Wokeism is dead - Lex Fridman

[whh2222]

I'm really happy Leo acknowledged the fringe extreme left as fools who primed us for a potential far right fascists takeover. Because they really are fucking stupid. Not as stupid as the far right, but they are their own unique special brand of stupid. Queers for Palestine lmfao 

[Oeaohoo]

20 hours ago, Scholar said:

This is basically what progress is, a freeing of the will of mankind in relation to subsiding survival pressures. 

Except that it’s a cyclical process of rise and fall rather than a linear and progressive trajectory.

The subsiding of survival pressures creates decadence because it allows people to forget the harsher realities of life. This leads to societal collapse, out of which emerges a new, less “free” social order.

[zazen]

On 17/11/2024 at 1:27 PM, zazen said:

People are too busy fighting between left and right rather than looking above. The irony is that progressives fear Trump dismantling institutions and agencies but are unable to understand why conservatives fear the left dismantling the fabric of reality itself. One is acting irrational, the other is acting reckless in the name of capitalist innovation and anarchic libertarianism. It is natural to fear both.

The problem I see is that only one fear is validated as noble and righteous by the mainstream establishment (the fear of establishment outsiders or those inside wanting to change it) whilst the other fear is mocked as regressive and backwards (the fear of a ideology being untethered from reality).

Wokism is the misdirected and misplaced expression of the souls yearning to transcend the limitations of form - they destroy or deny form instead. The truth is we are biologically conservative (form, boundaried), yet spiritually liberal (formless, boundless). We are lost in translation between two worlds, the duality we are - and this manifests in many ways including politics.

Liberalism honors the formless (God / soul) within each form - thus calling for justice and equality for all. Conservatism honors the stability of form (Gods creation / structure) - thus calling to conserve it. Liberalism taken too far into what we call wokism denies form all together. Conservatism gone too far into what we call fundamentalism see's nothing beyond form.

 

The world we inhabit, like the universe that birthed us, is bound by form. Life is a dance between the infinite, boundless spirit - the source of creativity and meaning - and the finite, structured constraints of reality. Ideologies, for better or worse, must be born downstream of this reality. They cannot escape it. The attempt to impose formlessness on form is not progress but decadence masquerading as liberation.

In times of decadence, humans experiment with ideas because they can afford to. Romans fiddled with extravagance and moral relativism while their empire rotted from within. French aristocracy debated philosophy in gilded salons while the guillotine waited just around the corner. And today in the West, we do much the same: entertaining ideologies so detached from material and biological reality they can only survive in the padded luxury of abundance.

Wokeness is a boundless effort in a boundaried world - to deconstruct everything, from gender to language, in pursuit of a utopia that cannot exist in the world of form. Wokeness is awakening calcified into a new sleep. What started as a call for deeper seeing became a new form of blindness when all it saw was: restraint as oppressive rather than protective, hierarchy as pure domination,  differences as inherent injustices. It mistakes surface level deconstruction for genuine liberation. It deconstructs everything while reconstructing nothing - a nihilistic carnival of progressive performance where complexity and nuance goes to die. It weaponises compassion into a cult like control system that controls via an insidious, invisible social contagion rather than a visible, apparent dictator with a face. It is an inverted totalitarianism as Chris Hedges put it.

Progress isn't about freeing the will from survival needs - it's about finding more elegant ways to align with them. We can't un-need needs. Hunger doesn't disappear because we've progressed enough to have grocery stores. The longing to belong to community doesn't disappear because we've developed social media. Progress is realising that the will itself isn't separate from nature - it's nature becoming conscious of itself. True freedom then isn't necessarily the absence of constraint, but the mastery of working within the necessary constraints of form. Wokism seeks to escape form, rather than evolve a better way of living within it. Progress integrates new understanding and environments with eternal principles. It builds upon reality's bedrock rather than trying to float above it.

Wokism and similar abstractions thrive not because they are practical or even moral, but because hard times have not yet forced it to reconcile with reality. It is, as writer Rob Henderson says - a “luxury belief.” You can only afford to argue that men can get pregnant or that dismantling police departments is sensible when your belly is full and your streets are safe. But reality doesn't debate, it demonstrates. In the decline phase of empire, luxury beliefs give way to necessary beliefs. 

Inflation, geopolitical tensions rising across continents, erosion of community and belonging - the signs of hard times echoed in history. History repeats itself not as comedy or tragedy, but as the ruthless law of reality reclaiming its throne. When survival is at stake, society sheds its frivolities. The spirit, so eager to transcend limits, must once again bow to the constraints of form. Ideological excess dies not by debate but by necessity.

Wokeism won't end because Donald Trump tweets something provocative, or because of conservatives railing against it. It will end because it cannot survive the hard times bearing down upon us. When people are struggling to feed their families, they don’t have the bandwidth to argue over pronouns or privilege theory. The luxury of endless deconstruction collapses under the weight of survival.

The proof is in the patterns we see emerging. Cities once heralded as bastions of progressivism - San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle - now face crises of homelessness, crime, and governance that even their most liberal citizens cannot ignore. Decay exposes the impracticality of ideologies untethered from reality. The pendulum swings back not because of malice but because of gravity.

And here’s the irony: wokeness, for all its posturing, is blind to its own privilege. It doesn’t see that its obsession with fluidity, abstraction, and infinite reinterpretation is only possible in a world that still functions. When the world malfunctions or stops functioning altogether - it won’t be wokeness that saves us. It will be the conservative impulse of reality itself, optimizing for survival and demanding order.

This isn’t new, nor is it unexpected. Hard times force humanity to return to the basics: food, shelter, safety, and community. The formless gives way to the form once again, and the cycle resets. If there is any lesson here, it is that we should aim for balance - not the extremes of wokeness or rigid traditionalism, but the wisdom to honor both spirit and form, creativity and reality.

So let the ideologues deconstruct reality while they still can. The luxury is running out, and the reckoning is already here. When it arrives, it won’t be a politician or a pundit that ends this chapter. It will be the hard, cold truth of the human condition: form always reclaims its place, and reality always has the final word.

Edited Monday at 03:40 PM by zazen

[Emerald]

2 hours ago, Oeaohoo said:

Except that it’s a cyclical process of rise and fall rather than a linear and progressive trajectory.

The subsiding of survival pressures creates decadence because it allows people to forget the harsher realities of life. This leads to societal collapse, out of which emerges a new, less “free” social order.

I never believed in the idea that strong men - good times - weak men - hard times cycle. That always just seemed to me that this idea comes about from a type of modern spoiledness and seeing the contemporary way of life only through a negative lens.

It's clear to me that good times (where people have their emotional and physical needs met) produces less trauma. And that subsequently produces psychologically healthier people who are able to adapt better to the world, and who are less prone to self-destruction.

It's evident to me that human evolution is both cyclical and progressive with a trajectory towards love, unity, and expansion... and an awakening of global consciousness.

It's similar to giving birth... with its cyclical patterns of painful contraction of the pelvic muscles enabling the cervix to expand wider and wider and wider... until something brand new can come about. And I believe that we've collectively been in this process of labor and giving birth for the past 10,000 years as there have been many contractions and expansions over the course of written history compared to our nomadic past.

Right now, we're about to go into a contraction for a minute. But if the pain is sharp enough and the contraction is deep enough, we will come back from that contraction more dilated and wiser and more able to step into deeper levels of consciousness and a more world-centric paradigm.

[Scholar]

4 hours ago, Oeaohoo said:

Except that it’s a cyclical process of rise and fall rather than a linear and progressive trajectory.

The subsiding of survival pressures creates decadence because it allows people to forget the harsher realities of life. This leads to societal collapse, out of which emerges a new, less “free” social order.

It's not in any way a rise and fall, it is an upward trend that sometimes has dips.

[El Zapato]

I agree, it isn't dead, it is just suffering the teeter of the Hegelian Dialectic.  Hopefully, when the other side goes extinct, it will be a much faster process

Edited Monday at 09:35 PM by El Zapato

[Schizophonia]

1 hour ago, Emerald said:

I never believed in the idea that strong men - good times - weak men - hard times cycle. That always just seemed to me that this idea comes about from a type of modern spoiledness and seeing the contemporary way of life only through a negative lens.

It's clear to me that good times (where people have their emotional and physical needs met) produces less trauma. And that subsequently produces psychologically healthier people who are able to adapt better to the world, and who are less prone to self-destruction.

It's evident to me that human evolution is both cyclical and progressive with a trajectory towards love, unity, and expansion... and an awakening of global consciousness.

It's similar to giving birth... with its cyclical patterns of painful contraction of the pelvic muscles enabling the cervix to expand wider and wider and wider... until something brand new can come about. And I believe that we've collectively been in this process of labor and giving birth for the past 10,000 years as there have been many contractions and expansions over the course of written history compared to our nomadic past.

Right now, we're about to go into a contraction for a minute. But if the pain is sharp enough and the contraction is deep enough, we will come back from that contraction more dilated and wiser and more able to step into deeper levels of consciousness and a more world-centric paradigm.

Living in unnatural conditions creates degenerations, whether they are supposedly favorable or unfavorable conditions.

Traumatized people end up most of the time weaker and less mature than "normal" people, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is false in this context.

But at the same time, men who didn't do sports during their youth and/or were stuffed with comforts are also physically and physically damaged (smaller brains, less androgenic behavior and physique etc).

[Emerald]

5 hours ago, Schizophonia said:

Living in unnatural conditions creates degenerations, whether they are supposedly favorable or unfavorable conditions.

Traumatized people end up most of the time weaker and less mature than "normal" people, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is false in this context.

But at the same time, men who didn't do sports during their youth and/or were stuffed with comforts are also physically and physically damaged (smaller brains, less androgenic behavior and physique etc).

What are you defining as unnatural?

Human beings aren't capable of doing things outside of our nature. It's just that our nature looks different than other creatures on this planet.

One of the major issues as human beings is that we see ourselves as existing as something outside of nature and interacting with it as an outsider, as opposed to recognizing that we are just as natural as any other living organism on this planet.

Can you see that cars, computers, and all the tools that we have created are just as natural as when a beaver builds a dam, or a wasp builds a nest?

And when we are subjected to any conditions, we will have contrasts that arise... both positive and negative.

And this creates both growth and decay. Regeneration and degeneration. Birth and death. That is the way of nature.

And it is the weakness of the cell that is the vigor of the organism. Degeneration is what helps us slough off the dead skin and move forward.

We're always moving 10 steps forward and 9 steps back as a species. So, usually when people start labeling out "degeneration" they are just pointing out the things that are naturally decaying that they wanted to hold onto.

And then they start believing that the entire world is degenerating and going to hell in a hand basket because their personal squishy bears are dying. But in reality, there's stability, regeneration, and degeneration all around us.

But this is just spoiled modern thinking. We take for granted how awesome things are. And we only see a fallen world.

Also, I'm going to need a CREDIBLE source to show that boys who don't play sports when they're little have smaller brains and are less Masculine.

 

Edited Monday at 11:17 PM by Emerald

[Schizophonia]

14 hours ago, Emerald said:

What are you defining as unnatural?

Human beings aren't capable of doing things outside of our nature. It's just that our nature looks different than other creatures on this planet.

One of the major issues as human beings is that we see ourselves as existing as something outside of nature and interacting with it as an outsider, as opposed to recognizing that we are just as natural as any other living organism on this planet.

Can you see that cars, computers, and all the tools that we have created are just as natural as when a beaver builds a dam, or a wasp builds a nest?

And when we are subjected to any conditions, we will have contrasts that arise... both positive and negative.

And this creates both growth and decay. Regeneration and degeneration. Birth and death. That is the way of nature.

And it is the weakness of the cell that is the vigor of the organism. Degeneration is what helps us slough off the dead skin and move forward.

We're always moving 10 steps forward and 9 steps back as a species. So, usually when people start labeling out "degeneration" they are just pointing out the things that are naturally decaying that they wanted to hold onto.

And then they start believing that the entire world is degenerating and going to hell in a hand basket because their personal squishy bears are dying. But in reality, there's stability, regeneration, and degeneration all around us.

But this is just spoiled modern thinking. We take for granted how awesome things are. And we only see a fallen world.

Also, I'm going to need a CREDIBLE source to show that boys who don't play sports when they're little have smaller brains and are less Masculine.

 

By natural, i mean being exposed to a similar setting to the one to which we have been exposed during our evolution.

Yes from a certain point of view everything that humans do is natural, humans do humans things just like beavers do beavers stuff.
It doesn't change the fact that you shouldn't eat random mushrooms in the forest because you risk dying.

 

+In case it wasn't clear i was agree with you.

[Emerald]

2 hours ago, Schizophonia said:

By natural, i mean being exposed to a similar setting to the one to which we have been exposed during our evolution.

Yes from a certain point of view everything that humans do is natural, humans do humans things just like beavers do beavers stuff.
It doesn't change the fact that you shouldn't eat random mushrooms in the forest because you risk dying.

+In case it wasn't clear i was agree with you.

When I think about human nature, I see it as an unfurling of new archetypes, inventions, and paradigms that already lay in wait in the recesses of the human psyche.

So, I view all things that we invent, create, think, do, and subject ourselves to as part of that natural unfurling.

And that will naturally take us into a state of opposition to our nomadic wiring as those are the stress tests necessary to bringing about greater changes as a collective. 

For example, we have evolved to be deeply immersed in community. And we have a profound need for connection. And yet, we have developed a society that takes us away from connection.

And one might think. This is unnatural for us. And it's unhealthy. And on one level, that's true. It's very stressful to the mind and body of a human being to be alone.

But on a deeper level, this age of Hermicism is also part of the unfurling of new potentials where we are driven apart for a time to help us come more into our authenticity and to experience freedom... only to coalesce again from a higher ordering principle that allows both social connection and authenticity/will/autonomy at once.

And certainly, there is the possibility that we can be a stillbirth species, where we don't make it past the tipping point and we self-destruct before reaching the new birth.

But in the grand scheme of things, I have a lot of faith in humanity to make it through these stress tests. We're adapting so quickly and so well to so many things. We're just way up close to the phenomenon, and so we can't see that we're actually sticking the landing.

97.5% of humanity's past is nomadic. And 2.5% of humanity's past is agrarian (which is where all the conservative values were technological adaptations to survival). And just a sliver of a percentage has been industrial and post-industrial living.

So, the past 10,000 years is like a sudden peak of change and growth and evolution. And we're still in that 10,000 year growth spurt. And growth spurts are always chaotic with all sorts of stresses to the human system.

So, it's quite natural that we be stress tested by collective dynamics that run in opposition to our nomadic wiring.

Edited Tuesday at 03:45 PM by Emerald

[zazen]

 

Meanwhile Bud light learning from their mistakes:

 

Edited 3 hours ago by zazen