The shift to remote working or working from home relied on internet technology – both hardware and software – steadily building up to a trigger point. During the 2010’s the question in IT circles was often asked as to what our WWII trigger would be to make the big shift (WWII ramping up scientific and engineering ideas that had been cooking through the 1930’s, like radar, nuclear energy, rockets and missiles). The great Chinese Lung Rot pandemic appears to have been that trigger.

But it may have been a trigger for much else beside; other forces and ideas that had been bubbling up from below but which only became obvious with the arrival of this disease and more accurately, the madcap responses to it by governments around the world.

Increasing problems with Public Education in the West and Public Health. Hanging over all this, the incredible amounts of debt piled up by governments, businesses and individuals, puts all of us in increasingly tight corners when SHTF. Not to mention rich, insane people planning for a future of where you will own nothing and be happy – people who support all the above. China’s many problems, so long suppressed, are also coming to the boil as a result of this trigger.

To be fair there many potentially bad things happening at the moment not related to C-19: it’s hard to keep track of them.

The war in Ukraine. The energy crisis triggered by that event, especially in Europe where it has revealed serious problems with so-called “Green Energy”, plus the Biden Administration’s attacks on oil and gas drilling in the US. The food crisis triggered by the same event but keying off the increasing insanity of governments directly attacking farmers (see Sri Lanka and now Holland). Although even in the case of energy and food at least one prominent group of “thinkers” have held that C-19 was a chance for what they call The Great Reset. They think this is all good.

While it’s important to confront these terrible ideas head on, it pays to dive into the recent past to find out where they came from and why they’ve got as far as they have even as they damage our society. I intend this to be a series that looks at a brief selection of essays, one post at a time that you may wish to explore on lazy Sunday afternoons.

How We Got Here: An Intellectual History.

By a former music and cultural critic of the New York Times, he tracks how Post-Modernism (PoMo, “truth is an illusion”) took over his world through the 1980’s/90’s and then, after 9/11, how PoMo got supplanted by Woke, in the form of a variant of PoMo called Postcolonialism (PoCo), which attacked the previously worshipped world of The Enlightenment because – for all the advances in science, medicine and such that it enabled – had also led to Imperialism:

Societies that had been colonized by European powers, in this view, were not just burdened by misuse of power; they were also burdened by Western claims of “superiority” and “universality.”
…
The conclusions are stark: No culture could claim an objectively truthful vision of the world. And no culture could claim superiority because none had the “right” or even the ability to judge another. 

PoCo established a link between that Enlightenment universality and racism: not simple bigotry but that evil term, “Systemic Racism”, which “Woke” would pick up and run with:

Yoke these ideas to the PoMo notions that “objective” measures of competence are by definition suspect, as are ideas of “merit.” And lo, we have entered the world of Wokeness, the heir to PoMo and PoCo. Can we call it Woko? So Woko ideology is not a reversal of PoMo relativism. It is a fulfillment of it.

That’s right folks, slavery for example is deemed to be a product of Enlightenment ideals. Seems incredible but it can be done because Woko rejects the basic belief of the Enlightenment:

This is a triumph of the Western imagination. We learn to comprehend those who appear different from us by imagining how they, too, perceive the world. This was one reason, beginning in the 18th century, that the novel became a powerful new form of literature in which privileged access is seemingly given to the inner lives of characters.

But with the intellectual and cultural relativism of PoMo and PoCo and the narrow visions of Woko, not even this is possible. If no cross-cultural evaluation is legitimate, neither are claims to comprehend the inner lives of others. 

Lived experience and all that. We’re all atoms: Irreducible and unchangeable by outsiders and known only to itself. Everything else flows from that, including all that historical revisionism; identity politics cast back through time to cast down works of art and thought, the only common ground being agreement on what must be opposed, which is the West.

The Japanese militarists and Nazis would have loved this shit. And of course Cancel Kulture emerges from this with nobody’s “Identity” to be questioned. As part of the rejection of the West you can kiss goodbye to redemption, the forgiveness of sin. Oppression is all there is.

There’s some comparisons of how WoCo treats the history of Jews and American Blacks, but that’s mainly done to further explore the problems of WoCo, while also pointing out that WoCo is currently thoroughly embedded in all our institutions.