Abstract: Three profiles of activists in the media: The tuber-for-you informs while leaving interpretation free. The whistleblower sounds the alarm to the collective by leaving to the collective the paternity of what to think of it. Finally the wokist imposes on the collective the conduct to be held. Three positions that mark pure solidarity, the individual integrated into the collective, and the solipsistic individual.
Sommaire
Glued to the blotter
YouTubers and influencers on social networks have become a big part of our lives. Even if you don’t belong to any network, the majority of people are immersed in it and your world is transformed by it. It is impossible to ignore this blotter effect that put an end to the autarky of thought among our contemporaries. Certainly our minds have never been truly independent of each other, say the sciences today. But our ancestors thought so, and this conviction was enough to create a relative autarky, an enclosed space where an original synthesis can be developed. We are the universe we think we are.
Emancipate this universe? True creativity requires belief in one’s autarky, not knowledge of one’s dependence. If creativity seems exuberant today, it is mainly because of the huge increase in our numbers, communications, and mimics. This is the exuberance of plagiarism! For deep originalities, we must still turn to History. Our forefathers, though in total numbers lower than our contemporaries, generated more flashes of genius.
Caliph in place of the Caliph
Difficult to turn to our independence when addiction is so rich and rewarding. Networks feed us with amazing information. Our personal universe bursts its limits and spreads to infinity, from the plot of land to the most distant galaxies, from the Big Bang to eternal cooling, from quantum fields to consciousness. Why call myself independent when I can be the whole world? Why remain a little demon when I can be god? Today’s rebels perjure insubordination. They are hysterical caliphs in desire to take the place of the Caliph.
Being the whole world, speaking for it, this is the new contemporary solipsism. As the individual is heavily diluted on the networks, they identify with a Superindividual: the group. The militant form of groupism, renamed wokism, is the modern face of solipsism. Regrouping of solitarians, gods sufficiently cloned to form a warrior phalanx. Within a wokism communication must be flawless, pruned, censored or amplified. Any scratch on the ideal would risk deflating its ardor. Dialectics is the essential weapon of the group. The other tools, reason, sincerity, hermeneutics, compromise, are too dangerous to handle. They could chip away at the ideal.
Pilgrimages
When we don the Internet suit, we will not surf waves of opinions that would end up propelling our even further. We enter Chapels, held by individuals or sects, each seeking to affiliate our attention. Who are we going to give it to? Before looking at the content, it is useful to know who we will be dealing with. Some indeed flaunt all the raw information, such as a market gardener presenting her products to the consumer and letting you choose. Others advise you on the choice, their motivation being above all to satisfy you; their information remains factual. The latter, finally, only expose the information they would like you to swallow. They have all varieties but many are repainted, rigged. Everything is arranged so that your reality becomes theirs.
Our three actors are in place
I just described the tuber-for-you, the whistleblower, and the wokist. All of them are well established on Youtube, of course, which is why I avoid ‘youtuber’. Let us be aware of the rather terrifying contrast that separates them. The Church, with its wicked demons and kind angels, awakened us better to classify encounters. The tuber-for-you, as its name suggests, collects good quality information to sell it to you at a minimal price. Your attendance is its remuneration. There is nothing wrong with this marketing. The problem with Youtube and its ilk is that compensation is correlated only with attendance, not product quality. Produce a surreal show and you’ll attract more followers. It’s even better if you claim the story is true. Easier to catch the surprises in everyday life than in fantasies.
The tubeur-for-you is the extension of the school teacher. Even if you have a bad memory of yours, classify it as a kind angel. She strives to integrate you into the collective by sharing the most consensual, factual, almost impossible to denigrate memes. Strong foundation for a shared world. But the ego quickly gets bored in the realm of Good, where it has little opportunity to stand out. So I take yours to the Underworld. We find at the border the whistleblower, in the role of Knight of Good. Behind her are the wokists, dark hordes seeking to invade the collective. But since everyone is convinced that they have the truth, what really differentiates them? It is on this delicate question that my article takes shape:
Being the woke
A first idea of the difference between whistleblower and wokist emerges in this comment by Freddie deBoer: Awakening/woke is not something you do, it’s something you are. If the wokist is her awakening, she does not have control over it. It seeks only to strengthen its own existence.
To control is to be something else, to accept to contemplate my awakening from another position, within something larger. Necessarily also: to reduce the importance that my awakening takes. If I am entirely something, then all control harms my existence. Control is hostile. Stop choking me!
The wokist refuses to simply consider something larger than her ideal, because it does not exist. It is the definition of the collective that separates her from the whistleblower. The ideal of the wokist is Everything, while for the whistleblower it is included in the collective. The justification of the ideal, moral or otherwise, is irrelevant. It does not matter whether the wokist is right or wrong, whether a vaccine is dangerous or not. It is the way in which the wokist deals with the collective that characterizes her. Or does not deal, rather. Since the wokist refuses its existence. No one has ever seen it in the flesh. There are only people, brains. What is this collective then? An illusion?
Wokism, a side effect of reductionism?
The whole imposing itself on its parts is indeed the subject of a controversy still alive in scientific circles. I detailed it with the Platist School. For reductionists the collective is an illusion, a simple emanation of micromechanisms. Transposed to the human “system”, this makes the social collective an illusion emanating from citizens. Nothing exists outside of them. Why would they submit to an illusion? The wokist draws from platism the idea that the power of the collective is nothing other than that of other individuals seeking to impose their selfish interests.
Is this a side effect of scientism, which has pushed back the influence of religions in our societies? By rejecting theology, science has also discredited its humanistic fallout, Christian charity, abnegation, self-sacrifice, all these collectivist virtues. It is now up to the individual to decide whether or not she wants to burden herself with these old things. The human atom follows its own laws; there are no others. This is of course the particular narrowness of the Wokist spirit, and to describe the others, I will continue to assume that there is a collective. It is made up of all those parts that come together from one spirit to another to say what it looks like, independently of us. Whether God exists or not is of little importance, ultimately, since we collectively created Him. The Collective is truly omniscient, since it brings together all the knowledge of Humanity, invisible, since no mind can entirely host it, and fallible on a daily basis since its custodians are. The Collective is a very realistic vision of the divine that satisfies me completely.
Give yourself to the collective…
But how not to be wrong about it? The collective is a consensus on which the individual must be constantly informed, adjust the image she has of it. Depending on the regime of social organization, this consensus can be firm or moving —conservative/reformer, conformist/protester. The caricature of the firm system is tyranny, that of the moving is anarchy. Democracy is the best compromise found so far: a hierarchy retro-controlled by its base. However, it is rather a range of regimes depending on the rules chosen, in particular the voting systems.
The whistleblower keeps the idea that the collective is a democratic consensus consolidated by laws and honestly represented by its elected representatives. She is a legalist. It does not question the political organization chart as long as it allows it to exercise its role as an investigator and warning in the event of a scandal. The institutions will take care of the follow-up. The whistleblower does not impose her vision of the collective, she serves it. She tries to keep an objective view. The soliDary part in her is truly independent, not subservient to the soliTary.
… or make it your own
The wokist is the opposite personality, fundamentally egocentric. Her vision of the common interest is personal and non-negotiable. Only those who share it have the right to claim to join the collective —her “collective” is therefore a group, in fact. If the current organization prevents the group from coming to power, the regime itself needs to be reviewed, regardless of what other groups think. The wokist is a revolutionary. Its first move is to tip democracy into anarchy, so that it can install its own tyranny later. It is necessary to tear down the collective to rebuild it according to the personal vision of the wokist. The soliDary part of the wokist is totally under the control of the soliTary.
Choosing well in the triad
Radical groupism is called a mafia. Today, undeniably, there are many mafias on social networks, renamed with the sweeter ‘wokisms’. Their violence is of the same order. It might have seemed more virtual for wokism. Recent events in the USA and France demonstrate the opposite.
The wokist remarkably illustrates the German concept verschlimmbessern, designating the one who makes things worse by wanting to do well. Personal translation: “towards the fall in good faith”.
Good faith is therefore not an effective beacon for the internet user. Let’s be more careful to look at who exercises this faith: a tuber-for-you teacher, a whistleblower knight, or a wokist demon? Let’s wave our crosses!
*