Why Elon Musk believes ‘woke mind virus’ and ‘wokeness’ are threats to modern civilization
I wouldn’t say “wokeness” is the worst thing in our society, but I will comfortably say that it’s bullshit. It’s virtue signaling at its most bullshit frequency.
I’ll give it an umbrella designation, if you don’t mind me making up some bullshit of my own: it’s part of what I think of as ‘signing someone else’s work.’ That’s one umbrella. A couple of other examples of the type:
1. Bragging about your diet.
Vegetables and teriyaki sauce were invented a long time ago.
2. Taking ‘stands’ that don’t involve any work from you beyond saying you took a stand.
No offense to the power of groupthink, but groupdo is a far more powerful force.
Wokeness is very much part of both, right? It’s taking credit for the inventions and the work of others, and it’s pretending to action that you did not take part in.
It’s all part of our natural human condition, though … we all, pretty much with every breath, do these sorts of things. The concept of perfection is every bit as stupid, pointless and self-serving as bragging or complaining about levels of wokeness. Yet we all have it in our heads that perfection is something we simply aren’t getting because we aren’t trying hard enough.
Gotta say, that’s also bullshit. Right? Perfection is a tire brand. It’s a worthy goal to an extent, but a ridiculous standard and an awful result for a living, breathing organism.
Perfection, in life, would be death. All the flavor is in fat, all the fun is in making mistakes, and most of the euphoria we feel comes from chemicals that are classified, in large doses, as poisons.
And I think … perfection is also a form of ‘signing someone else’s work,’ right? It’s the ultimate straw man; a standard held up that literally no human being has ever lived up to. And we have some pet names to represent this non-existent human being:
Adolph Hitler: perfect evil
Mother Theresa: perfect good
Abraham Lincoln: perfect president
Beatles: perfect band
Babe Ruth: perfect ballplayer
Mona Lisa: perfect painting
And so on …
Getting back to ‘wokeness,’ it’s also a straw man; the straw man for perfect civic awareness. If one is ‘woke’ then one is perfectly aware of racial differences yet somehow completely UNaware that they exist.
Bullshit.
But again, it’s far from the worst thing in our society. But it’s one of the worst things for our need to cut down on the racial animus, and it gets in the way of healing the endless open sore that is American racial history.
We committed genocide against one major race and enslaved another. No amount of “I get it” now is going to prevent the ramifications of what we did then. It’s just flat-out not a process that can be short-cut. It’s a wound. And wounds only heal with time.
Which means everything that irritates the wound will increase the time. And pretending that you are at the end of a process that you barely started is an irritation. It makes you irritating.
It makes you less credible. And it makes reactions against the very real, genuinely virtuous attempts to heal the racial wounds of American history stronger. It’s like sitting down to Mario and claiming that you got the princess after the first screen. That’s not the fucking princess, scooter. She’s in another castle, one that you won’t even see until you’ve gone through more castles than one warrior, even a virtuous one, can go through.
We will need to get this princess together, over time that will not end with us, even probably with our children. But I have hope for the grandkids, and their grandkids will hopefully be a lot closer to the magic castle, where nobody will call being nice to other people by a name. Nobody will brag about simply being a decent human being.
They’ll just be. And nobody will mark the occasion, because it will just be normal. Not named, not made of straw. And the smattering of stubborn partisans who remain, on both sides of the divide, can be hunted for sport. Thanks for reading.
