Two decades ago, one of my university professors asked the class of students I was in how many bathrooms we had in our homes. It quickly became clear that the fewer bathrooms we could boast, the greater the currency we possessed in order to purchase observable virtue. When it came my turn, I asked if the fact that I had an outhouse until I was seven years old counted in my favour: it did not. After reading Douglas Murray’s book The Madness of Crowds, I have a greater understanding of what was happening in that room 20 plus years ago, and what continues to happen in the strange rooms we find ourselves in today. In the new world order a small class of people have risen to defend the underdog, which would seem to be anyone in the minority category: black, gay, immigrant, trans, and so on. According to Murray this elite class views privilege based on external characteristics as the new enemy: namely skin colour and possibly bathroom count.
Murray explains that this new upper class colludes with tech companies to extract pre-determined conclusion about people, for the purposes of weeding out their thoughts from public engagement. Apparently, the belief that a proclivity toward racist, homo/transphobic, right extremism have a higher incidence found in those individuals encased, for example, in the males with white skin is just one tenet of the new religious elite called woke. This group of individuals, while standing above everyone else in judgement and privilege feigns a self loathing (of trivial offenses) to highlight their righteous moral high ground that dare not be questioned; while at the same time hiding their real sin: racism, hate, hysteria, the very things they project onto their victims.
I work now with over 100 volunteers in a thrift shop to raise money for a good cause. A short while ago I asked a fellow worker if she heard the term woke. She had not. There exists a myriad of reasons why conflicts in one intellectual sphere bear little image to the lives of those in another. But without question we live in an era that until such time that certain issues flood the commons through powerful systems of release, they would otherwise go unnoticed. The export of ideas from powerful story makers (in concert with tech censorship of dissenting thought) must not be underestimated. An understanding of how information is produced and which way it flows to create policy is crucial to decision making for the every day citizen. Without an examination of conclusions that are arguably divisive, hateful and novel, the masses buy into “the science” that masquerades as an output of independent thought in a democracy.
Murray’s point is well taken. The speed at which media infects a person’s thoughts is overwhelming. Suddenly the consumer through “illusion of consent” via tech distortion, thinks he has a read on the popular sentiment of the day. Not wanting to be viewed as a bigot, racist, homophobe, he retweets the meme or slogan and then castigates anyone who thinks differently. The ruling class who orchestrated the issue and interpretation(s) to begin with, then relies on the population to enforce their perspectives and policies through this cunning flow of story formation. We fall into a trap; that being the illusion that the concerns of the common people are informing our leaders when in fact they do not. Instead, the everyday man and woman are unduly pressed upon, through the calculation of narrative flow, to nudge yea even force conclusion conformity aligning to those who hold the power.
As I read Murray’s book, I get a picture of our future that is more sinister than the stories of our past. The new colonizer’s strategy employs weapons “heretofore unimagined.” The new monarchs target the cyber space not with weapons of material destruction but social weapons of “emotional annihilation that shuns its victims into oblivion.” Shame, toilet counting, skin inspection, word-redefinition, outright cancelation and the like are the new nuclear threats. The gain from this madness? Less! Less unity, less thinking, less white influence, less science, less fact, less truth, less manliness, less men.
Murray skillfully illuminates a swath of taboo questions that challenge the set of unscientific assumptions that holds woke in a state of play. This book is a must read to help us think and question our way into sanity. We may even find ourselves in dialogue with someone other than ourselves.
Empty Box, Full Heart
Inherently, ministry life is lonely; add repressed grief to the situation and it produces a tale of gut-wrenching isolation and all the neuroticism that ensues. If you thought that it’s tough to be a leader in a church setting, The Box Must Be Empty dispels such silly notions: it is downright brutal. Kriete invites the reader to share in her messy experience of catharsis while she skillfully cradles the shock in humor and wit. This author will not disappoint. It’s not just her authenticity you’ll connect with, her epigrammatic elegance is left on every page.