Confronting Woke: Systemic Contempt in the age of Narcissism
How do we talk about Respect and Authority?
One of the regular features of the narcissism of our age is a contempt for hierarchies, for competence and for achievement. Its starting to look like the communist revolutionary contempt for the economic elites before they seized the means of production and killed or starved 60 million people.
Contempt and disgust are intertwined emotions and as Malcolm Gladwell observed in his 2005 book, “Blink,” these two linked behaviors are the single most reliable features in predicting marriages that will end in divorce. Contempt for our family members, colleagues and broadly of our fellow humans is a toxic and destructive attitude that leads to dehumanization and abuse. It happen from small scales like intimate partner relationships to the very largest scales like cultures and nations. When contempt and disgust is directed by groups towards other groups, it is a socially corrosive and very dangerous force.
If we in any way are grateful for the decades of peace we’ve enjoyed living in this imperfect, yet evolving, experiment in civil society, we will confront this in every instance in which we see it.
In many ways this contemptuous attitude is the central problem of wokeness, of cancel culture, and of the censorious left. It is almost universally expressed in tandem with illegitimate demands for respect. The act combine to say: “We are the anointed, the virtuous, the worthy! You are the pagan, the unlearned, the unworthy”
This is a phenomenon often found in imperialistic, dare I say colonial and paternalistic religious expansions and also in groups of teen girls.
Teenage-girls sometimes outgrow these power tactics and outgrow they willingness to engage in nastiness - just like most boys outgrow the response to use physical violence and intimidation to solve problems. People either learn how to get along with others as they grow up or they become known in their families, friend circles and workplaces as toxic tyrants and bullies. They are extremely difficult and costly people to deal with and they inevitably leave a trail of chaos and destruction in their wakes.
What we have however is a widespread, collective and pervasive toxic power-play in society that is entrenching itself in our institutions. “Systemically Oppressed” vs Oppressors.
There are far too many people claiming to be working towards social justice, trans inclusion and racial equity who demand respect and attempt to appropriate authority from society. They claim they are marginalized victims and they display a deep contempt for the people they are attempting to extract respect from. They express their contempt by shaming, abusing and attacking people who they believe are guilty of benefiting at the expense of others. They do this based on race and gender.
These people demand, as many immature, toxic and abusive people do, that they be respected. Anyone who does not comply is an enemy.
We should not be bullied or guilted into deferring authority to people who claim to be special or unique. We should begin our human interactions in a civil society with the presumption of good faith and an expectation of civility in return providing that we recognize that street-smarts and discernment must also be used. When people give indications they are untrustworthy or exploitative, or even if there are no shared interests or a lack of rapport, in the social world, we are under no obligation to them.
Alan Watts remarked in a few lectures that you can never say to someone, “You MUST love me, you can no more tell someone to love you than you can tell a flower to bloom.” which seems so obvious when you consider it.
Yet we are seeing an increasingly adopted worldview based on group identities and racial and sex stereotypes, that says some people are not worthy of the same civility one extends to the rest of society, and that they MUST capitulate to power claims of another person. These are the behaviors toxic abusers and these relationships don’t end until the people facing the abuse stand up and call it what it is.
We are seeing these power claims infiltrating our workplaces and schools and even social lives. People are being divided against their friends and families. When institutions adopt these structures, which is happening from universities, to schools, to PTAs to knitting clubs, it meets the absolute definition of systemic abuse, carried out in the name of ending systemic abuse.
Let us remember the definitions of respect, and let us reclaim self-respect along the way. Otherwise we will allow abusers to shame us into nothingness.