Unhumanity: Part VIII The Cult of the Un-Man
Continued from prior columns, here concluded.
The civilizational suicide of Wokeness is an eternal revolt against earth and heaven, seeking to undo the gains of civilization, and to reject nature herself. This means rejecting human nature, which the eternal rebels take to be fluid and ever-evolving.
To be one of them, one must be “Woke” that is, enlightened enough to see and reject the hidden sources of all the injustices of the world. These injustices spring from a world-spirit or zeitgeist the ancient called the demiurge and the moderns variously call capitalism, patriarchy, whiteness, white supremacy, and cis-heteronormativity (I kid you not).
To become enlightened, one need pass no test, shed no blood, work no miracles, donate to no charity. One need only recite the bromides, whatever happens to be fashionable, of the other members of the conformist mob of the Woke. To fail to do so invites ostracization, called cancellation and deplatforming.
No merit makes one Elect. Indeed, a lack of merit is an advantage.
The fact that you lack any virtue, any value to self or others, means you are a victim of the world-spirit, which proves your worth to yourself. The fact that you are a victim means you are secretly a king: the fact that you are a loser proves you are a winner.
The reasoning here is that of a paranoid megalomaniac: the Woke regards himself as worthy of the persecution of the world, for the same reason prophets and messiahs are persecuted, because of their exceptional exceptionalness.
What is really going on is that this Wokeness is satanic, and pursuit of their aims by their means leads the Woke, step by step, to jettison their own humanity within themselves.
Their project is the suicide of civilization, the corruption of innocence, the cessation of humane sentiment, the darkening of the intellect, and the damnation of the soul. The aim is the abolition of man.
1. The Inhumans
Humanity has a fallen nature, and we are prone to pride and evil, but we are also blessed with several qualities beasts cannot learn. These are the things which make us use the word “humane” or “human” when speaking of those in whom these qualities are best displayed.
Wokeness deters all of them. Let us count the ways.
2. Humor
Man is an animal who laughs. A sense of humor eases pain, humbles pride, shows us the absurdity of our own conceits. A man who laughs in good humor is one who suddenly sees the situation in new perspective, or grasps the indignity of his own self-regard.
Humor, in that sense, is a funhouse mirror whose exaggerations put proportion back into one’s view. There is a healthy core of nonsense and good-fellowship at the heart of any well meaning jest.
Jesting and japing are out of place, however, during sermons, or during sentencing, as in churches or courts of law. The hushed solemnity of the sacred, of the grave and profound, hangs over serious matters. Heaven invites the delights of joy, the mirth of victory over the grave, or shouts of laughter at the wonder of creation: but no one should scrawl the graffiti of mockery across the clouds and constellations, or paint a moustache on the Madonna. Such things are jeers, not jokes, born of hatred, not of good fellowship.
The Magician regards himself as equal in dignity to God, or above, and so no proportion is possible to his self-regard. The convex looking glass of his own self-esteem cannot possibly inflate him to equal infinity. Therefore no sense of humor is possible. He himself is church and court, king and pope and the sole paramount of creation, and the only thing worth praising. The degree of egomania involved is perhaps impossible to imagine: let sane men give thanks they cannot.
As a particularly sly and witty saint once said, the Devil is a proud spite, and cannot endure to be mocked. The same can be said of his children, whose likeness they bear.
Too many have commented on the loss of comedians among the contumely of cancel culture for any examples to be needed. Comedians cannot be funny in the wake of the Woke, for the same reason tyrants keep no court jesters: nothing can be allowed to puncture his pomposity.
To inflate oneself to godlike stance is a wearisome business. It is difficult at best to swallow the seas of self deception needed to justify, for example, the hundred million slaughtered by socialism in the Twentieth Century, or the one billion slaughtered by aborticide in half that time, while advocating for the sexual mutilation of children, the abolition of liberty and property, imposition of anarchy and tyranny, and the disintegration of the family unit, and, in short, to make oneself into the perfect image and likeness of Antichrist. To do all this, while at the same time keeping one’s conscience smothered, and all sense of human feeling dead, requires an immense and continual mental effort.
Any doubt might shatter the whole, sick structure of self-deception and vanity. Continual self-flattery is required. One jest, even mild ribbing at one’s own expense, or a small self-deprecating smile, would topple the whole preposterous pretense. So that smile can never, never be allowed. When a Magician enchants himself to a delirium of godhood, one laugh might break the spell.
Jeers and scorn the Woke can utter, but no jokes, japes, or merry nonsense. Hell is humorless.
3. Curiosity
Monkeys and cats poke their noses into things, and are called curious, but they do not have the capacity to make and refine an abstract model of their surroundings, nor to seek out the puzzles and contradictions that crop up when the model falls short.
Only for man is life a riddle to solve: only man has language to lead him astray with false words, ambiguities, imprecision. Only man sees the ratios and relations of the world, the equations of nature, the epicycles of the stars, the Golden Mean in the growing leaf. Only he puzzles when predictions go astray. Animals stir or slumber or seem surprised at a lunar eclipse of the sun; only man pulls out abacus and astrolabe to quell his surprise.
No beast ponders why the world is round but looks flat, where the stars go at sunrise, or wonders how rivers are swallowed by the sea without the world’s waters rising. Only man wonders whence he comes, wither he goes, why he is here, or wishes to know the nature and meaning of truth, justice, being, beauty, fate, fortune, free will. Only man has words for the infinite and eternal.
But the Woke propose they know all things, or, at least, all things worth asking. The whole point of the dialectic of unreason is doublethink, that is, the ability to hold two perfectly contradictory propositions in mind at the same time, and affirm both with no sense of shame. The whole point is to pretend knowledge not given to man. Hence their balderdash is bathed with baloney and balloon-juice, expressed in obscurity, nonsense-words, and the Newspeak of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Asking a Hegelian to explain himself is regarded as an insult; questioning Marx makes you a class-enemy; questioning Cultural Marxism makes you are sexist, racist, homophobic bigot who must be cancelled, silenced, and sent to a reeducation camp.
Curiosity makes us human, for good or ill. It is the curse of Pandora and the blessing of Sherlock Holmes. Curiosity, however, is forbidden by Cancel Culture. To question shows worse than a lack of loyalty: it means one is not Woke, not among the Elect and Enlightened, still enmeshed in the filthy nets of bigotry and deplorability. One has not recognized and confessed to the shame of one’s own White Privilege.
Normally, honest theology express mysteries that cannot properly be put into words, told only as myth, or paradoxes, or found in wordless contemplation. This is because honest faith must face transcendental reality, something human language is ill-equipped to capture, and human thought can only blink like an owl in daylight.
Dishonest religions, or cults, or kooks, mimic the surface features of honest faith and leave the substance aside. To fools, the profoundest insights of mystics and proverbs of saints are mere foolishness, just a jumble of words. So, in trying to mimic wisdom, they invent ponderous words and phrases, jumble them together, and speak folly.
Stupid statements are recast as being profundities so deep that only hypergenius brains or ultrasaintly hearts can grasp them. If you cannot grasp that a woman is any man who identifies as a woman, or how wage-earning is wage-slavery, or when roads are racist, or why global warming causes global cooling, or wherefore science must be taken on blind faith, you are the not just a clod and a brute, but an evildoer, for this is knowledge bestowed by one’s own inner god on oneself, and is a sign, not merely of intellectual accomplishment, but of moral purity.
Asking for evidence or explanation is confession that one is a heretic, if not a devil. If you are uneducated, fool of fools, it the not the task of the Enlightened to enlighten you! The Woke are purer than Christ, and take on no disciples.
This results in fakery at every level. None of the gurus of this cult actually believe this ungainly hogwash is right: they merely believe it is right to say it.
The gibberish is not meant to express their ideas, but the signal their virtue.
For them, saying stupid things shows their loyalty to their fellow mobsters, who see them humiliated by the lies forced from their lips. Their hope is the mob will not regard them as a threat, and will not tear them to pieces. It is, at best, an uncertain hope.
Pretending one already knows all answers forbids one from forming questions. Curiosity is not for the Woke.
4. Romance
There is no romance among the Woke.
“Romance” and “romantic” both come from a late medieval literary movement that coined the term — which literally means “coming from Rome.” In a non-Christian society, one has no need to woo the bride, because her consent was not asked nor needed for marriage. One would approach the father of the bride, as Laban in Genesis is approached by Jacob to win Rachel.
The postchristian, progressive worldview issues from Nietzsche and Marx by way of Hegel, and holds all human relationships, including love between bride and bridegroom, to be a masquerade hiding a remorseless power struggle between exploiter and victim, master and slave.
For the Woke, “romance” is a falsehood hiding the reality of rape-culture — the least romantic idea imaginable. If no one has free will, no one consents to sexual relations, all relations are power relations, all romance is rape.
Their world is sick and satanic to its core.
5. Poetry
With no romance, half the muses are silent. Aside from love-songs, perhaps popular ballads remain, or epic tales of heroes, but only for those who honor the deeds of their ancestors. Perhaps hymns remain, but only for those in humble love of heaven. Pastoral poems remain, but only for those with awe or admiration for the wonders of nature. Anthems remain, but only for patriots. Comic songs or limericks remain, but only for those with a sense of humor.
But we have abundantly seen that love, honor, patriotism, awe, piety, all the normal human emotions are absent from the heart of narcissism. So what songs do men who hate truth, virtue and beauty sing? Not beautiful songs.
No. The only poetry for them is the pounding beat of jungle drums, because this expresses raw passion. Their lyrics are largely matters of boasts, threats, crassness and cussing, cop-killing and bitch-slapping. Rhymes are simple, given as chants or barks, without melody or harmony.
If beauty is in the ear of the beholder, those who lack talent have the same claim to artistic merit as those who do.
6. Chivalry
If life is an endless war of strong against weak, there is no umpire, no objective standard, no shared commonality, not in art and music, nor in any field, enterprise, nor institution whatever.
The idea of courtesy to a fallen foe, or honorable treatment of captured prisoners, or of keeping your word even to an enemy, is impossible in a world of endless Darwinian war.
Military courtesy is neither asked nor given in the Darwinian war of class against class, race against race, male against female; nor can there by any civilians or bystanders, since all not actively aiding the world-revolution to the utmost are traitors and mortal enemies.
Guilt and innocence is determined by one’s war-banner: anyone not feverishly loyal to the jihad is perhaps an infidel, whom the cult decrees cannot be spared, or is perhaps a game animal, to be killed for sport.
For the Woke, their enemy is not merely contemptable, but disgusting. He is not disgusting in one respect, but in all respects. The Woke cannot admire Wagner’s music but deplore his politics; if Wagner is ungood, all of him is ungood. He must be blotted out, banished, cancelled. He is an un-person.
No kind word, howsoever mild, can be given the un-person, and no sleight howsoever dirty or dishonorable, is too wicked to use. The element of sadism is never absent from radical activism: they seek retaliation against the good for his goodness, the honest for his honesty, the decent for his decency. Hence tortures visited on the victims of radicals must be evil, dishonest, and obscene. See the French Terror for details.
7. Honor
And by the same token, an adversary in business, a rival in romance, a political opponent, is worthy of no honest dealing. Professional courtesy, attention to customers, avoiding gossip among neighbors, loyalty to family, keeping faith with friends — none of them are needed in a world where Thou Art God, and all lesser beings are unwitting or malicious allies of the cosmic conspiracy denying you all your rightful honors, praise, and fortunes.
The concept of honor is the concept that winning by cheat, by sleight, by rigging the game, by deception and fraud is forbidden. The ends do not justify the means. The same standards of behavior as should apply to your opponents, apply to you.
This concept is anathema to Woke thinking, for it undermines the Gnostic axiom on which all such thinking is based. The only reason to claim godhood for oneself is to excuse one’s obedience to God. The only reason to claim ethics are social construction, or are class-interests disguised as moral maxims, or are arbitrary, or a part of a sinister conspiracy to befuddle the unwary, or to claim ethics are relative to the situation, is to undermine the authority of ethics, and justify one’s own violation of them.
Please note no one ever claims ethics are relative when defending the ethical codes of fascists, capitalists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, nor when defending the right of hate-speech to be platformed on social media. The claim of non-objective ethics is never offered in good faith because it cannot be: saying it is unfair to hold others to a common standard of fairness assumes the very standard of fairness it dismisses. Rules for thee, not for me.
If all whites are slavers and all men are rapists, all wage-earners aid in perpetuating capitalist oppression, and all happy housewives are foes of feminism, and if anyone who says “boys are not girls” is a cis-heteronormative fascist, and anyone who says “babies are babies” is a terrorist, then all folk outside the bubble of Woke are not merely dishonest exploiters, they are genocidal, insane, and benighted.
By this logic, no rules can protect the benighted, since they are all guilty of breaking all the rules. They cannot be treated honorably, since they are part of the cosmic hoax defrauding all the innocent minorities. They are guilty of all fashion of enabling evil, exerting privilege, degrading environments, non-representing minorities, perpetuating harmful stereotypes. Why treat them with honor? They are part of the deception of the demiurge, and cooperate with it.
The benighted are to be condemned even if not one of them has done a single guilty act or thought a guilty thought. The guilt is innate to them. They are guilty because they are White, or Male, or Straight. They are born guilty.
Perhaps an argument can be made for pretending to be honorable until such time as you and yours have the upper hand, and can start herding the deplorable by cattle car into reeducation camps, or, better yet, death camps.
Any sign of chivalry, courtesy, or honor becomes a sign of weakness, of unfitness to survive. Treason, deception, scheming, underhandedness and double-dealing become merely one more tool in one’s available tactics, judged solely on their utility.
The Gnostic Wokesters regard themselves as superior. Their superiority grants them a unique right to rule, enslave, and exterminate any bipedal primate useless or inconvenient to themselves, or to their vision of a pristine, green, gender-free, socialist paradise.
They are Doctor Moreau. You are the beast-man. You are the egg to be broken to make the omelet of Utopia.
There can be no chivalry, no courtesy, no compassion between those on the Right Side of History and those on the Wrong. Darwinian evolution has already decreed your extermination.
8. Wisdom
By Woke logic, the benighted are guilty by definition, merely by being part of the world-system created by an evil architect or demiurge. They are not guilty as a matter of law or logic, but as a matter of magic. Symbolically, the scapegoat is guilty.
Treating a scapegoat, honorably, chivalrously, decently, is logically impossible: you cannot give a fair trial or give a fair hearing to the innocent goat you yourself selected to bear the symbolic sins of the community. Attributing guilty to someone you know to be innocent of wrongdoing is not an accident nor oversight of the practice of scapegoating: it is the point of the practice.
Marx knows Capitalists have done nothing wrong, just as race baiters know the White Race is the only race in history who freed other races from slavery. Feminists know men love women. The crowd calling for Christ to be crucified knew full well he was guiltless of any lawbreaking. The whole point of pretending to be Enlightened when you are a fool, pretending to be Beyond Good and Evil when you are a wretched whore-chaser, pretending to be superior when you are inferior, is to retaliate against everyone not as sick and twisted, small and sad as you.
So you pretend you have discovered an invisible and ineffable truth. It is not a scientific nor philosophical truth, nor a revelation from heaven. It is a truth appearing out of nowhere for no reason, which has anointed you to be its prophet.
Only you and yours see the truth: only you and yours are truly superhuman. Everyone else is a herd-animal, and Eloi from AD 802701. You, on the other hand, are evolved to post-human status, so that human moral codes no longer apply to you. You are a Morlock.
This pretense of invisible and ineffable truth cannot coexist with claims of truth based on logic, evidence, experience, or revelation.
The lack of logic requires the Morlock to decree ethics to be relativistic, social constructs, or merely self-interest in disguise. There is no Golden Rule, no Ten Commandments, no objective source of moral intuitions, because there is no logic. If there is no logic, there is no such thing as Natural Law; which means, no such thing as precedent or consistency in Common Law; no such thing as folk law, tradition, or legislative law. There is only power.
The lack of logic requires justice to be an empty word: it is what the strong call the rules that keep them in power, and suppress the weak who are gullible enough to obey. Patriotism is either a code-word for racism or is the Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological malfunction of identifying with one’s captors.
The lack of evidence means deferring to authority. Truth is not true. Only what Big Brother says is true. Facts are not legitimate. The reason why the Woke feel no twinge of shame asking their followers to disbelieve eyewitness testimony, is that facts have no legitimacy in a world where evidence is no basis for belief. Lying sometimes deceives the innocent, for the victim does not guess he is being deceived. Gaslighting, however, asks the victim not to believe the victim’s own eyes. There is a degree of self-deception involved, to trust a man who asks you to mistrust your own eyes. He is asking you to call yourself a liar, and believe it.
Lack of experience means that any wisdom painfully gained over the generations of man, passed down since antiquity, must be dismissed. Only someone promoting foolishness would ask his audience to dismiss the only useful tool available for judging practical matters. Only someone promoting nonsense asks all testimony of common sense to be silenced.
Lack of revelation means lack of any supernatural knowledge, lack of any confirmation beyond the meager wisdom of mortals.
9. The Un-Man
The esoteric tradition, reaching from ancient Gnosticism to modern Wokeness, varies only to what degree it rejects philosophy, religion, and common sense.
In each case, it is a virus or parasite, affixes itself to an institution or worldview it pretends to improve, whose language its adopts, for the purpose of inverting the goals of the institution or worldview, falsifying the language, and driving thought to the opposite conclusions. It is the devil pretending to be an angel of light, a magician pretending to be a philosopher, a false prophet pretending to be an economist, a woman-hater pretending to be a feminist, a Democrat pretending to be against racism, wretches and grifters and hysterics and losers pretending to be superhuman. It is the benighted pretending to be enlightened.
They promise utopia, a superhuman future.
Instead, humanity is inverted. Each human quality is reversed: good humor is absent from narcissism; curiosity cannot co-exist with claims of extraordinary inner knowledge; romance is impossible when self-love eliminates love; poetry cannot live in a dead soul, nor chivalry be practiced by the craven. Honor is absent if all life is a Darwinian struggle without quarter. Wisdom is absent if reason, evidence, revelation and experience no longer serve as basis for belief: in the vacuum of utter nihilism, there is no truth, only power.
Truth is whatever the powerful force the weak to say. There is no justice, only the strong oppressing the weak. The Woke do not want to end the oppression and call a cease fire. There is no cease fire in Darwin.
The jackboot must trample the human face forever. They do not want the trampling to cease. They want to wear the boot, and for yours to be the face.
The esoteric tradition entails the loss of every quality that makes a man worthy of humanity. It is the loss of all masculinity in male, and femininity in female. It is the loss of family love and local loyalty. It is the loss of honor and honesty toward employers and employees, partners and patrons, vendors and customers, and every economic relation. It is the loss in subjects and citizens of patriotism toward crown or constitution, hatred of laws and manners, and also hatred of the niceties of courtesy. It is the loss of virtue and honor on the battlefield or off.
The esoteric tradition scorns ancestors, aborts progeny, defames the praiseworthy, praises the blameworthy, rips down monuments and erases memorials of the past, darkens dreams of the future, burns the flag and tramples the crucifix.
The only thing left, once these unelected Elect are done dismantling and deconstructing whatever fails to serve their lust for power, is a vacuum of wisdom, reason, or faith. They jettison tradition, because tradition remembers that each prior attempt of theirs failed miserably. They jettison reason, because facts do not support them. They jettison religion, because they hate God.
After everything unserviceable to them is jettisoned, what is left is formless and void. What is left is a realm of darkness filled with wailing and gnashing of teeth, whose denizens literally scream at the sky in helpless woe and hate.
Pragmatically, all institutions captured by them cease to function. Teachers no longer teach. Scientists hide scientific findings. Newsmen suppress news. Entertainers cease to entertain. Instead they promote Woke.
Producers no longer make products to serve customers nor stockholders. Politicians no longer serve voters. Instead they serve Woke.
Preachers no longer preach the Gospel. Instead they preach Woke.
The parasite kills the host, but continues to imitate it, in hopes of vampirizing its prestige for is own use.
But Wokeness does not promote nothing, leaving every one free to find his own way. It promotes worship of nothing, which is not the same thing. Freedom is the first thing to go. The Woke Way is the sole Way: all else is bigotry and phobia, cis-heteronormativity, capitalism, patriarchy and whiteness.
Perversion is lauded and chastity is scorned. Abortion replaces child-rearing. Hook-up culture replaces domestic life. Nonconformists are cancelled. Truth is misinformation. Free speech is Hate speech. Silence is violence.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Opposites are combined. Anarchists and totalitarians combine against law and order. Atheism and Jihadism combine against freedom of religion. The Press supports censorship. Democrats and Blacks combine to reimpose segregation. Plutocrats and socialists combine to abolish free enterprise.
Philosophically, what is left is a worldview of nihilism, unreason, mysticism, relativism, Machiavellianism, ugliness, godlessness. Theologically, what is left is radical narcissism, collectivism, and satanism, where the cosmos was created as a malign trap for perfected spirits, whose escape is through rebellion, transgression, and the abolition of man.
Since the Gnostics, the Neoplatonist, the Hermeticists, the Hegelians, the Marxists, the Cultural Marxists, the Woke, have different incarnations in different times and places, and, even within a given generation, might change their names several times to hide their natures, and call themselves by the opposite of what they are, it is difficult to find one name to sum up their inhuman philosophy, hellish theology, and general emptiness and darkness that comes to anything they touch. They look human, but seek to expunge all human things from life.
One name which suggests itself with a certain poetic acuteness, simplicity, and ugly clarity is the word coined by CS Lewis.
In the novel PERELANDRA by CS Lewis, the materialist Weston starts as a scientist, becomes enamored of a mystical theory of a life-force that he invites to possess him. Once the exterior power is invited within, Weston becomes its puppet. This turns out to be not the impersonal force of nature Weston imagined, but a devil named Thulcandra, the same tempter who beguiled Eve on Earth.
Weston, in other words, was once of the Woke, the Enlightened, the Elect, that is, one of the self-anointed superiors to God. He is soon reduced to a husk, capable of little more than suffering pain and horror.
No longer human, he is called “the Un-Man.” When the protagonist, Ransom, comes upon Weston torturing small animals for pleasure, he is described thus:
“He saw a man who was certainly not ill, to judge from his easy stance and the powerful use he had just been making of his fingers. He saw a man who was certainly Weston, to judge from his height and build and colouring and features. In that sense he was quite recognisable. But the terror was that he was also unrecognisable. He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one. The face which he raised from torturing the frog had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it.”
Later, in the same chapter:
“Its eyes moved like the eyes of a living man but it was hard to be sure what it was looking at, or whether it really used the eyes as organs of vision at all. One got the impression of a force that cleverly kept the pupils of those eyes fixed in a suitable direction while the mouth talked but which, for its own purpose, used wholly different modes of perception. The thing sat down … If you could call it sitting down. The body did not reach its squatting position by the normal movements of a man: it was more as if some external force maneuvered it into the right position and then let it drop. It was impossible to point to any particular motion which was definitely non-human.”
“[One] had the sense of watching an imitation of living motions which had been very well studied and was technically correct: but somehow it lacked the master touch. And he was chilled with an inarticulate, night-nursery horror of the thing he had to deal with — the managed corpse, the bogey, the Un-man.”
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
