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I suppose a counterpoint to the 2nd paragraph would be that it's also comforting to blame a select few groups for the cultural crisis, but it's much more black pilling to believe that a sizable chunk of the masses isn't merely being misled, but is very much within its own agency when it demands more wokeness. And to some extent, what's most fashionable among the woke urban middle class does seem to direct the conversation. For instance, throughout the last decade, it was all feminism that was pushed so aggressively as the centrepiece of woke. Culminating into MeToo which went on until 2019. It's still being pushed of course, but the spotlight is on BLM since the George Floyd protests and the whole "Defund the police" campaign. I just cannot rationalise such a scheme without making it seem even sillier. There does seem to be some pressure from below.
Well, you're a bit behind the times, because even BLM fell out of fashion post-Rittenhouse, it's all about trans issues now, which will also fall out of fashion because of the medical scandal around transgender care for minors.
I sympathize with the pushback against being psychologized, since as you rightly point out this is something anyone can do to anyone, but in my opinion the mundane theory just doesn't hold water. If there was pressure from below, you shouldn't have seen accusations of of nut-picking in the past. If there was pressure from below you shouldn't see wokeness having to rely on censorship, shadow-banning, and algorithmic supression. If there was pressure from below, you should see that Harry Potter game bomb in terms of sales, and fuddy-daddy game journos struggling to explain it. Everything about these mundane explanations flies in the face of observable reality.
It seems pretty brilliant from where I sit. It's like fighting a hydra, for every head you chop off, two new ones take it's place.
What is the end goal of all this, in your view? Culture wars to avoid a class war? If so, why now and not, say, 20 years ago?
The end goal, or the likely outcome?
The end goal is obvious. A prosperous, equitable society free of injustice, poverty and oppression.
The likely outcome is a very large pile of skulls, when society passes some critical point and abruptly and catastrophically decoheres. Most, perhaps all of the precursors for that eventuality are already baked in to our social reality; we're now just rolling the dice until we hit snake-eyes.
Why not twenty years ago? Because that's how policy starvation works. Twenty years ago, or fifty for that matter, the easy, palatable solutions hadn't been discredited yet, so people overwhelmingly went with them rather than with the ravings of the extremists. After decades of effort those moderate solutions all failed and were discredited, so now consensus is falling in behind the radicals. The radicals are likewise failing, and so soon it will be the super-radicals and so on. Since their goal isn't actually possible, it will simply go on in this fashion until the system as a whole runs out of capacity to absorb the strain.
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Answering that would require greater insight into society, and how it's run, than any of us can plausibly get, but something like avoiding class war does feel plausible to me. But the question of "why now" doesn't feel that relevant to me. Maybe they just didn't get the idea yet? Maybe it's a question of logistics - for certain things to happen, certain other things have to have happened before, and we weren't at that point yet? Maybe in the past class war itself served the same function that wokeness does now, but it got a bit out of hand, and had to be replaced?
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