Crushing Recusants in the Age of Ideological Obedience
The coterie of elites employ themselves as gatekeepers to the activities and social structures of society, a projection of the disdain they hold for the common man
What we call “Woke” (for now) is the Red-Lining of values through ideological prisms promulgated through race, class, and gender identities. The word itself was a construct of exclusion. The human desire to be on the inside of the social group du moment can cause a person to think and speak in ways he otherwise wouldn’t, or to act in ways counter to his previously held morals and beliefs. In his classic essay “The Inner Ring”, C.S. Lewis says,
I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.
A certain class of people use their lock-step adherence to an ever-growing list of demands and restrictions as a badge of virtue. It is how they separate themselves from the unwashed. It is a status symbol and exclusionary tool to indicate membership in an intellectual club. This new Status Class has morphed into a gnostic following, the rules of which intentionally and turbulently shift in order to keep those who create the rules always in the most exclusive ring, mercilessly leaving those on the outside breathlessly trying to learn the new ideology and corresponding social jargon so as not to be contemptuously cast out with contempt as nonbelievers.
Language is used to set the parameters of who shall be admitted into the Status Class, and much more importantly, who shall be allowed to stay. This wholesale social awakening has prompted a change in language, not to mark a burgeoning era of innovation, but to indulge in the shallowness of our presumptions. A sorting of superficial characteristics to complete a social hierarchy ensconces the elites of the Status Class firmly at the top. We see greater divisionary terms based on skin color, ethnicity, sexual identity, and gender. Words like heteronormative, nonbinary, anti-racism, equity, white-privilege, white-adjacent, micro-aggression, Latinx are used as identifiers. Their use isn’t meant to endear to be inclusive or to signal tolerance. Rather, they are badges earned and proudly displayed rolling off the lips and pages of those who trade in their exclusivity. “That’s what I hate about the times we live in, the terms,” the prescient words of Ellie Guggenheimer, immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic.” It is the price of admission for people who wield language as a weapon against political and cultural enemies and a shield against threats to their realized power.
We’re witnessing the prostitution of language and behavior that affects thinking and critical discourse. It inhibits necessary debate to solve societal problems and ease tensions between social, political, and economic groups. The media, amid political reordering, is grasping at the edge of the cliff of influence. The corporate media retains its power, not by building confidence in consumers or cementing its place as a trusted institution but gives in to the temptation of insulated moral superiority. The so-called journalists and reporters who set out to “change the world”, don’t do so by representing facts, but by bending reality to fit a preconceived narrative, furthering identity divisions, and advancing the exclusivity of the status class. The media signals, in increasingly extreme terms, the parameters of what is socially and culturally acceptable. Those who abide by the rules are the good, the righteous, the morally superior. Those who rebel, object, or even question them are ridiculed, mocked, and ostracized as cultural lepers.
Once the bed is made, the media’s algophilia knows no limits nor shame. Taking advantage of the genuine compassion of Americans toward minority groups based on its original sin of slavery, the elite class use bigotry and racism as a cudgel to disown dissenters from its progressive vision, widening the ring of exclusion. It is the peremptory device separating the good from evil. Decades of collective shame and prostration before grievance adjudicators have separated the sin from its meaning. It has now been commandeered as another, perhaps the most important and effective, sanctimonious badge of honor. The media constantly makes examples of people to create bulwarks against threats to their power and influence. Nick Sandman, Kim Potter, Drew Brees, and now Kyle Rittenhouse are inextricably tied to the poison arrow that is accusations of racism or evidence of America’s systemic racism.
Media: Why Do Reporting When We Already Know Rittenhouse Is a Terrorist? [Supercut] :: Grabien News
The media feeds people an ideology of what they want to be the prevailing beliefs. The revolution of the modern American ideology has transformed from one of a shared system of beliefs to a hierarchical caste that weaponizes identity politics and language as a tool of exclusion. It is wickedness masquerading as compassion. The status class condoned the race riots of 2020, they vote to defund the police in communities devasted by street violence, they eliminate gifted and talented programs from schools and graduate kids painfully unprepared for life. They put Black Lives Matter signs in their pristine, gated yards, all to comply with the rules that keep them in the inner ring. It’s a lie that would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. The most glaring example is the “De-Fund the Police” movement. In Minneapolis, the lines of exclusion couldn’t be more clear. The rich, white liberals voted overwhelmingly to defund the Minneapolis Police Department, while those in the most violence-stricken, poor, black neighborhoods voted to keep the Department.
This is a symptom of our decadent society, that an exclusionary, well-heeled coterie has an outsized influence on society and is remaking it as their temple. They are enamored with abstractions and theoretical absolutes that have no connection with reality. They wear it as an intellectual equivalent to what the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined, “conspicuous consumption,” in a modern-day interpretation of his 1899 treatise, Theory of the Leisure Class. The contemporary elites employ themselves as gatekeepers to the activities and social structures of society, a projection of the disdain they hold for the common man. They cannot bear to live by the standards of the traditional values shaped and steeled in the fires of the human condition, the stoics, the Western Canon. Harold Bloom called this the “School of Resentment.” They preoccupy themselves with social activism and political grievances, insisting on a literary affirmative action by adding works based on minority groups rather than scholarly merit or influence. Doing so destroys the foundations of our beliefs and traditions, remaking society as a house of cards.
The peril is in the nonconformist, the heretic to the Gnosticism, the recusant in this age of ideological obedience. For those who awakened to the suicide of Western civilization, the dearth of heterodoxy, a famine of free thought and innovation in a world hungry for bold ideas, the consequence of self-awareness is swift and complete punishment. It reveals itself in former allies who dare vote against the progressive orthodoxy – being race traitors, Uncle Toms, black white supremacists, TERFS, and domestic terrorists. No matter how deeply a person sacrificed his speech, his thought, his faith, and his moral beliefs at the altar of the Status Temple, it would never be good enough if there was a hint of dissent. The rule of the elites must be unquestioned and absolute. As Robespierre proclaimed, “To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.”
Is this the endgame of a society obsessed with attaining gilded deification in the Status Class? Have we approached this point because we allowed the bifurcation of values from traditional notions of moral virtue? Over the course of the last half-century, when the radical awakening of Solipsism gave rise to the confusion of standards and moral anomie, is there any way out of the morass? Yes. But as it took us decades to reach this point, so it will take longer to climb out. We see the sunlight in small cracks created by writers on Substack like Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald. Those who refuse to conform to a dogma of moral slavery like John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, and Coleman Hughes. The professors and university workers who refuse to be silenced by the cowards in elite schools of higher learning who demand ideological conformity like Peter Boghossian, Jacob Howland, Dorian Abbott, and Jodi Shaw. We must renew our commitment to the classical teaching of our children. We must support those who dare broaden the debate of ideas, not deaden us to a fin de siècle malaise.
George Orwell wrote of Charles Dickens in his Collected Essays, [have the face] “of a man who was always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry – in other words, a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are contending for our souls.”
Indeed.