With the election of Donald Trump for a second term in 2025, the War on Woke, now officially sanctioned, has greatly intensified. And other figures such as the neurologist and writer Dr. Iain McGilchrist, best known for his work on the hemispheric functioning of the brain, have taken up arms in the fight: not against the war but in support.
And yes, I do appreciate that anything, including wokeness, can be taken by some to unfortunate or grotesque extremes. But for the majority of ordinary, everyday, law-abiding, sentient people, to be woke means to be aware of injustice and to have sympathy, compassion, and empathy for the vulnerable and the downtrodden.
Weaponization
As Neo says to Bugs in the 2021 film, The Matrix Resurrections: “How am I doing? I don’t know. I don’t even know how to know.”
To which Bugs replies: “That’s it, isn’t it? If we don’t know what’s real... we can’t resist. They took your story, something that meant so much to people like me, and turned it into something trivial. That’s what the Matrix does. It weaponizes every idea. Every dream. Everything that’s important to us.”
Sadly, it seems the same goes for ideas like the hemispheric functioning of the brain. And furthermore, just as the term “red-pilled” has been hijacked by the alt-right (much to the Wachowskis' dismay), so too, there are some who appear to be of the belief that being right-brained is a right-wing / Conservative thing (which would ironically be a left-brain appraisal). Even Elon Musk, of all people, sees himself or likes to be seen not as an arch villain in a Bond movie but as part of the “Resistance”.
Part and Parcel of the Culture Wars
The thing is that the War on Woke does not exist in isolation or in a vacuum: part and parcel with it are attacks on liberality; the erosion and loss of hard-won civil rights and human rights; the abandonment, indeed opposition to, climate crisis mitigation; and the rise of a brand of Christian nationalism, which has been waiting in the wings for decades, and which appears to have abandoned Jesus's teaching that advocates unconditional love and turning the other cheek, in favour of taking a more fundamentalist and hardline approach such as talk of hellfire, brimstone and treacle, and taking an “eye for an eye”.
And, in order to achieve these goals, a price is being be exacted and paid: dictatorship and blatant corruption in the halls of power; the casting aside and burning of rules and regulations; political and religious isolationism; perhaps soon the loss of free elections (not that they were ever fair); the rise of a new, obscenely rich, technofeudalist aristocracy along with AI; brutal paramilitary goons dragging people, even law-abiding working people and US citizens, from the streets and throwing them into concentration camps; and questionable, if not illegal, extrajudicial killings outside the US borders.
I'm reminding of a cartoon set in a post-apocalyptic time with a man in ragged clothes and three children sitting around a camp fire, with the ruins of civilisation in the distance behind them and now returned to neolithic subsistence. And the man is telling his children, “Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders”, all thanks to Mammon (a personification of wealth and avarice as an evil spirit).
All these things, and more, are part of the right-wing package deal that people have been sold or have bought into because they oppose the admittedly dysfunctional liberal status quo with its own vested interests, and feel bitter, having been disenfranchised and neglected by the distant gubbermint elite. They're willing to pay this price in spite of the Trump regime's utter incompetence, abandonment of Constitutional propriety and restraints, divisiveness, and sheer cruelty, and even if that means “cutting your nose off to spite your face”.
And yes, given our circumstances, in this post-enlightenment era of post-trust, post-truth, post-rationality, post-honour, and post-chivalry; as meaningless non-entities in a disenchanted and mechanistic cosmos, these actions are perfectly understandable. As Henry Corbin tells us, we are engaged in a terrible “battle for the soul of the world”, and it's a battle that we may even lose.
This, tragically, is the bitter legacy we are leaving our children, grandchildren, and generations to come.
And again, I picture the final scene in the 1969 film, Planet of the Apes where Taylor and Nova are riding on horseback along a beach. Taylor, seeing the upper body of the once-proud Statue of Liberty partly buried in the ground ahead of them, falls to his knees and cries out in despair: “We finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”
If Taylor could see the state of his beloved country, and the dire straits that the whole world is now in, in Century 21, he would surely weep and wail at the tragedy, curse us for our foolish and evil ways, and urge us to “Wake the f*ck up!” before it is too late.
There's still time to change the road we're on. Keep the faith!
Follow the Breadcrumbs . . .
These, and more, are some of the reasons for writing our books, most notably our latest work, Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt, a story of resistance.
All our books and short documents are freely available at the Internet Archive's library.
They are also available, in full, for easy download as PDFs, in the Files section of the Facebook group Mystical Faction.
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Image: Screenshot of the final scene from the 1968 film, Planet of the Apes.