Caustic Ramblings

Regarding all of the wanton 'woke' craziness and apparent mass-psychosis that's painfully apparent right now to anyone even barely paying attention to unfolding events, it does really seem like the whole Progressive Liberal ideology is on its loud and abrupt way out. When any dogmatic belief system is on its last legs, the inner core of its true believers tend to behave crazier and crazier until the craziness of their whole mode of thinking is impossible for outside observers to ignore.

And might this signal the twilight and gradual decline of materialist-liberalism as a whole? (which of course has been established long before the shrill-moralistic and 'woke' variants escaped from the lab). Perhaps. This could really be the beginning of the end for the liberal project which has been going on for the past four centuries in the Western world. In practice, Liberalism served as the secular replacement of the medieval Christian worldview. At its very core, any liberalism unaccompanied by adherence to an established religion, constitutes a worldview devoid of metaphysical coherence. And thus Secular Liberalism had to adopt other 'gods' once the Christian concept of divinity was wholly jettisoned into the void. The main 'gods' of this pseudo-religion are Progress, Materialism, and the Hedonistic-Utilitarian view on what exactly constitutes happiness and 'good.'

Liberal-Progressivism worships these principles, but it's not the only version of liberalism which does. There are other sects of the so-called 'Church of Progress.' And I believe that all of them will be making their exit-stage-left-and-right right after Woke Progressivism finishes imploding. These other sects will probably each take their respective leave with a ton less fanfare though.

One in particular has been on my radar for quite some time: the mostly-apolitical ideology I call "Consumerist Americanism." Which is, the idea that if you as an honest and hard-working American do your part in being a dutiful wage slave or cubicle serf and worship every new consumer trend and techno-gizmo that hits the market, then the 'American Dream' of our collective mythology just might land in your lap. Before American popular culture started shifting to 'culture war' politics around 2014-2015, it was this Consumerist Americanism that was the default mode of being across most sectors of America.

We see now especially on the new Populist Right (and maybe among some principled left-leaning people too), people turning against many facets of Consumerist Americanism: Hollyweird celebrity culture, cynical 'woke' corporate PR, Corporate Karen busybodies who populate the HR departments of the largest corporations, the mainstream media as a whole, a monstrously-bloated and irredeemably corrupted academia, and especially the Silicon Valley tech giants and the soy-fed 'woke' technocrats who run them. Sure, there are some aspects of Trumpist Populism that echo some of the old Consumer-Jingoist sentiments, but as a whole there seems to be a real shift away from that underway.

Among the new populists there seems to be the realization that further advances in tech just means more surveillance and more censorship, and the erosion of freedoms that results from such 'advances.' Basically, tech = big brother and the enslavement of humanity to ghastly machine-things. Maybe within 5-10 years, no one except the most ardent holdout believers in techno-progress will still have an 'Alexa' listening/spy device sitting in their living room? I would wager that as the Boomer generation continued to die off, some kind of sane middle-ground between Tech-worship and Ludditism will become more mainstream.

IMO, the biggest hypocritical feature of this fading, largely-astroturfed Consumerist Americanism is the pseudo-libertarianism of its adherents; the silly notion that one is living a life of "freedom" by spending 9 hours a day doing some form of mindless and/or humiliating bureaucratic paper-pushing, all to enjoy the 'freedom' of living in a poorly-built McHouse in some pre-fab suburban subdivision completely bereft of anything resembling real community; a place an inhabitant will be promtply ejected from after missing just a couple mortgage payments, without many of the neighbors seeming to notice or care.

Hopefully whatever American civic culture or ideology comes to replace the fading one will actually value real freedom and less reliance on faceless bureaucratic entities. My one prediction is that working with one's hands is indeed a fine and honorable way of existing, and living a simpler life with less stuff, will become cherished values.

An internet comment from SCM:

Cultural Marxism: An offshoot of Marxism that gave birth to political correctness, multiculturalism and "anti-racism." Unlike traditional Marxism that focuses on economics, Cultural Marxism focuses on culture and maintains that all human behavior is a result of culture (not heredity / race) and thus malleable. Cultural Marxists absurdly deny the biological reality of gender and race and argue that gender and race are “social constructs”.

Nonetheless, Cultural Marxists support the race-based identity politics of non-whites. Cultural Marxists typically support race-based affirmative action, the proposition state (as opposed to a nation rooted in common ancestry), elevating non-Western religions above Western religions, speech codes and censorship, multiculturalism, diversity training, anti-Western education curricula, maladaptive sexual norms and anti-male feminism, the dispossession of white people, and mass Third World immigration into Western countries.

Cultural Marxists have promoted the idea that white people, instead of birthing white babies, should interracially marry or adopt non-white children. Samuel P. Huntington maintained that Cultural Marxism is an anti-white ideology. Critics of Cultural Marxism have maintained that Cultural Marxists intend to commit genocide against white people through mass non-white immigration, assimilation, transracial adoption and miscegenation.

This is a pretty typical summary of "Cultural Marxism" we might expect from a person on the Dissident Right who can coherently string a few paragraphs together. Except that, few if any people actually self-identify as either this label or the above list of criteria in any sort of conscious manner. Rather, it's a laundry list of agenda items which Cultural Leftist aligned institutions have been pushing for the past several decades. The majority of people, regardless of their ideological leanings, do not willingly embrace this entire list. As a clear example, just go back 10 years in time and you'll find that the average self-identified "Progressive" would not admit to signing onto all that stuff. Many would even disavow a number of those items. However, many of the things listed above are indeed what the current crop of intersectional cultists are indeed advocating, but (in my view) more as "NPC" ideological automatons rather than fully-willing agents. How many SJWs today would willingly admit to holding at least 90% of those positions?