feminism brought with it a disruption to what had been fixed reference points in the predictable dance of life for men and women for many years. Some of the important rituals that made for predictability were no longer to be relied upon.

As in the most effective forms of propaganda, there has to be an element of truth within it to guarantee its potency. It was true that many men abused their situation of dominance over women and some measure of redress and correction was required within society. But the chosen means to make this correction left many men confused as to what they could safely do and what they could not in these new circumstances.

But the most recent progenitor of the woke movement is that of the politically correct one. Over several recent decades starting somewhere around the early Nineteen-Eighties a whole host of items became hot topics inviting criticism and punishment for those continuing to engage in activities or utterances which continued to breathe life into them. Yet another layer of confusion was added to that brought about by the feminist movement.

This third wave however has the potential to be the one that completely overwhelms any status quo the western world has ever known. Some may say that is a good thing. That tongues must be held, everyone thinking twice, counting to ten or more and so on before making any utterances at all. There is a risk of creating western societies where some minorities run rampant, aware they are totally immune from criticism, saying what they like about those whom they believe may oppress them, while a sizeable majority maintain a dumb but resented silence afraid they will be violently verbally attacked to their shame or cancelled, left jobless and friendless.

What would a more or less totally woke western world look like? How many of you believe it would eventuate into becoming a happy-go-lucky place where everyone was safe from prejudices, unfairness and the misery of isolation due to sexual orientation, skin colour, class or race? Would the West come out the other side of the levelling machine eventually, distilled to a Star Trek-like amalgam of equality, even-tempered humility and mutual respect?

I wonder.

I suspect it would simply descend into an ever deeper morass of rootless, traditionless chaos where anything goes for those who must never be criticised, leaving the rest in a bottomless confusion where fear of saying the wrong thing keeps them shut-mouthed during the day and endlessly awake at night.