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Between the Extremes

Entry 2380, on 2025-01-09 at 21:34:30 (Rating 2, Politics)

There seems to always be a zeitgeist associated with every period in history. It's like people are just looking around trying to find someone else to tell them what and how to think, instead of figuring it out for themselves. Maybe "zeitgeist" is too strong a word in some cases, but at least there will be societal expectations, trends, and ways of thinking favoured by prominent groups like the media, politicians, and academics.

I can remember being very critical of the previous zeitgeist which was the neoliberal economics and politics of the late 1970s up to the early 2000s, but now we have an even worse one, which is the opposite in many cases: woke-ism. Just to be clear, by this I mean political correctness, adherence fo postmodernist theory, critical race theory, and what some people call neo-Marxism.

The critical difference between these 2 is that neoliberalism was very individual and based on right-wing concepts, but woke-ism is more oriented towards groups and is based on leftist principles.

I should also say at this point that both of these ideologies have some merit, but both went too far, resulting in a correction which became an over-correction, because when a political view achieves what it wants it never stops there, it always goes on until the situation is worse than it was before, but usually in the opposite direction.

For example, women did not have equality, and have only achieved it since the feminist movement helped remove unfair laws, but did feminism stop there? No, now they want equity rather than equality. They want women to be paid the same as men for doing lesser work, for working shorter hours, and for having less commitment to the job. Why? because they cannot accept that men and women are different and that men, on average, are more work oriented than women. It's a fact, people!

A similar argument applies to racial issues. Black people (I'm talking about the US in particular here) have as many rights as anyone else, but they still do badly, on average, and again the woke mob demand laws to "fix" this, instead of looking at any underlying cultural problems. They want monetary payments for slavery in the past, even though many black people do not have any background with slavery, and others actually owned slaves themselves.

So I think it is clear that woke-ism started with good intentions but has since become corrupted by its own agenda. Now, instead of making society better, it is dragging it down into conflict and mediocrity.

But there is hope, because there are clear signs that woke-ism is dying. Just like every other ideology that went too far, people are sick of it and rejecting leaders who embrace it. It is not coincidental that I am writing this post just after Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, announced he is resigning. He was probably the most woke leader of a major country and he has been thoroughly rejected by the people, with his party facing a massive defeat at the next election.

He lasted a bit longer than our own (New Zealand's) super-woke tyrant, Jacinda Ardern, but their path has been nearly identical: entering power and enjoying some success because of their "kindness" until people realised it is all fake and very destructive. Both Ardern and Trudeau resigned before they were destroyed in an election, so they certainly saw the inevitable consequences of their actions.

I have already discussed Trump's win in the US, and that was undoubtedly also partly because of the rejection of woke-ism. The two most prominent woke leaders remaining, Keir Starmer (prime minister of the UK) and Anthony Albanese (prime minister of Australia) are both very unpopular and might nor survive long as leaders, so the trend against the woke left seems fairly obvious.

Of course, this reversal won't last. Eventually the more right oriented parties which are prominent now will go too far themselevs and the left will come back until they do something outrageous and... well, you get the idea.

It seems like a very inefficient and confrontational way to run the world, but it's what we've got. Is there a better way or is this the best we can do? I've always been enthusiastic about direct democracy, or at least going further down that path, but even that is debatable. Maybe we are just doomed to alternate between the extremes.

Comment 1 (7808) by Jim on 2025-01-10 at 10:15:20:

Oh OJB, you have some very extreme opinions expressed in this blog. Are you not part of the extremes yourself?

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