The Woke Generation - Fighting Back

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I feel like diogenes walking with a lantern looking for one example of left wing wokeness

People like labels because they don't to be alone. Plenty of people will do the things for them by saying that they are weird and don't act like they should for the gender that they have been assigned. It super sucks to face that for who you are, and can feel really good to find that there are other people like you.

Accepting the label of non-binary is not just throwing oneself in another box after not being like being put one in the first place, it is largely a category of not being in the other two, and can differ a lot depending on the individual. Some feel like they are a gender separate from male or female, some don't feel like a gender at all, some are a mix of genders, and some shift depending on the moment.

Gender neutrality is a fine goal, but at least the moment it has utility for things from bathrooms, attraction, grouping people into sports and representation. As well as solving things like dysphoria. Where non-binary fits in this may often only be evidenced by people who experience it. In regards to representation, enbies can feel a rush of euphoria when they have a character who is themselves non-binary, something they can see in themselves, that most people don't have to really ever worry about. Because there are always a male and a female character.

A question. How would you feel if someone said that you were not a man? Would you care?

Assuming that the tonality of the statement was aggressive, the statement “you’re not a man” would intrigue me. Someone testing how much I care about their opinion of me. How much power they could assert over me. This is what all name-calling is.

I would probably ask them if they needed a hug. I could guess something made them feel bad. They are trying to illicit a negative emotional reaction probably because they are in a negative emotional state.

Sad people want you to be sad, mad people want you to be mad, happy people want you to be happy, scared people want you to be scared. It’s a basic comfort mechanism. People want you to react to things the way they do. Makes them feel “normal” in the moment.

I used to do this to people who called me a weirdo, they tended to open up and tell me sad stories, some of them became good friends. The ones who got mad and huffed off, I ignored. I don’t have time to worry about everyone.

Last edited by boden on 02 Jul 2021, 12:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

So, you would take it as someone trying to insult you. Because it has never really bothered you if someone said you were one? Do you think that your appearance is enough that people should be able to know what you are?

It is not quite what I meant with the question. You said earlier that you don't know what a label feels like, and that you just feel like yourself. But you would think or feel one way about people saying that they saw you as a woman compared to a man? This being totally out of the context of some idea of something like boys being called girls as an insult.

We cross posted. See my post above.

If they stated any of those things the context and tonality of the incoming statement would dictate how I would respond, or not. Intentions matter. If I am confused about the intentions I’ll ask for clarification.

If they’re being patronizing that also tells me something about them. If they’re being honest and they genuinely see me as a girl they would also be telling me something about themselves. If it were an honest statement I would be very intrigued to learn more about their perspective. Maybe they think I have some attributes that remind them of that label. Maybe they see the world in an interesting way. I want to learn more in this theoretical situation.

Edit: I forgot to say goodnight. I hope you and everyone who reads this has a beautiful day.

I was mostly just wanting to gauge how you might feel from being seen as a gender. Maybe that you wouldn't like to be called the wrong one.

There are people that don't feel comfortable being seen as either a man/boy or woman/girl, both can feel wrong, and not what they feel themselves to be. Being referred to either "she" or "he" can feel wrong.

Granted, it took me a long time to recognise myself as non-binary, coming from thoughts that I might not care what my sex was, and having thoughts of myself of being able to switch. For the longest time I did just default to what my body was, but a part of myself kind of felt off and unfulfilled. As silly as it sounds, I started to explore myself a bit through female characters in video games, and those parts started to feel fulfilled. And then I learned that there are people who get to identify as that neither male or female. Sometimes you don't realise what you are missing until you feel what others have. And that is people who always had something can find it hard to understand the experience of people that didn't.

That’s wonderful. I understand and respect every person as the beautiful unique miracle they are. I see every person as a individual who has a unique interest, desires and needs.

I see labels as negative information (negative as in less than zero). If I say to someone “I’m an Aspie” the listener may assume that I have traits that are not present in me. Then I would have to correct their assumptions just to get back to zero information. It’s better to say “I’m Boden” then they don’t assume anything and we can start at zero and get to know each other.

Okay, now I’m goin to bed. Have a great day.

Something else I'm listening to, I really debated whether to post this in here because the first ten or fifteen minutes are on spirituality and big questions but I still really enjoy listening to these guys. What Cornell West is talking about as 'Love Supreme' or what I've heard various people call 'Soul Force', I think all of us need to focus on cultivating that in the face of adversity, it's really the only way you don't get capsized and turned into something that you never wanted to become if and when adversity really cuts you deep (I've had that moment) - and it's particularly tragic for that to happen if it were true that we only got to live once and afterward there was nothing.

West comes from a strong baptist christian tradition and you often hear religious overtones in his speeches. However frames his ideas in a positive way and injects hope into how to solve intractable divisions in society which he frames as one of class as well as race.

I also notice that he's doing some extrapolating out, much like Chris Hedges does in terms of believing in the frame of the Christian ethos without believing in the historical Jesus, or right now I'm listening to Jordan Peterson talking to John Vervaeke and their conversation picks up on the Platonist part of it (well... I'd actually say Vervaeke finds himself in that neighborhood by way of Platonism rather than Christianity and it's more Jordan's interest in the specific framings of Platonism in the Gospel of John that keep pulling them back to that).

For as much as the Abrahamic religions have had their annoying factors I do see where they orchestrated a pendulum swing (particularly Christianity and Islam) against what's really the natural game theory of survival of the fittest, and to some degree the Freemasons were another instance where some form of game theory (seeded with closed-loop and strong right of refusal) ended up also having a deep transformation impact on things like secular humanism.

I think all of this comes around full circle, and interestingly enough (if you'd take a very hippyish-looking red-haired half-Mexican half-Islandic guy seriously, ie. Andres Gomez Emilsson) it seems like one of the largest overtures in terms of battles in the human condition has been something like consciousness vs. pure replicators - it has some correlation to K and r selection, I'm still not sure of power correlates quite as tightly as that but it seems like being strictly status-driven, social climbing, etc. is a pure-replicator strategy, the deeply conscious person for whom the lights are turned on particularly brightly could end up in a lot of places so I don't always know that it counts for or against success, but the trick seems to be making this world a more enjoyable playground for conscious life (and widening the range of possibility that doesn't have to be triaged for survival) rather than having the pure-power or pure quantity types pull it all in. Unfortunately the arms race for mammon really took off lately at the expense of everything else and it's figuring out how to shift direction.

This illustrates how moral relativity can bring on social equilibrium. Secular humanism has its roots in the moral framework set up in tribal law but evolves with monotheism to set up secular frameworks. Even athiests accept the role of judeo-christian ethics in moral and ethical framework of the 21st century. The masons are an interesting movement working behind the scenes allied to the elite with their roots in the templar movement in the middle ages becoming more or a less a secret society to avoid the inquisitorial gaze of the catholic church. The masonic tradition permeates the ats and sciences gave rise the renaissance movement and the scientific method. The adoption of Abrahmic frames for morals and ethics were married to the biological determination of Darwinism and game theory and geographical determinism. This is best exemplified by the philosophical writing of British historian Arnold J Toynbee in explaining the rise of empires in the 16th century and the writings of Sir Halford Mackinder in the operation of resource management and geopolitics of these empires in the proceeding centuries. In the neo-colonial era the writing of Jared Diamond expanded on Mackinder's work in explaining the geographical fortunes that favoured sea-faring nations and the age of exploration giving rise to the modern world.

Neo-liberalism is technically a form of neo-colonialism where the international economy and the relative wealth distribution is largely dependent on the innovation and technological advancement of the old colonial powers and new merchant class who exploit cheap labour in ex-colonies and maintain their power through economic coercion and escalted military industrial complexes. Neo-liberalism is a marriage between disparate groups with competing agendas but ultimately maintain the old power structure from centuries before.



There are certainly biological factors of K and r selection applied. Read Toynbee, his ideas were eagerly adopted in the Reagan-Thatcher era of biological determinism in the rise of people in Europe and Asia who would rule seperate parts of the globe.

The dilemma of replicators Vs consciousness is one of ongoing debate that has likely not been resolved for hundreds of years. Ultimately it relies on the existence of a consciousness (which is essential for the existence of philosophy and religion). Those who rule our planet operate on an assumption that we are replicators (regardless of their personal beliefs) as that is the most expedient approach in a neo-liberal world.

Could you unpack that one? I ask because moral relativity means different things in different applications.


Actually they share the same root, and I don't know that there's evidence of Freemasonry before the early 18th century but what you had were the Di Medici's paying people to get ancient texts from monastaries in the middle east - largely they were looking for works from antiquity like Plato and such but they were also looking for the Hermetic works and it's said that when they'd actually found those Marsilio Ficino stopped translating Plato to get that done. That's where alchemical philosophy really picked up a lot more, you had the Tuebingen circle with the Rosicrucian Fama's in 1614 and 1615, you had a culture steeped with progressive platonic mysticism, and the Freemasons were a group who wanted to be able to keep that sort of thing alive as the Counterreformation was kicking in to high gear and as the church was seeing the Hermetic corpus as having been authored by post rather than pre-Christian philosophers. It was a place where they were doing scientific and alchemical experiments as much as they were reading and discussing Boehme and Swedenborg or the Christianized cabalah.

In that sense it was a bit like they were running a neoplatonic mystery school or chain of academies of that sort and as you mentioned - trying to have a 'think easy' away from the penalties of prohibition.


Those sound essentially like the worst of both Abrahamism and game theory, and it brings up images of what the incoming Tasmanian settlers did to the natives, what Leopold II did to the Belgian Congo, etc.. It was 'transfer frontier' at it's most blatant and unapologetic.


I think as the race to the bottom becomes more difficult it'll get nastier and more obvious. The positive side of the story tends to be that if you can get per capita income of developing countries above 5K per year per person then they can afford to be environmentalists and until that time they'll be tearing down rain forests with slash-and-burn farming or chopping down rare trees until they're extinct in exchange for food. It'll be interesting to see if there is any possibility for a world where 5K per year per person is the bottom 1 billion, I worry that for what markets are based on they may not be flexible enough to allow that, but I get the sense that the process of getting there will be as self-interested and rapacious on the part of multinational's shareholders as it ever has.


I tend to think they're situational in terms of a person's upbringing and whether there's hope for their lives to unfold or whether they're coming up in a war-torn part of the world or coming up in either a place or social class where life is relatively cheap and short (ie. fast life-history strategy). What I don't know is whether the degree to which the lights are 'switched on' is situational or where that exactly comes from.


For a person, for example, to feel painfully - perpetually - blinkingly aware of themself, their surroundings, their environment, almost to the point of coming of as fearful to other people, and seeing very few signs of self-reflection or self-awareness in most people around them, that's describing 'something', maybe it's perhaps not describing consciousness (perhaps a more internal locus and command of it's contents), and part of why I've never taken eliminativism seriously is because there'd be nothing it's like to be me, no one else would be asking the question either, and for the most part when people do bring it up I tend to think of it as something like weak emergence and panpsychism for people who despise both weak emergence and panpsychism and want to hide that it's in their formulations.


So yes, you have people in power looking at the poor and people out of power saying things like 'Ah, they're used to it' or 'They feel less (pain) than we do'. That's a cynical and self-serving use of declaring oneself consciousness and other people simple apes looking to copy.

The standpoint I'm thinking of it more from is the way competition leads arms races, limits choice, makes it so that there are things you 'have to do' because they're how income and status are gotten and without those you're either homeless, on assistance, treated like a non-person and rendered socially ineffective (even if you have interesting things to say) by those who'd insist that your bank account and answer to 'What do you do for a living?' tells them everything worth knowing about you. It puts us in a place where the variety of things a person can do with their life are few. It puts us in a place where integrity's incredibly hard for people to have because everyone needs to get money from somewhere and in most cases that means jumping through other people's hoops or accepting corruption in places you start work at because you're in no position to say 'no' if you want to be employable in the future (especially if you have precious little or no experience to put on a resume otherwise).

Add to that last point - we're running into environmental constraints, ie. the biosphere can only handle being chopped up and turned into widgets, apartments, and condos so fast and if it's going beyond the environment's capacity to replentish, and you have the same suicidal death-race at the top for status then being the same people who wield power and then electrifying most of the world beneath them to march to the beat of the metronome they set, and it's people who got there because they sheered off everything else about being human to cut weight, that's humanity - the being 'human' part - getting dominated and destroyed by blunt algorithm. It's nature getting destroyed by algorithm.

It's the sort of thing that makes one think of Rene Guenon's 'reign of quantity' and his take on the Kali Yuga if one were to go metaphysical in their read of it.

I think your response requires a few days to answer all your points but I'll start with the first.

Moral relativity has three perspectives in modern society
- morality based on social (and cultural) norms of the time
- morality based on transnational ethical frameworks
- morality based on legal jurisprudence

I'm not an ethicist nor a legal expert so I'll just deal with what I know about the first dot point.

Morality is relative in terms of social/cultural/religious boundaries but also historical boundaries. Put in simplest terms, what is morally acceptable in the western world has varied based on timeframe. But there is subtle nuance even within the same social/cultural or religious groups.

The amount of information that one can write can fill a library.

TY, I'll try not to have this get lost as a side-track, and I think we can probably roll anything else we have to say on it into your next response.


My own place on this - I have some minimal agreement with Sam Harris that gainless pain, particularly anguish, is a thing we avoid and avoid inflicting on others as a moral marker that's a relatively fixed point for us. Similarly robbing the future could be seen as unethical, such as saying 'Wow, Yosemite sure is beautiful - lets fill it up with luxury apartments'. Past that it seems like most things are wrapped around the levers and fulcrums of context. I don't know whether relativity and context are quite the same claim but what I like more about 'context' is it has more of an embedded sense that people can't simply make it up, or at least to do so (in the context of founding / sacred texts) one has to show a lot of obedience to realities on the ground for it to be a gainful operating system for the culture in question.

I can see how this can be a reference point for drawing a map or moral compass. There's interesting data to suggest that altruism is built into our DNA. It has something to do with evolution of social groups engaging in altruism to strengthen the group and in turn help with survival.


I often wonder drives self-centredness and selfishness? Certain personality types who are naturally low in empathy and high in self-gratification might think this way. Luxury apartments might also be linked to short term gains in sharing something beautiful to gain social respect for short term gain rather than thinking in terms of future generations being robbed form having a pristine environment to enjoy. This line of thinking certainly promoted by the neo-liberal breeders/replicators over the conscious individuals who see harmonious and sustainable existence with all life as important.



Yes that's a good point, In biology there's a diathesis stress model where an external factor switches on a gene (epigenetics) leading to expression of a particular behavior. It's often said that despite being adherents to technology, ideology, dogma or culture/social norms, that people are only one disaster away from returning to an animal/base form. And yes connecting this to another thread, most NTs make a conscious decision to groupthink. Keeping up with the Jones's is preferable to sticking out like a nail. People make it up as they go along to get what they want.