The Sage of Main Street (03-18-2023)
DGUtley (03-18-2023)
Temious is a word with a clear definition. If more people use it maybe it'll grow up to be a "real" word someday!
I submit that "Woke", even though it might be appearing in some "real" dictionaries, is a fraudulent word lacking a clear definition, and only created to cause confusion in the language.
That is my opinion.
word
noun
How and when does a word become a "real" word?
- 1.
a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed
DGUtley (03-18-2023)
Back to the topic...
How ‘Wokeness’ Is a Product of Marxism. Not, James Lindsay was a speaker at a Heritage Foundation panel on July 24 back in 2020. The book has been available for some time. It is highly informative and a quick and easy read.
...James Lindsay, the co-author of a forthcoming book, “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody,” says wokeness is actually a combination of many different ideas.
“Wokeness is a fusion of the critical theory school of neo-Marxism, which is a form of identity politics, and radical activism that has a very particular worldview that separates the world into liberationists versus oppressors or oppressed versus oppressors,” said Lindsay, whose book is set for release Aug. 25.
It marries that, Lindsay said, with postmodern theory, which holds that “all applications of truth are actually applications of politics by other means.”
In other words, the truth is malleable, based on power and who drives the narrative of what truth really is. In effect, the truth is replaced by my truth.
Marxism is a mostly economic theory, with origins in the 19th century. Those ideas, he said, led to some of the worst atrocities in world history.
Traditional Marxist ideas were adopted but changed in the 1920s by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and others, and became the project of the Frankfurt school of critical theory. That new theory focused more on shaping culture, Lindsay said, marrying traditional Marxism with Freudian psychology and other social theories to change the way people think.
The goal of postmodernists who were part of that movement was to “deconstruct the very meanings of things,” said Lindsay.
Those ideas reached a new phase with the writings of Herbert Marcuse, a Columbia University professor in the 1960s and 1970s who advocated radical activism based on identity politics.
But this radicalism burned out, Lindsay said, because its violence ultimately made it unpopular.
The radicals then left the streets and embedded themselves in our schools and universities.
“It has all of the conflict theory—separate the world into oppressor-versus-oppressed classes—with zero-sum conflict, no ability to agree or understand one another across those, and then takes on the postmodern understanding of truth being just politics by other means, which removes all of the brakes standing up against it,” Lindsay said.
Seeing the world through that lens is what constitutes wokeness....
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ― Gustav Mahler
True woke is when you realize you destroyed your company or your body of a fad.