The Present Age is Woke

Kierkegaard and the Gay Paperclip

I’m sure a great deal of you have seen this from February of last year, indicating a rather concerning trend. With polling indicating that at as high as one fifth of Gen-Z Americans identifying as some kind of LGBT signifier. While the rate of actual homosexual or lesbian activity has remained relatively stable to Pre Great Awokening statistics, the transgender and nonbinary numbers have seen an outstanding rise in their ranks.

Coming off the heels of some reporting last year in June, you can see here from the Times, who reported that it is the nation’s youth that are seeing a rise in transgender identification. Quoting from the article:

“It’s developmentally appropriate for teenagers to explore all facets of their identity — that is what teenagers do,” said Dr. Angela Goepferd, medical director of the Gender Health Program at Children’s Minnesota hospital, who was not involved in the new analysis. “And, generationally, gender has become a part of someone’s identity that is more socially acceptable to explore.”

It’s safe to say for better (it’s for worse) that the present age is queer, but also queer in the sense of an identity but queer in the sense that we are very much off the rails for what was and continues to be the baseline normal for human sexuality and relations throughout history and in other civilizations. It is a time of great indolence, wherein man is fed, or rather stuffed in his own gluttony of sexual dysfunction in the guise of liberation, feminism, and individuality that has flattened us into a world of sameness. A world of the lowest common denominator, where we are forced to adopt a culture in frozen in time. What constitutes “American culture”, where movies are made about brands ranging from Air Jordans to Flaming Hot Cheetos. Generation Z actors have played the childhoods of the 80s in Stranger Things and Super 8, and Millennial writers have ensured that their infantile fantasies can defy their aging bodies as the world moves on without them.

For as much discussion as there is about the “Patient Zero” of wokeness, a term I really don’t like to use though it is the common parlance these days to describe a systematizing and homogenizing form of leftism, with a specified animus towards the general majority of the population and the old social norms that once constrained them from their own impulses and desires which has only left them more miserable than generations prior. From the Paradox of Female Happiness to the high rates of mental illness associated with LGBT Youth, there is a degree of despondency, an impotent rage against a system that has been sold to many on the historical narrative of progress, and its grand arc of revolution captivating and lifting millions to chiliastic freedom.

Even on the subject of climate change, whose science and doomsday predictions could make even the Millerites blush, it has had a substantial effect on part of the population who buys into these secular eschatologies. For instance, eleven percent of childless adults cite climate change as a “major reason” for why they do not currently have children, and another 15 percent say it’s a “minor reason,” according to a nationally representative 2020 survey by Morning Consult, a run of the mill bean counter.  If true, this constitutes millions of people and it is pushed in the mainstream media even, in the midst of discussion of climate refugees and William Hague’s traitorous “Age of Migration.” The growing anti-natalism for climate change, economic, and racial reasons hearkens back to one of my favorite philosophers. The great Søren Kierkegaard and his writings, especially his own work called Two Ages: A Literary Review, with a section titled The Present Age. In there, he writes the following words;

Not even a suicide does away with himself out of desperation, he considers the act so long and so deliberately, that he kills himself with thinking—one could barely call it suicide since it is thinking which takes his life. He does not kill himself with deliberation but rather kills himself because of deliberation

We see this quite often when it comes to suicide or choosing not to carry on the family name or legacy - it is with deliberation, because of the logic of costs, or late stage capitalism, or transphobia do people kill themselves, at least on the left. Suicide comes with a great deal of rationalization, deliberately thinking that one would be better off dead than alive in the world given his or her present circumstances.

But before we get too far into the weeds into Kierkegaard, (there’s a reference to Cheers if you look hard enough) one needs a good definition for what Woke actually means. It has gone on too long for this existential culture war for words not to be pinned down and for solid battle lines to be drawn, so let’s get down to the weeds of words.

Defining “Wokeness”

Since apparently some pundits fail to define what that word or process or system actually is, I find it prudent to offer one up.

Wokeness is a noun describing a process of a homogenizing and systematizing form of leftist managerialism. Managerialism requires systematization, which requires a streamlined and homogenizing process. If progressivism is a nanobot (or a mind virus) then the gray goo scenario would be to make everyone, regardless of race or culture be broken down and reassembled into little gay paperclips.

Gray Goo? More like Gay Goo

This homogenizing managerialism wasn’t as always leftist as once was, the claim that the Cold War was won by Blue Jeans and Rock n’ Roll is an example of this. Exporting a homogenizing culture is a good way to ensure your satrapies whose internal politics aren’t necessarily kind to your greater hegemonic ambitions fall in line. As a child growing up as an army brat, I remember my father saying that German music and dress was “still stuck in the 1980s” as late as 2003. Pan-Americanism and the Good Neighbor Policy from FDR, one of the more effective leftist managerial regimes of the 20th century had done something similar, Los Three Caballeros is a propaganda film mind you; a progenitor of sorts of Zero Dark Thirty, Madame Secretary, and 24.

The government is usually known by many people conservative or liberal to be quite ineffective and poorly ran, one can point to the IRS, Congress, or their local DMV. Yet of all government programs and policies that most didn’t consider the long term consequences of (save for a few) was the mass subsidization of higher education. Now any ol’ midwit can get a bachelors degree, see the value of the degree go down as inflation kicks in, with a mass overproduction of “elites” looking for sinecures any way they can find them. Many infantilized, and not wishing to face the real world or workforce seek Master’s Degrees or PhD Programs just to kick the maturation can down the road and further ingratiate themselves in the progressive schoolyard, in which our university system has selection pressures for diversity and like-mindedness.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that this system didn’t just rear its ugly head sometime in 2012, it’s been around for quite sometime. Edward Peter Garret detailed it succinctly in 1938 in his monograph The Revolution Was.

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.

Garret also points out the views at the time that only a few short years later would be succinctly written up by James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution. It was the great depression that had reorganized the Republic into its more bureaucratized state, with words weaseling their way into new dialectical positions. Writing later on in the pamphlet, Garret points out the following:

Writing at some distance in time he will be much less impressed by the fact that it was peacefully accomplished than by the marvelous technique of bringing it to pass not only within the form but within the word, so that people were all the while fixed in the delusion that they were talking about the same things because they were using the same words. Opposite and violently hostile ideas were represented by the same word signs. This was the American people's first experience with dialectic according to Marx and Lenin.

Until it was too late, few understood one like Julius C. Smith, of the American Bar Association, saying,

Is there any labor leader, any businessman, any lawyer or any other citizen of America so blind that he cannot see that this country is drifting at an accelerated pace into administrative absolutism similar to that which prevailed in the governments of antiquity, the governments of the Middle Ages, and in the great totalitarian governments of today? Make no mistake about it. Even as Mussolini and Hitler rose to absolute power under the forms of law … so may administrative absolutism be fastened upon this country within the Constitution and within the forms of law.

For a significant illustration of what has happened to words — of the double meaning that inhabits them — put in contrast what the New Deal means when it speaks of preserving the American system of free private enterprise and what American business means when it speaks of defending it. To the New Deal these words — the American system of free private enterprise — stand for a conquered province. To the businessman the same words stand for a world that is in danger and may have to be defended.

The New Deal is right.

Business is wrong.

A particular brand of progressive idealism had finally seized the reins of power in the night of depression, and even attempts to undo it have been thwarted by its managers. Just ask Nixon, Reagan, or Trump how well governing can be when the dealers are counting the cards.

This revolutionary mindset has seen a few system updates, or waves of the left, to a point now where the “New Left” of the 1960s Academia has found itself being used pedagogically on the American “New Right” of today. Today it can be best described as what I had written earlier in defining wokeness, a homogenizing and systematizing form of leftist managerialism, whose systems including procedural manipulation (the replication crisis of social science is a feature not a bug), anarcho-tyranny, and anti-white racial biases/practices.

I think we’ve got a good definition for what “Wokeness” is with a bit of historiography included. I do hope another one-word-catch-all term can be created or used in its place (leftism?) but for now this is the common linguistic mainstay with cultural currency. For now though we go further back in time to Mr. Kierkegaard and see what this leveling is all about as it is very relevant to today’s progressivism.

Kierkegaard and the Gay Paperclip

The present age has a sameness to it, wherein each television show, movie, or music is going to promote the same social message. White male protagonists are the impotent goofs, or retired or aged leaders of a beloved intellectual property that has been rebooted only to have him be emasculated for the future face for modern audiences that can subvert your expectations. Swearing for edginess’ sake and the millennial monoculture for entertainment can be seen vividly in the Games Industry, from WH40k being targeted for its “toxic masculinity” to side shaved heads of female antagonists who happen to be streamers in the last Borderlands sequel. The sameness, can be seen everywhere from the writing to the visual style.

Culture is just as much a reflection of the people who wield the measures of shaping the culture, which is power and offices of authority. Sovereign may be he who decides the exception, but that sovereign can also decide what is and what isn’t in the message of the zeitgeist. This brings us back to Kierkegaard’s concept of the leveling.

Hubert Dryfus gives us a pretty good definition, which I will use here: Leveling is a social process in which the uniqueness of the individual is rendered non-existent by assigning equal value to all aspects of human endeavors, thus missing all the intricacies and subtle complexities of human identity.

While Kierkegaard was certainly concerned with things being reduced to the lowest common denominator, the rise of the enlightenment concept of the public square and public space heavily dominated his thinking in contrast to that of John Stuart Mill or Alexis De Tocqueville. In 2023 America, the people who live inside of the United States (not all of whom are Americans) are brought into being “Americanized” with a pop culture, corporate identity. There are now two product biopic films made with the intent to tell the history and story of America’s pop culture exports, that of Flaming Hot Cheetos and Air Jordans.

We have certainly lost the plot.

Even as I write this, the public space of individuals competes heavily with the more powerful voice and presence of corporate branding, regime intelligentsia, and blatant control of the public space by a progressive leviathan. To continue on the pop culture trend for a moment, one needn’t look any further than this obvious mash-up.

Grotesque.

As find ourselves in a dialectic of equity, an offshoot from the liberal (and enlightenment) language of equality, we find ourselves where Kierkegaard wrote, “the dialectic of the present age tends towards equality, and its most logical — though mistaken — fulfillment is levelling, as the negative unity of the negative reciprocity of all individuals.” The public dialectic is oriented around equality, the discussion over equity or equality of opportunity, all falling within a Hayek-eseque fatal conceit of what we are to be. Nothing more than abstractions, and even more so in a discarnate world that McLuhan wrote about in The Gutenberg Galaxy.

As the public square became the common space, frenetically secularizing but still maintaining a vibrant religious attitude (or perhaps a Spenglerian Second Religiousness) the public square can change rapidly and still be deemed “the public square.” From 2015 to 2023, acceptance for homosexual “marital” unions was fait accompli despite nearly half the country opposing it. Of course, the public square has also allowed the worst aspects of the passions to rule over us, and in turn we can see the results quite plainly when it comes to access to pornography.

Furthermore, Kierkegaard writes: (Emphasis Mine)

A generation, a people, an assembly of the people, a meeting or a man, are responsible for what they are and can be made ashamed if they are inconstant and unfaithful; but a public remains a public. A people, an assembly or a man can change to such an extent that one may say: they are no longer the same; a public on the other hand can become the very opposite and still be the same — a public. But it is precisely by means of this abstraction and this abstract discipline that the individual will be formed (in so far as the individual is not already formed by his inner life), if he does not succumb in the process, taught to be content, in the highest religious sense, with himself and his relation to God, to be at one with himself instead of being in agreement with a public which destroys everything that is relative, concrete and particular in life; educated to find peace within himself and with God, instead of counting hands.

The abstraction and the nebulous nature of progressivism comes to mind. A dialectical assembly that helps reorganize the individual to count the hands and to ensure that the right words are said, forming the perfect individual who can either take advantage of grievance politics or proudly announce that they are transing their six year old boy. The abstract sense of the common good, a progressive good, has been the great reorientation that was once embraced towards universal reason and law; which has only been used to rationalize a cultural norm that strays further away from God with each passing day. This has its roots in what Burke observed, that "In a free country, every man thinks he has a concern in all public matters."

Kierkegaard writes once more (emphasis mine);

The levelling process is not the action of an individual but the work of reflection in the hands of an abstract power. It is therefore possible to calculate the law governing it in the same way that one calculates the diagonal in a parallelogram of forces. The individual who levels down is himself engulfed in the process and so on, and while he seems to know selfishly what he is doing one can only say of people en masse that they know not what they do; for just as collective enthusiasm produces a surplus which does not come from the individual, there is also a surplus in this case. A demon is called up over whom no individual has any power, and though the very abstraction of levelling gives the individual a momentary, selfish kind of enjoyment, he is at the same time signing the warrant for his own doom.

The levelling in 2023 exists in the abstraction and reduction of the common good, a systematizing caste of individuals to all adhere to racial grievances, Anti-Americanism, ahistorical revisionism of Western Culture and European History, reducing it down to where all may wear blue jeans and watch the latest social commentary movie from Greta Gerwig, but the ESG and DEI that formulates the abstraction is the Demon that the collective West has signed its own death warrant to. Even now as the demons and the legions of the Enemy rail against Churches, we see more and more of today’s youth, epsecially those who are the target regime the most (young white men) turn to religion in an age of Woke Animus towards their existence. From Drag Queen Story Hour to The Great Replacement, man looks for ways to endure and defend himself both physically and spiritually. Kierkegaard remarks on this as well, that for us living in a present age of progressive levelling, we try to look towards the Lord and fulfill what was said in Matthew 6:33.

Their age will, in the very highest sense, develop them religiously and at the same time educate them aesthetically and intellectually, because in this way the comic will receive its absolute expression. The highest form of the comic arises precisely when the individual comes directly under the infinite abstraction of ‘pure humanity’, without any of those intermediary qualifications which temper the humour of man’s position and strengthen its pathos, without any of the concrete particulars of organization which the levelling process destroys. But that again is only another expression of the fact that man’s only salvation lies in the reality of religion for each individual.

For me that reality lies in Holy Orthodoxy, but it may vary according to my readers. I work in sales, not management, although one welcomes the conversion of the sinner so he may not die. For while most of the Western World has either abandoned Christ or watched it turn into a Sunday Social Club where its roots and fears of the Eschaton and majesty of the Mysteries have faded away, the acknowledgment of hierarchy hasn’t faded but has only seen inversion. The abstraction of the social public, which has been formalized by both the State and the Academy, reorients man away from the divine nature (if only to blaspheme and say God is Queer) and instead tries to fit him within how he can flagellate his Western, White Self into saving Mother Gaia and be accommodating for “Climate Refugees.” Kierkegaard writes;

The abstract principle of levelling, on the contrary, like the biting east wind, has no personal relation to any individual but has only an abstract relationship which is the same for every one.

This comes naturally in the discarnate world of the online, where real people try and play as NPCs for money, Libs of Tik Tok merely reposting what teachers say out loud online as to what they want to do to their kids, and so on. The abstract principle of equality, a chiliastic egalitarianism has levelled us down, and the public square has brought us to where the public square has become the avenue where values and tradition go to die.

To return to Dryfus one more time:

Thus, while Habermas is concerned to recapture the moral and political virtues of the Public Sphere, Kierkegaard brilliantly sees that there is no way to salvage the Public Sphere since, unlike concrete groups and crowds, it was from the start the source of leveling. This leveling was produced in several ways. First, the new massive distribution of desituated information was making every sort of information immediately available to anyone, thereby producing a desituated, detached spectator. The new power of the Press to disseminate information to everyone in a nation led its readers to transcend their local, personal involvement and overcome their reticence about what did not directly concern them. As Burke had noted with joy, the Press encouraged everyone to develop an opinion about everything. This is seen by Habermas as a triumph of democratization but Kierkegaard saw that the Public Sphere was destined to become a realm of idle talk in which spectators merely pass the word along.

Idle talk where the word that gets passed along is the same thing, either on the camp where “culture sucks” or where an identity can be formulated off instantaneous access to signifiers appeal to progressive abstract virtues. Kierkegaard’s concept of The Levelling began rolling uphill at an impressive pace come the managerial revolution, where the abstract sense of progress and egalitarianism could be quantified and bureaucratized. It began rolling downhill when the public square became an instantaneous free-for-all that led to us having ourselves and our culture electronically interdependent on this public square and what is instilled from the top-down of our elites.

This is the present age, an age where the public square barely exists, it is fractured and jagged based along fandoms, consumer identities, and political projects of all sorts. It is the fatal conceit that the public square has made us more passive, how likely are we to dunk on journalists on twitter or commentate idly with memetic prowess? Even we on the right are reduced into digital abstractions, fearful of offline engagement in the paranoia (with actual legitimacy) of the regime wanting to bear down on you. The public square has become the great leveler, wherein you can watch the progressive system of global homogenization take place in real time.

In the present age, people strive for uniqueness in their own individual identity, from neo-pronouns, otherkin, trans rights, neurodivergence, you name it. Yet all of this reduces glibly all human efforts to be seen as proper and good and that herculean efforts are disparaged, and that in the eyes of most people vices are totally fine. If everyone is gay, trans, queer, autistic, neurodivergent, then what really are you than just the sameness and ugliness that is associated with humans of flat design?

There is nothing unique or human here at all, all levelled down.

Looking On

Kierkegaard is well worth your time reading, and offers a critique of the public space and the fading presence of the fear of God quite nicely, and not just the 1846 Two Ages: A Literary Review. His writings on The Present Age is well worth revisiting, and in an age of progressive systematizing homogenization we can see that the Levelling has come for us and eaten culture and faith quite quickly in our digital public squares. Rebellion would come just two years later to Europe in 1848, and in 2023, we find ourselves all calmly trying to ignore the obvious fraying and deliberate destruction of Western Social Fabrics.

The press and public square are just as much to blame for a life that is rife with submission and slavery to the demons of our passions, that have enabled us to live passionless towards the things that actually matter such as our civilization and our posterity. We as individuals, those who retain it and are oriented towards the Almighty, must preserve and organize both collectively and religiously to endure. The left will wear your religion as a skinsuit, but the Gates of Hell will Not Prevail, but it requires us to act in the meantime. To retain our humanity, our individuality, one must harden themselves and prepare for what is to come for as St. Anthony the Great had said “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.’” That time is certainly now.