Do you ever wonder what is keeping you from saying the simple, good-hearted and obvious statement: “All Lives Matter”? It’s the modern version of woke totalitarianism. Through the use of lies and cancel culture, it is destroying most of America’s institutions.
Michael Shellenberger, author of “Totalitarian Manipulation Of Language Behind Woke Destruction Of Harvard, New York Times, And Other Elite Institutions. It’s time for counter-Wokeism.”
Investigative reporters have exposed a pattern of plagiarism by Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, that directly violates the university’s policy. . . .
The first salient feature of the above episodes is the willingness of institutional leaders to lie about what they are doing. The first response from Harvard’s Board of Directors was to deny that President Gay had committed any instance plagiarism and to threaten the New York Post with a lawsuit if it reported the opposite of that. The New York Times similarly lied about the op-ed piece it had published and effectively asked the oped page editor to lie about his departure. And similarly, the AAA falsely claimed that the anthropologists who wanted to discuss biological sex on a conference panel had not accurately represented their topic.
In each case, the institutional leaders lied in order to cover up unethical behavior. Harvard was covering up both the plagiarism of its president and the unwillingness of Harvard to do anything about it. The New York Times misrepresented the substance of the op-ed in order to disavow it and, perhaps, to justify forcing out the op-ed page editor. And the AAA lied about what the dissident anthropologists did in order to justify its blatant censorship.
And those lies and unethical behaviors all rest upon a set of underlying lies. Harvard lied when it claimed that it had selected its president on the basis of her qualifications, even calling Gay a “scholar’s scholar” despite her having a below-average scholarly record. The New York Times and the Harvard president, when she was still the Dean of Arts and Sciences, had been misrepresenting Black Lives Matter protests as peaceful and driven by a genuine epidemic of police killings. And AAA’s cancelation of the panel was based on the organization’s claim that biological sex is a spectrum rather than dimorphic. All of this lying is characteristic of totalitarian regimes…
Woke totalitarianism advances values that are contrary to the ones it espouses. It claims to be opposed to racism and sexism and yet promotes them through perpetuating the idea that people, by dint of their race or sex, are either victims or oppressors. It claims to be liberatory and empowering of those individuals designated victims while promoting the idea that they cannot escape their victim identity. And Woke totalitarianism promotes the notion that it is wise and truthful despite promoting such monstrous lies.”
What is the solution? It’s not going to be pleasant or easy, but we need to confront those who are tearing down our institution with their corrupted language.
Once we understand Woke activists and leaders in elite institutions as being in the grip of an anti-social and dehumanizing dogma which uses dishonest esoteric language to manipulate emotions and people, we can know to take them seriously, but not literally. At an interpersonal level, the best way to deal with narcissists is to ignore them, thereby depriving them of the attention they seek; at an institutional level, they must be confronted in a public way.
