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To be blunt, wokeism is an efflorescence of booming economic times, when companies can afford to waste money on pastel-haired persons of diverse pronouns and genders as an advertisement of their civic virtue.
Now there's a downturn, and the fat is being trimmed, and that means all the DEI stuff which doesn't make money and where boycotts won't really have an effect since people are pulling in their spending anyway, and now their decisions are not being made on "is the pasta rainbow hues?" but "is this value for money?"
I think there is a definite turn against the excesses which became very excessive, but the major engine of change is turning off the money tap.
No, wokeism expands when times are bad, not good. The worse the economy gets, the woker the people who are holding most of the cash get- if the game is zero-sum, and you can't buy you success over your peers, the first person to press the Defect button wins. The traditional tools for this- sexism, racism, bullshit oppression narratives, and the concern trolling/plausibly deniable lie that turns the moral panics into a globe-spanning hysteria- work just as well in 1980AD as they did in 1980BC.
When the economy's good, purity spirals aren't generally tenable- capital needs labor more than labor needs capital, so capital has to pay more. And that payment comes in what it can and can't dictate through its bureaucracy- if you start kicking out good people when you can't hire them fast enough your company goes under. People usually refer to these time periods as "golden ages"- woke and identarianism (and their perpetrators) are marginalized by economic forces.
When the economy's bad, it's all about fortifying a more tenuous grip on power. Labor needs capital more than capital needs labor, so it can once again dictate the terms. Wages go down, and "the freedom to not be humiliated at work or in society at large" is one of those things that are absolutely part of one's wage (people leave jobs that do this to them all the time, just like they leave the ones that don't pay enough in raw dollars). People refer to these time periods as "dark ages"- there's not enough opportunity to reject woke and the high heel of (capital-serving) identarianism descends once again upon the human face.
We should expect the group that managed to capture the government at the very beginning of the decline to have a bunch of legal carveouts, and continue trying to grow their power by picking tiny fragments of the population to parade around as the excuse for why labor's wages deserve to be in the toilet. Which is the reason we see diversity statements required for janitor positions, and why the oppression has become monotonically worse since wages stopped increasing ca. 1970... except for that blip in the 90s and early 00s when the Soviets collapsed and then everyone was convinced to go to war, but that was just "it stopped getting worse".
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I sort of agree with a mild version of this but I think it way overstates the case; companies are no more amenable to wasting money in good times than in bad, what may in fact be the case is that DEI departments did actually represent, or at least were perceived to represent, a reasonable investment in boom time, for any number of reasons (attracting young talent, maintaining a good public image etc.), and this is no longer to be the case in more lean times. The question was always 'is this value for money', it's just that for many the answer used to be yes, and now it's no.
If your perception of what is reasonable changes depending on how much money you have, and you are more likely to find more things to be reasonable when you have more money, and assuming the perception of what is reasonable is more tolerant towards risk when you have more money, how are you not then more susceptible to waste money when you have more money? Sure, no one couches their investments as 'waste'. But it's hard to call it anything else after the fact has been revealed that you 'invested' in a bunch of snake oil.
I don't think you represented a mild version of what was said. But rather a PR coded version that fronts the notion that companies don't waste money. I don' think the notion of a return on investment was ever on the cards for companies that hired professional racists to do in-house struggle sessions on white supremacy. I think that you could, at best, define it as a wasteful fashion statement.
That such programs are less likely to be considered value for money these days is not proof that they were at one time 'snake oil', only that different economic conditions have now rendered them less useful.
Fashion statements are not necessarily wasteful, especially if you are a very public facing company who markets their goods to the general public.
I am not saying they are less likely to be considered valuable. I am stating that they are and were always not valuable. Not as a matter of perception but as a matter of fact. That's why I likened it to snake oil. The snake oil might have been believed to be good when the prospective buyer didn't know it was snake oil but thought instead that it was a rare elixir that cured all illness. But that belief never made the snake oil a good investment. It was always snake oil and the buyer was always a fool for believing it was an elixir that could cure all illness.
Another way to say this, just because a company believed that something was valuable doesn't mean that it was. Or that the company was reasonable for having believed it was valuable in the first place. It was always a money pit designed by grifters.
But they can be. Like the wardrobe of a bored housewife of a rich husband. Sure, it might be very good for the image of the husband and wife for the wife to be well dressed at social gatherings. That fact does not preclude us from recognizing that you don't need a gigantic wardrobe filled with dresses that will never be worn to present yourself properly 4 times a year at company conventions. On top of that, buying into a bad fashion trend might hurt your company as well. Like the case with the anti-men Gillette razor commercials.
Again, just because a company believed something or did something doesn't mean it was good or smart or reasonable or anything else. Decisions are made by people. You can't shield those decisions behind the fact they were made by a company. You have to look at them as they were taken. Which is why, sometimes, companies go bankrupt and CEO's get fired. Regardless of how good they believed their decisions were at the time.
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I find the the world's most bizzare phenomenon to be the existence of fundamentalists who can't understand the idea of religious-like devotion. All the moral commitments of their enemies must be cynical ploys or trivial aspects of their character; they could never be a driving force stronger than material concerns.
I wonder how long this has been the case. It's fascinating to realize that the descendants of crusaders were brutally crushed in an openly atheistic revolt back in 1790s France, then in 1917 Russia. Then when the threat of depravity (See Weimar's trans-mania) and communism threatened the 1930s German petit-Burgeois, these immediately understood that their only hope was not in the church but in viking Larpers who it turns out were not larping at all. Now the most ostensibly religious country in the West is the exporter of woke culture to ostensibly irreligious Europe, having previously broken records in unrestricted abortion, appalling divorce and child custody policies...
At some point, you've got to wonder what it says about Christians that the the morbidly obese gender-fluid idols of the left inspire in their followers, a greater will to power, than the rock of ages.
I'll have you know that Hitler explicitly hated Viking larpers.
Nothing dies unless it is moribund, I agree with that. Christianity is finished, there are new ideas that inspire greater fervor.
Christianity is alive and thriving with greater fervor than ever before.
Note that it is Christianity explicitly devoid of intellectual content and rational thought.
True, I saw a graph of church attendance in the UK and all the traditional churches were shrinking year on year, all but one of the evangelicals were growing. But this was in the context of the Anglican church of Uganda splitting from the English church over some compromise they were doing with gay rights: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/church-of-england-crack-up/
The key thing is getting tangible results. Christianity is not pulling in its own direction, it's getting pulled in other directions. The strongest, richest and most important parts of the world aren't getting more Christian, they're getting less Christian.
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None of what you quoted claims that. "There are X adherents" where X is a large sounding number doesn't imply growth at all. And "Pentecostalism is believed to be the fastest-growing religious movement in the world" neither says that Christianity is growing, nor does it even say that Pentecostalism is growing fast. ("Fastest growth rate" doesn't imply "fast growth rate".)
Be very careful not to interpret Wikipedia articles as saying more than what they literally claim, because writers phrase them to imply things that they don't have evidence for while being literally truthful. (Wikipedia is similar to the media in this way.)
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Do you have to wonder? Nietschze spent quite some time arguing that Christianity, as slave morality, was inconsistent in terms of will to power.
This is a strong argument but it's not exactly consistent with the behaviour of Christians before the enlightenment. I think the defining shift happened when God died in the souls of the tiny proportion of people who are capable of embracing an idea fully, and going to war for it. These, then went for other ideas that could still capture them, and everyone else was at most a trivial inconvenience in their way.
Okay, then what caused them to turn their backs on God?
Actually, who were these few people? I think it’s a mistake to read the greatest and most venerated of historical figures as categorically different from the masses. The existence of a warrior nobility was no guarantee of success, and it was specifically the transition to professional militaries which put Catholic Spain in charge of the western hemisphere for a few decades. But the Protestant nations of the 17th and 18th centuries clearly met success after the Enlightenment. It’s the incentives and the technology afforded to common men which drive history.
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A traditional cycle: The older generation promote strict social mores but fails to follow them, the younger generation observes the hypocrisy of the older and is disgusted and so loosens up, the next generation observes their libertine elders and is disgusted and so tightens up, on into infinity.
I bet that gen Z (or the gen after it) will be more conservative in some ways than the millennials (although not on lgbtq stuff, that is locked in forever once the boomers stop taking up all the cultural space);
The TQ stuff is likely to blow up in a spectacular way once all the sterilised kids grow up and huge chunks of them decide they were failed by the system (and the rest of the probability space mostly looks like "AI killed us" or "we get fertility-restoration tech"). It's exactly the sort of thing that makes a society decide Never Again once everyone's had time to stand back and process.
There's also the issue that nuclear war is pretty likely in the near future and I think that most SJers literally dying in a fire would lead to the few who survived getting removed from power; SJ's hold on the countryside is tenuous.
And, y'know, the stats of millennials/zoomers who reproduce are immensely different from the rest along this axis.
Not obvious how fast Thermidor will come or how far it will go, but I wouldn't count it out just yet.
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