For the record, “redux” means to return to a topic. What motivates my return to my return to a discussion about bullshit generators? Well, this time I don’t want to write about the generators exactly, but about something I said as a side note about “woke” BS generators.
I recall I listed a number of transnational companies for whom the reason they are going through all the extra expense and trouble to accommodate marginalized groups is, really, because they need to clean up their image. Please don’t think this was any merit of “the left”. People on the left have been far too weakened and divided over the decades to control large institutions that way.
Woke-ism provides a rare opportunity for large institutions to treat the liberation of marginalized groups as another kind of imposition on the rest of us. If you work for a large institution, and were told in subtle ways how to speak, think and act at meetings with the upper brass, none of whom may be part of any marginalized group, you know what I’m talking about.
Maybe you don’t mind watching what you say, and you don’t mind rules and even laws being passed (namely federal bill C-16, passed in 2017) telling you what to say around marginalized groups. But I am not the only one who thinks it is an imposition on liberty. Such laws presuppose that we are all incapable of a decent level of decorum and respect for our fellow man. It assumes that in a conversation with anyone who identifies as being in the LGTBQ2S+ camp, that I will not respect their basic humanity, and need laws to intimidate me into being a decent person around such people. I see it as a law that “forces” me to do something I would have done anyway as a decent, respectful person, and assumes that I and all people are incapable of such civility.
A lot of electronic “ink” has been spilled on this issue, particularly by certain groups who wish to use this as a wedge issue. And they are quite numerous on YouTube; particularly from Jordan Peterson, who started this whole rebellion in Canada by politicizing the issue and making it into a paranoid conspiracy theory about “the left”. My estimation of this is that Peterson does transnationals a service in that he provides a smokescreen to get “right” and “left” groups on campus to yell and scream at each other, distracting them from thinking about notions of freedom itself, and how Peterson is being used to pit two groups against each other.
To be fair, Peterson talks about liberty in this context as well, but he is using it to use “the left” as a punching bag. He has been quoted as saying something to the effect of “I will not let anyone on the left tell me what to think or say”. You might muse: why the left? Could he have not just said “I will not let anyone tell me what to think or say”, and the statement would have been more powerful. And judging from his photo ops with followers of Pepe the Frog, we can say his attack and his entire conduct is less than academic.
Large companies who have cleansed their image by being “woke” and among the virtuous and holy, can now use this as leverage to turn racism, sexism and all the other “-ism’s” into something we do to each other, turning our attention away from corporations who do the same to us. Railing agains the “-ism’s” becomes reduced and trivialized into petty squabbling between individual colleagues rather than an issue that unites us against a common oppressor. Brilliant in its execution, what is supposed to unite and liberate people at the grassroots, is being used by the powerful to divide and conquer.
How I address you in a conversation should be a matter of ettiquette. You can’t legislate ettiquette, any more than you can legislate human decency. The feds have passed laws that favour marginalized groups, but laws can be interpreted to say that one marginalized group member can be held accountable to the law for something they say to another marginalized group member. In other words, these same laws can be interpreted to oppress the groups they are intended to liberate. Laws are a terrible tool for telling us to get along with each other.
And why this matters now, and why I am going through the trouble of writing this now, is: Donald Trump has been inaugurated as of yesterday to much celebration and brouhaha. No sooner than the ink dried on his executive orders, several transnationals, including Meta, Google, Amazon, Tesla/SpaceX, McDonald’s, Ford, Walmart, and a host of other big companies are terminating their DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) hiring and managing policies. Now that they no longer have a Democratic party to appease, the mask can finally come off.
All the while, those who divide themselves among “the left” and “the right” can go on with their petty squabbles, fuelled by bots and hired trolls from social media. And so long as people divide themselves into smaller and smaller groups based on “identity”, there will never be a social movement that will rise up against the large transnationals or the government, or any other large institutions.