It seems that wokeism or the tendency to defend and institutionalize the new World Order Key Elements (WOKE) is the order of the day.
Escribe:
Pharisee:
As far as I see it, indeed, the attitude and standard of wokeism is being not only being sensationalized but institutionalized nowadays as the correct or the normal of behavior so that the new world order can be ushered in fast in a more acceptable manner. Anything anti-racial or having the color of discrimination against any sector of society is being avoided now by developed countries so that they can have the visage of modernism or set the standard for the new world.
It is therefore, necessary for them to put into law policies that protect sectors of societies which could have been undermined or discriminated against in the past. It is therefore incumbent for modern lawmakers to emerge as champions or heroes of these “marginalized” sectors in the hope of being perceived as just and proactive governments.
Unfortunately, some of those who espouse wokeism may not be sincere in their demands for changes and are only riding on these issues for the popular support and possible advancements of their personal agendum like many politicians would do for the sake of future votes. Truth therefore, is diluted by some leftist elements in the name of progress so that the unique minority override the will of the majority expected in a democracy.
We have examples of this when we have laws establishing gender-neutral bathrooms or the establishment of these sorts unmindful of the possible discomfort they would bring about in comfort rooms where ‘straight’ people still exist. Or providing more access to pronoun declaration access even in filling up application forms totally-eradicating gender polarities. This would then allow for transgender dressing and more careful use of words when referring to an individual. The acknowledging of more gender privileges however could be abused such that the veracity of things become no longer relevant or important. We have now parents and teachers educate conspiring to teach the child that he can be a she or that she can be a he depending on what the child prefers or where the parent-teacher conspiracy leads him or her. Sex education has left the differential stage of showing the amazing difference between the sexes but now contrives to ignore a lot. Awful, as it is, the motivation is now to ignore one’s real sex if it is not preferred and dwell on pretensions on how a preferred gender may be approximated.
Saducee:
It is sad to see that the progress being made in strides are being ignored by the Pharisee just because there are some superficial problems encountered. Gender pluralism is something that this age can not avoid since it is a reality which is gazing back at us as we mirror the society where we live in. The LGBTQ + sector is a big and beneficial part of society which we simply can’t ignore. Nor could we ignore the injustice which one can still be find against blacks and even those who hate Asians.
We commend governments like the Philippines for prioritizing programs like GAD (Gender and Development) where the LGBTQ+ community is thoroughly recognized and their representation in the nation building is acknowledged. However, in highly developed nations like the U.S., it seems to be that most progress made in terms of racial discrimination had been stunted or retrogressing. For instance, after the blunder made by white officers against alleged black offenders even resulting to death which brought again the “black lives matter” movement, blacks and whites are again not allowed to eat in the same lunch counters recalling the times when blacks were segregated. Unfortunately, some social activists are only showing the differences and not proposing any solution. They seem to enjoy the great divide so that since social injustice is still perceived, a militant activism is in order. But Martin Luther King in his time was working for universal justice and his dream was progressive for both blacks and whites. We wonder if cancel culture, the me, too movement or the critical race theory are working towards the same dream.
Imperial Roman:
The role of neo-Facists and neo-Nazis can not be underestimated. The white supremacists will always employ whatever ideology available would match their needs to bring about their version of the new world order. It is therefore, necessary for them to identify key elements prevalent in society to be used as main issues and concerns which would bring about necessary change. And this ideological attitude of racial dominance which feeds these woke reactions as answers to social injustice.
Any kind of imperialism would use this design. And yet even the dominant and strong could find injustice to justify an aggressive action as White supremacists do. Even Vladimir Putin is speaking about a new world order as one imperative why war in Ukraine should continue despite its great cost. And yet, Putin is not even using communism, Russia’s common battle banner for his ideology for war. Putin is putting forth an unexpected historeligious imperative. This is evident in his definition of Kievan Russia as part of the pure rationale that Ukraine must be part of Russia. It is as poetic as saying that Russia will lose its soul if it has lost Kyiv as Russia has primary roots there. Secondly, Ukraine is Catholic and has therefore lost its Russian Orthodox identity and must therefore recant and reconvert because it is where Russia’s soul was first nourished.
The key elements therefore which Russian wokeism had identified are Ukraine’s infidelity to Russia by cavorting with NATO allies and its decadent western cultural orientation.
The Russians are therefore, calling all nations with a shared Russian patrimony to stay woke and stay away from western influence which could only bring about a similar alienation.
Michel Foucault in his nihilistic deconstruct of what truth is manifests that it is impossible to arrive at the truth. Yet Jesus Christ, the King of the Jews, and a Roman subject said He is the Truth. Therefore, those who are identified as workers of social justice and are anti-racial discrimination but are rejecting Christ are simply sub-group jockeys for their own personal agendum which are only being fostered by the radical following which they have agitated for their own use. Hence, a feminist activist could only be useful as her activism feeds her own soul’s hunger and still stay within the bounds of moral feminism, fighting for a woman’s legitimate place in society. But if her activism fails to satiate her then she may ignore moral constraints and could even become a lesbian as some feminists have done. This is when wokeism finds its worst expression when it creates its own truth.
In the constructivist viewpoint wherein, Herodians are experts are experts, the term “woke” was first used by Marcus Garvey to describe the cultural awareness of the blacks as an exploited people in 1928 as he began his slogans, “Wake up, Ethiopia”, “Wake up, Africa”. Garvey wanted to show that Africans have their own cultural heritage that blacks can be proud of such as the unique Ethiopian culture.
Then the New York Times in 1962 published the article by black novelist William Melvin Kelley where he wrote the essay, “If You Woke, You Dig It” And so, the origins of the words “cool” and “dig” and “work” are definitely not the whites. In 2017, in an interview with Okay Player, black female singer Georgia Anne Muldrow underscored the meaning of woke as 1) being literally awake, 2) vigilance over a cheating romantic partner and 3) being on the look out for systemic injustice. Earlier, her contemporary, Erykah Badu had the following lines from her album, The Master Teacher from her song, “I Stay Woke”;
Even if yo baby ain’t got no money
To support you, baby, (I stay woke.)
Even when the preacher, tell you some lies
And cheatin’ on ya mama, (I stay woke)
Even thee go trash, struggle and strife
To keep a healthy life, (I stay woke…)
I have longed to stay woke
A beautiful world I’m trying to feel.
The institution and the mores is represented by the preacher-philanderer who pushes the woman, or the mama into marginalized life of strife and struggle. It is the woman’s own look-out if she could still live a happy life despite her hard existence. The woman is chosen to be the subject on the assumption that the woman is also discriminated against. And so, being woke is be on alert in order to survive an injustice which is prevalent or is serving as a norm. Any expression against this established institution or standard falls under wokeism.
Zealot:
In governance, the most traditional and conservative elements constitute the rightist block of the political polarity while the most progressive and dynamic elements constitute the leftist block. Wokeism is found in both polarities since there are governments which would like to appear progressive. But the real woke should be leftist they ought to seek universal justice for the marginalized groups and races and ethnic groups which are discriminated against.
In her book, Left is not Woke, American philosopher Susan Neiman is warning against assuming that just because the initiative is coming from the left it is already woke. She is right because many leftists are only pretending to be woke so that they can be identified as progressive but they are not really working for universal justice but their real motive would be more votes in future elections. According to her, because of woke there is a tendency to reduce the individual to the prism of marginalization, the focus becomes the inequality of power and to consider all history as criminal. Left wing critique of those who share the same values, according to her, might look like an instance of narcissism. The right must always be a dangerous choice but usually the left, for Neiman has deprived itself of ideas to “lurch it back to the left”. The problem now is to re-infuse “woke’ to the left.
Consider France, many French politicians support the entry of more indigenous black Muslims as immigrants because they would translate into votes. It is the same way that Filipino politicians use squatters’ votes to stay in power but are likely to vote for their resettlement once they are already comfortably seated in the Congress. But the disguised zeal for universal justice for displaced black “refugees” has now caused France to have internal problems such as security for French government workers especially the ones in uniform as they are usually targeted by extremists who believe they have already taken over the French way of life. This is a usual wokeism backlash where the marginalized few or the discriminated ones become dominant because of the special attention and powers given them. Imagine those who were thought to be marginalized are the ones attacking the original French people. And the same inequality of power is still being blamed. This is based on the criminalized history of the French invading black Africa in the past and implementing colonial power. Also, we have now straight
men and women bashed in the internet because they are ‘straight’ by the unforgiving members of the LGBTQ+ community for being bigoted, insensitive or are too obstinate in not revealing their ‘true’ selves. This is because the prism of social standards defined them as marginalized and that they have no real power to defend themselves as traditional history have made them victims of these criminalized straight people. I believe that our zeal must only be reserved for universal justice and not for noisy minorities who are too loud in their bid to take over society.
But we, in the brotherhood would rather have more caution in the deliberation of woke ideas. If the intention is not for universal justice and is only simply social justice for alleged some who are marginalized and only for some which are alleged to be discriminated against from then it must be just woke and not at all is not leftist in accordance with Neimanian definition. If Christ was a member of the Sanhedrin, he must have belonged to the extreme left which is for progressive universal justice. He must really be branded a leftist for violating Sabbath and for considering the sinful woman’s accusers as equally if not more guilty. But he was never woke because He never chose to speak only for a particular sector of society like the Pharisees, the Sadducees nor the Zealots but rather the salvation of all mankind.
But wokism that tends only to popularize one’s alleged heroism for standing for a cause or to ride on a popular issue in order to emerge worthy of adulation is the kind of woke which in appearance is good but are actually psychologically damaging for they tend to damage the cause they stand for or make the issue diminished. For there were former messiahs even before Christ’s public ministry and all they were able to do were poison the wells of Truth and made Christ’s teaching suspect for inciting to rebellion and subversion of government. Take for instance the feminists who plotted against the person of the Virgin Mary and ending up as lesbian late bloomers when there were no more feminist issues to raise. And the commercial institutions who embraced all the conditions of the rainbow flag only to suffer losses because of undignified stances. Yes, these are admittedly wokism in stance but are not necessarily for the truth or universal justice.
However, what makes us more worried is the fact that those who create standards of behavior have been using woke themselves and not the universal truth. Consider the following;
While both middle extremes of the woke polarity accuse each other of questionable and harmful methods one must remember that even the beginnings of psychology as new science itself was uncomfortably questionable. A Dangerous Method is a movie based on the play The Talking Cure by Christopher Hampton which in itself is based on John Kerr’s A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein. In this movie, as it is in the play and the book, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis and Carl Jung, the father of analytical psychology are joined by a hysterical Russian patient, Sabina Spielrein whose brilliance after her cure made her one of the couple’s best students who became herself an analyst. Because of transference, however, Sabina fell for Jung and wanted to have a relationship with him. Jung, at first didn’t want to betray his wife, Emma, but Otto Gross, another brilliant psychoanalyst who was his patient explained to him that it was a natural symptom for a normal, healthy sexual desire to be repressed and counseled him to seek his happiness in wild abandon. Hence, Jung and Spielrein continued their teacher-student, doctor-patient, analyst-client relationship both in the clinic and in bed. Freud found out the relationship and found the situation very unethical and against the standards of the discipline they were building and thus, cracks of differences appeared between the two. Freud would only tackle cases from the sexual repression origins for they were scientifically empirical but Jung would explore human spiritual archetypes and symbology believing religion is a normal human function which could not be ignored. The Freudians find these tendencies a waste of time and bordered on superstition.
It is our opinion therefore, that even psychology today, although it has developed many scientific steps already towards patient cure and counseling may still employ these basic conflicts between empiricism and spirituality. But one thing is for sure, it didn’t stop the belligerents from becoming immoral. They wouldn’t even live blessed lives as “scientists”. Otto Gross, Carl Jung’s libertine counselor grossly starved to death in 1920. Sigmund Freud was expelled from Vienna by the Nazis and died of cancer in London in 1939. Sabina Spielrein trained some Soviet psychoanalysts before she and her two daughters were shot by the Nazis in 1942. Carl Jung thanked Sabina for making him a “better” person. In fact, when she visited the Jungs, he admitted having another mistress. He recovered from a nervous breakdown to become the leading psychologist of his time before dying in 1961 with heart problems.
Woke was not yet invented as a term then but one would notice the wokism of the protagonists. From his leftist notion of Oedipus and Electra complexes, Freud had to make use of word association and dream interpretation to make his discipline empirical. And yet he wouldn’t want to Jung to explore spirituality. Jung’s openness on the other hand, had made him explore even the bed, exploiting someone suffering from transference and ethically under his ascendancy as teacher and healer. Spielrein is too woke to just allow herself be a student and patient, she had to live through the experience of an analyst even in great abandon. And of course, Gross’ gross counsel for pleasure in wild abandon was too woke, to be ignored.
Yet, even as psychology had grown by leaps and bounds, St. Padre Pio simply tells us to seek spiritual counseling especially after unexplained anxiety and fear and/or spiritual dryness have overtaken us. Perhaps those who recognize Thomistic psychology even before psychology was invented would remember the virtues and vices listed by the angelic doctor. And so, if therapy per se could only give the semblance of goodness to man’s existence but not the salvation of his soul, of what good it is.
Counseling nowadays is very woke as it is meant not to harm nor psychologically hurt a client. Whatever he tells the counselor, he must remain comfortable and en rapport or otherwise he may feel hurt and the counselor may lose the client. But woke counseling is not truthful simply misguiding the client about the true state or reality of things. A transgender dresser may feel good about crossdressing but his biological sex should never be ignored nor allowed to be disguised. His aggression against those who finds what he does as unacceptable must never be encouraged as it would just encourage him to disrespect or harm others. As transgender dresser he must be ready for the consequences of his action and this would comprise realistic guidance and counseling.
While Freud ignored the value of baptism when he to assigned his complexes even to baptized children whose predisposition to original sin had already been removed, Jung’s adultery made him an immoral teacher who ignored matrimony when he exploited his student. Psychonalysis and analytical psychology are therefore, pitfalls of the same kind, a “dangerous method” for the soul and thus, are not good as bases for counseling. So, any client who was told that his evil actions, if he feels good about them, are good then, either he abandons the Eucharist because receiving It makes him uncomfortable, or would ignore the sacrament of reconciliation because it is necessary so that he would feel comfortable again into receiving It. So, since wokism in these endeavors could undermine the reverence to the real presence in the eucharist how are we still to expect people to call the priest for the viaticum which very important for the departing soul and the confirmation which would make one repulsive of the anti-Christ when he comes? Would one still find reverence in the consecrated hands of the holy orders?
Dale O. St. Oz
Marciano “Arci” del Sol
Komo Seyama
FRMG Macario “Cari” del Sol
