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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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The comparison to the Christian concept of original sin falls apart immediately.

In Christian theology, everyone is born with original sin and everyone has the opportunity to atone for it through faith and receiving Grace. It's universal and - wait for it - egalitarian.

Wokeness has explicit power hierarchy from birth wherein some groups are sinless throughout life and others are without redemption. Furthermore, Christian original sin is about the origin point of man - we are all fallen. Wokeness is about different historical scorecards for inherited wrongness. Some groups (white males) have inherited such substantial debts that we can actually condemn them as a class (isn't that like, bad?). The Canadians are now finding ways to help people of all types find ways to not be the wrong types.

It's conceptually eugenic - if you're born "wrong" maybe we won't kill you (although if your self-sterilize that would be nice), but you will be confined to a life of non-personhood full of self-flagellation. But if I can "choose" to be something that is biologically impossible, it begs the question - why can't we all just choose to be one of the non-bad character classes?

Sometimes I do believe the double-weirdos when they say that middle aged divorced men transition just so they have some relevance to society today.

Wokeness has explicit power hierarchy from birth wherein some groups are sinless throughout life

I don't know about that. Unless you're a gay black trans disabled palestinian poor nonbinary woman, there's still something for you to feel guilty about. Within every group there are people being made to feel guilty about the more oppressed members of that group. Pride parades themselves have been relentlessly attacked for not including POCs, being too corporate, being sexist, etc. For every article about black men being sexist, there's an article about white women calling the cops and demanding to speak to the manager.

I agree that the woke version of original sin isn't as egalitarian, though I think it still takes advantage of the same psychological mechanisms that Christianity does. Christianity and wokeness are both puritanical religions, in which the goal of being free of sin/privilege is always slightly out of reach. This is good for perpetuating the religion, because it turns people into either evangelists who relentlessly attempt to convert others, or villains who lash out at the religion and provide an example of what not do do. A simple civil religion that says "Thor is great, be like Thor" or "love is love" isn't going to divide people as effectively.

Ah, so they've speedrun Calvinism.

I knew I could count on a banger from @hydroacetylene.

In a word, yes. Wokeness has all of the hallmarks of fundamentalist revival movement. There's no coherent worldview or deeper investigated theology, it all ends at the level of "what we're fighting for is right because we're fighting so hard for it."