OK, this is a little heady so I'll drop it under philosophy. Woke is sorcery, in my simpler thinking, because there is nothing rational about it, nothing empirical, but a sort of magic, black magi one might say.

“WOKE” IS THE NEW SORCERY

It may seem bizarre to diagnose certain current events as involving sorcery. Surely sorcery is something that was never real, and attempts at using it disappeared hundreds of years ago. Yet the political philosopher Eric Voegelin demonstrated that many of the new ideologies that have arisen during the past three centuries have, in fact, been efforts to change the world by casting a spell of words over it.

Voegelin aimed his analysis chiefly at nineteenth-century thinkers such as Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Auguste Comte. He notes that Hegel quite clearly saw himself as a sorcerer, as he referred to his Zauberworte (magic words) and his Zauberkraft (magic force) that would transform reality. But Voegelin’s analysis applies equally well to more modern sorcerers, including those who conjure up a new political order through the magic language of “wokeness.”

...In “On Hegel—A Study in Sorcery,” Voegelin summarizes this feature of the sorcerer’s work as “replacing the first reality of experience by the second reality of imaginative construction, and endowing the imaginary reality with the appearance of truth by letting it absorb pieces of first reality.” Voegelin notes that this sort of sorcery is widespread: it is “the great confidence game played by modern man . . . under such titles as advertisement, propaganda, communication, and comprehensively, as ideological politics.”

...Lest this analysis of sorcery seem like merely a right-wing tactic to smear leftists—although Ayn Rand, for one, was hardly on the left!—I will cite another recent example of sorcery: what is often called “neoconservatism.” The secondary reality that neoconservatives of the George W. Bush era attempted to create is one in which all actions by the United States are, by definition, virtuous, and all people, all around the world, have as their deepest aspiration to become American.

...Yet the promise of being able to create one’s own reality is very seductive: as Voegelin noted, “Once you have entered into the magic circle the sorcerer has drawn around himself, you are lost.”


(tPF to keep the usual suspects from wrecking this thread on the serious side.)