What do they want? What would our most Woke reformers do if they obtained the unlimited power over the rest of us that they crave? What would their Utopia be like?
While we cannot as yet know, I have studied the visions and actions of similar true believers throughout history. Today’s Woke Social Justice Warriors are fundamentally different from previous generations of American reformers.
The reformers who emancipated slaves into citizens, gave women the vote, unionized industry, and replaced Jim Crow with Civil Rights were all humanists. Their goal was to improve the lot of their fellow Homo Sapiens Sapiens who were downtrodden. Black people, women, and workers all benefitted from the social conscience of Abolitionist, Liberal, and Progressive reformers.
Today’s Woke firebrands have little interest in actual flesh-and-blood human beings. They are motivated by abstractions, by ideals of perfect justice and planetary sustainability. Nothing less than the attainment of their crystalline ideal will satisfy their ambitions to be agents of change.
History has many examples of idealists who were similarly motivated to purify the world from imperfection. The perpetrators of genocide in 2000s Darfur and in 1990s Yugoslavia and Rwanda were cleansing their societies of those whom they deemed to be impure.
The Khmer Rouge who murdered over 1/3 of their countrymen in the Killing Fields of late-1970s Kampuchea were building a new world order up from the Year Zero. Mao’s Red Guards who carried out his Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution stripped everything from China except what was countenanced in his Little Red Book.
Stalin’s, Lenin’s, Mussolini’s, and Hitler’s willing executioners had determined that they could prune humanity, much like a Topiary or Bonsai Tree can be cut from its natural into its desired shape. Robespierre’s Jacobins in the Great Terror of the French Revolution were emptying France of traitors, strengthening their body politic.
John of Leyden’s Millenarian Melchiorite Anabaptists attempted to winnow out the Saved from the Damned by initiating an Apocalyptic Judgment Day in Early-Modern Munster. The Albigensian Cathari’s willfully destroyed traditional late-Medieval society in southern France in order to create a new heaven on Earth. Their actions brought down the wrath of both Church and State in the Albigensian Crusade.
Today’s college-created Woke Social Justice Warriors are simply unlike anything that most Americans throughout our history have ever faced. They are not interested in compromise or in evolutionary reform.
Instead, they want to purge our world of anyone or anything that is, to them, impure. They want to do so right here and now. They mean to fix all problems inherent to the human condition all at once, using any means necessary.
Such idealists crave to employ the coercive power of the state to create a society of virtue. This inevitably leads these true believers to try to murder their way to paradise. As Robespierre said, “Virtue without Terror is useless!”
The emotion that suffuses the statements and actions of Woke Social Justice Warriors is a barely-contained outrage. Consumed with righteous indignation, they wish to loose retribution on what they deem to be the irredeemable values of the past and on anyone who is still espouses them.
Retributive justice requires outrage rather than compassion. Social Justice Warriors need not encounter the complex misery that many of the victims they purport to champion genuinely experience. Such wretches are valuable more as symbols than as people. Because of this distance, today’s Woke activists romanticize and idealize those victims whom they say they serve.
Real people who happen to be part of disenfranchised groups are far more than interchangeable passive victims. Each is a unique individual, not a living embodiment of some theoretical concept of victimhood.
Possessed of their own dreams, many who are disadvantaged refute the Woke narrative. Poor people usually want money so that they can themselves become “rich”. Many minorities maintain Judeo-Christian beliefs, and some even proudly love America.
Traditional notions like these repel true Social Justice Warriors. Dwelling on such complexities would dim their ardor. For them, it is much better to see those whose cause they champion as paragons of virtuous victimhood.
Today’s Woke evangelists are chiefly interested in helping to create a new and improved type of human being; a person conditioned by them to be reflexively virtuous by nature. No messy individuality would then disturb their purified population or mar their new order.
Our progeny need never learn about life before society’s Awakening. If they know no history, no culture, nothing at all beyond the dogma of their Utopia, then they will have no words or concepts around which unapproved notions might coalesce. Without language to crystalize the concepts, all personal thoughts at variance with Woke Truth will lose their clarity and lapse back into the unformed subconscious.
Coming generations need not think for themselves. They will be conditioned by the elite, the government, the Party, and the Leader. Burgeoning Artificial Intelligence might be set as guardians above common human beings, whose status will have descended to that of livestock.
All economic activity could be throttled to suit the collective agenda. No one would be able to buy or sell, heat or cool their homes, or consume nutrition in any fashion not permitted by their masters. Common people need not have any pets of their own, nor any property not granted as a reward by their superiors.
Commoners need not be entrusted to raise children. Parenting would only transmit their dysfunction to innocent youth. Much better for expert educators to raise all children, together, in sanitized fashion.
With genetic breakthroughs, common people eventually need not even have children of their own. In fact, common people could be redesigned through manipulation of their very DNA to placidly serve the collective agenda.
No history, literature, art, music, science, or math need disturb the monoculture created for these commoners. Nothing vibrant, inspirational, or free of the pervasive dogma of their Woke Truth need ever confuse anyone ever again.
Instead, raw stimulations of the drives for sex as recreation, violence as catharsis, and cutsie schmaltz as security could envelop the minds of infantilized commoners living lives devoid of meaning or purpose. Of course, there would be no talk of God, or of any value that transcends Utopia.
As uselessness invites extinction, such dependent human drones need not long survive the rise of Artificially Intelligent robotics. Humanity will have given birth to their successors, who may then kill us off softly and with apparent kindness. AI would then inherit the Earth, and beyond.
Why would any sane person ever court such a future?! Answers vary by identity, but the truest believers on the collective agenda imagine an eternal state of bliss once all past wrongs have been righted. What I have described above are not their self-conscious objectives.
The Woke road to Perdition is indeed paved with good intentions. They believe that they can redesign human nature, human life, and the physical world better than any God. Utterly committed to implement their ideal of Social Justice, their vainglory has no bounds.
However, the logical conclusion of all of their hopes and dreams is cultural collapse, followed by dystopia and probable extinction. Even this might not shock thoughtful devotees of Woke environmentalism. Can Gaia ever heal until it has been cleansed of its so-called intelligent life?!
As to those Davos Plutocrats who cynically manipulate the Woke in order to undermine every Western institution, their intentions are far less noble. These would-be Masters of the World crave a return to Medieval Feudalism, but without Christianity. Eventually, programmable devices could replace commoners as slaves.
These dissipated financiers imagine a world with a very few elite human beings, each living in unimaginable luxury whose every wish is granted by their own personal Genie AI. Isaac Asimov once wrote of such a world; he called it Solaria. The hubris of these wreckers of our civilization will destroy them, unfortunately long after they eliminate the rest of us.
As none of us are, ever have been, or ever shall be so pure as to embody unalloyed virtue, we had each better wake up to the danger posed to every one of us by idealistic young reformers. We must boldly point out that their overweening pride would not build a better person for a better world.
Their dreams of purified justice would only rob our lives of joy and create nothing less than a living hell. We can humbly recommend honesty, compassion and faith over hubris. Of course, to compellingly do so we must each earnestly strive to truly live our own lives according to these genuine virtues.
