The Problem with Woke
I cannot imagine that anyone has missed the launch of Amazon’s Rings of Power. There has been an ongoing talk since its release, particularly about its woke casting choices. While I have not seen the show – nor is it likely that I will – I have nonetheless taken a bit of an interest in the vitriolic discourse around it. In particular, I am fascinated with how the left deliberately misrepresents what the problem is and with how the right fails to conceptualize it properly. For this reason, I would like to offer a take on what the issue is with woke media more generally, and especially with the kind that co-opts existing works. This won’t be a review of the show, nor a discussion of its particulars; there will be no spoilers and no in-depth analyses of Tolkien lore. My focus is rather on a much broader problem, one that extends far beyond just a single production.
Listening to the smug, sniveling hysterics of the left, one would imagine that the detractors of the show had somehow decided that it was unreasonable that black people play the role of fictional characters, or that they think blacks are less realistic than elves. And if indeed that was what the detractors were saying, perhaps the left would have a point. It would be a stroke of extreme pettiness to think the mere presence of black actors in a production is categorically unreasonable. But as is usually the case with the left, they are motivated primarily by feelings of cruelty, resentment and permissible outrage, and so are neither willing nor capable of understanding the right. On the contrary, they derive great pleasure from deliberately misrepresenting the right, making themselves stupid by choice to spite those they hate. This is a given – it always works like this and without fail.
What is not a given – and which is in fact a serious problem for the right – is to allow oneself to be bogged down by the discursive frame set by the left. What I mean by this is that if you are writing 10 000 word long dissertations on why elves in Middle-Earth do not, in fact, have melanin, you have already lost. Such discussions are pointless, because the heart of the issue is not a misunderstanding of the lore but a deliberate subversion of it. Arguing within the frame set by the left – a frame which is deliberately constructed to be stupid and pointless – will always derail you from getting to the point of what the actual problem is. Nor is the reason why you want to get to that point to convince the left – they cannot be reasoned with. Rather, you are getting to the heart of the matter in order to keep it clear in your own mind who the enemy is and how they operate, and to communicate it to others. The enemy depends on an ideological smokescreen to hide their malicious intentions, and our job is to disperse that smokescreen and bring the enemy into the light.
So what is the problem? If you were to ask the left, they would say that the problem is with representation. Certain groups – the client groups of the left, such as women and ethnic minorities – are not being fairly represented in the media available to them. This poses a problem, the left claims, in that these groups are excluded from the empowering experiences of seeing people like themselves be heroes in great mythopoeic epics such as Lord of the Rings. To this the right may respond that Lord of the Rings in particular was written with heavy influences from European mythology and folklore, and that it is therefore more fair to represent the characters as Europeans. But all of this raises an interesting question which brings us to the heart of the problem.
Why aren’t any mythopoeic epics being written from African influences?
Or from Persian, Arab, Indian or Chinese influences? This would satisfy both the demand for representation while simultaneously bringing new material and new influences into the cultural sphere. I believe such a thing might actually appeal to the right, much like how Dune with its strong Islamic influences appeals to the right.
To answer this question, we need to consider the person of J. R. R. Tolkien himself. Tolkien was not a fiction writer by trade, nor did he write his legendarium with the explicit intent of becoming a published fantasy author. Rather, his writing began as a private project born from his intense love of Germanic, Anglo-Saxon and English philology, linguistics, mythology, folklore, geography, genealogy and history, and with the broader European tradition of epic storytelling. His legendarium is a culmination of two distinct forces – the dedication of the scholar and the love of the romantic. It is from here that everything that has fascinated readers for so long about Middle-Earth comes. The combined appeal of Tolkien’s numerous areas of scholarly interest together with his love of England and the English people has an irresistible draw on people, as it speaks to certain elements of our common humanity. It carries with it the power of myth, which draws people in like a moth to the fire, with a magnetic power emanating from the very essence of humanity.
This brings us to the prospective writers of an African or other non-European mythopoeic epic. For them to possess the level of scholarly ability needed to blend linguistics, myth and history into a coherent whole like Tolkien did, they would most likely need to come from an academic background. It is here that we come to the heart of the problem.
We no longer have romantic scholars, only bitter activists.
The modern academic is schooled exclusively in the activist’s trivium – Foucault, grievance studies and ethno-narcissism. I am not exaggerating when I write this. Michel Foucault has been the most cited writer across all fields of academia for many years now. He is the foundation upon which modern academia rests. Even if some prospective young writer were to study African Studies in order to write the new epic of our time, he would leave knowing only Critical Race Theory and spouting sterile “black bodies”-type academic bullshit. To the extent that there are academics in the fields of African philology, pre-colonial history or indigenous mythology, their only interest in these topics centers around how to weaponize them for the “liberation of black bodies from normative whiteness”. There are no philologists because the modern academic thinks language is a “social construct” meant to facilitate oppression. There are no historians since history is a “neocolonial legitimization of phallogocentric hegemony”. There are no genealogists since genealogy is “fascist essentialism”. There are no geographers since we are all part of the same “global community”. And there are no mythologists because “religion is the opium of the masses”.
To the modern academic, a human being is nothing more than a set of identity markers engaged in dynamics of oppression. Something exists only to extent to which power flows to or from it to affect the various intersectional labels – black, gay, woman, etc. – that these academics gush over. The totality of their work amounts to nothing more than keeping tabs on slights. In practice, it is no more than bitter resentment at the white man wrapped in middlebrow academese to hide the civilization-wide looting of everything that isn’t nailed to the floor. Nature, religion, language, history, ethnicity, beauty – all of the various sublimities which make up the substance of humanity both on an individual and cultural level – have value only to the extent that it can be used to immiserate white men. The intersectional categories of black, gay and woman are rolled out as totem images of a superfluous social class hell-bent on sucking the whole of Western civilization bone-dry while howling to the moon about how they’ve been slighted.
Our culture is designed to produce Black Gay Woman Communism and nothing else.
To these people, every institution, every cultural artifact, every legacy exists only to serve as a vehicle for Black Gay Woman Communism. Anything unfit for this purpose is purged with genocidal intensity. They are capable only of producing more ideology, more jargon, more bookkeeping of slights, more masturbatory revenge fantasies and more sinecures for themselves and their clients. Not a lick of creativity exists anywhere near these people, which is why they are categorically incapable of doing anything other than co-opting the creations of others to serve their agenda. They have completely salted the earth of Western culture with their unbearable wretchedness, and maintain themselves only through Soviet-style political repression. It is this and nothing else which is the fundamental problem with woke entertainment – it is having Black Gay Woman Communism shoved down your throat by talentless hacks who hate you, want to exterminate you, have no interest in the aesthetic value of what they co-opt and who will mark you as an enemy of the state if you question your own erasure in any way. We see here what the representation discourse is really about. If a lack of black representation in media means that the media is saying that blacks don’t exist, then the deliberate erasure of whites from media means that the media is saying that whites shouldn’t exist.
To conclude my piece, and illustrate by example exactly what it is I am talking about, let us look at another woke production. Here is an excerpt from the sales pitch for Lovecraft Country.
“Yes, [HP Lovecraft] was a notorious racist [even in] genres notorious for underrepresenting people of color. We’re going to change that. When I first read Lovecraft Country I immediately knew it had the potential to be a show unlike anything on TV. It’s not horror. It’s not sci-fi. It’s not fantasy. We’re not approaching this asking what it is. We’re approaching it wondering what it can’t be.”
And there you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth. What it can’t be. And it can’t be white, straight or male; it can’t cherish Europe or European peoples and cultures; it can’t show a reverence for European storytelling and mythology; it can’t care about genealogy or philology; it can’t display a love for the European countryside; it can’t take beauty and mystery seriously; and above all, it cannot allow the hated whites to feel anything resembling pride, joy or interest in themselves and what they are.
It can only be Black Gay Woman Communism and nothing else.
And that is the problem with woke.
A big part of this is that the Leftist priesthood doesn't care about creating ART.
Narratives are intended to educate, inspire, encourage, and Empower the audience. To teach young boys to be heroes, and warriors, and innovators, and champions.
But Leftists intensely despise the audience.
Leftists want to hurt, and humiliate their customers — partially as a humiliation ritual, partially to feel powerful by inflicting psychological demoralization, and partially because they are projecting their dysfunctional pathologies onto broader culture because they cannot bear honest self-examination.
So, modern Leftist art is designed to demoralize and psychologically break the audience.
It would be possible to create an epic Chinese, African, Persian, Hindu, Aztec, or Norse mythos... either something original, a modernization of regional fables, an adaptation of ancient stories, or some novel hybrid of these techniques.
But, creating a successful African mythical blockbuster trilogy would be a disappointment to these sexual deviants and oversocialized misfits — they want to break white Christians, and to destroy the audience.
So, what they have found is to take popular, existing franchises and then pervert, desecrate, corrupt these narratives.
The business interests financing these movies are generally unaware, or willing to ignore the underlying dynamics of resentment and malicious neglect. Big studios are effectively paying an ideological mafia protection money, as Catholic aristocrats once paid indulgences to the Pope.
FrogTwitter offers us a chance to build an alternative, superior art scene.
Interesting article.
But WHY would Amazon want to make everything about BGWC and nothing else? Is this just a consequence of corporate wokeism and not its intent?