source:  lewrockwell

By Jayant Bhandari

August 31, 2022

Some people consider Christianity or Islam to be the fastest-growing religion. As statistics are presented, that is indeed the case, but unaware of the nuances, one can be misled.

A rapidly rising insidious religion is wreaking havoc in the West and the Third World. It has hollowed out Christianity. It is quickly finding converts in the Muslim world, in a silent apostasy that even the fundamentalists cannot challenge. It is finding converts worldwide, even when people speciously continue to adhere to their formal religions.

It looks cute, non-violent, mostly innocuous, secular, and even kind-hearted.

It is proliferating, not because of any conspiracy or proselytization but because its growth is a natural outcome of falling away from civilizational restraints and ethical conduct. It is a result of entropy. It has come to be known as “wokeism,” a belief system of no beliefs, a value system of no values, where there is no objective morality. If you engage in female genital mutilation as an immigrant, there is no problem among the “wokes.” You have the right to preserve your culture.

For the wokes, everything is subjective and relative. Emotions, not reason or morality, are the basis of logic.

They have come to control the institutions in the Western world. They don’t understand the concept of classical justice. Their ideology is deeply imbued with multiculturalism, diversity, feminism, LGBTQ, environmentalism, egalitarianism, affirmative actions, safe spaces, etc. It is not that there is a problem with any of the issues they raise, but they lack comprehension or understanding of the associated costs. More importantly, behind the façade of their activism is an attempt to transfer the responsibility for their failure in life to others and to get free resources.

What matters to the wokes is virtue-signaling while they have no empathy or compassion for anyone—their materialistic, animalistic desires drive them. Lacking any moral fabric, they have no inhibitions about dipping their hands in others’ pockets. They feel no shame in asking for the unearned. Lacking self-responsibility, they always have someone to blame for their real or imagined suffering. Unable to think critically or think at all, they don’t want their valueless, hedonistic, animalistic ways to be challenged.

Those who provide a counterpoint get a fatwa—they get canceled and removed from functioning in society. Worse is to come in the West as the cancel culture matures slowly and surely. A valueless, amoral society is not in-your-face evil but barbarous and savage in its outcome. And that outcome is inevitable in a society that has lost its civilizational moorings.

Most people think wokeism to be childish and irresponsible. Some might say that a dose of wokeism can soften fundamentalist Islam. What is wrong if something challenges the fundamentalism that Islam engenders? That is until you have not experienced wokeism. I should know better. I grew up in a woke culture—in India—which had no values, morality, or civilizational constraints and where getting away with crime was glorified.

A few days back, the Indian government, in a widely publicized event, released some men who had been in prison for rapes, brutalities, and killings, which included children and babies. On their release, sweets were distributed. Politicians of the ruling party called them “good Brahmin.” The criminals’ release before the upcoming regional elections should tell you something.

No one knows better about the psyche of the citizenry than politicians. Politicians know how to motivate voters. The release of the criminals is a well-calculated affair. It will increase the vote in favor of the ruling BJP party. These voters are not criminal or evil in the conventional sense. But, as is the culture of India, these voters have no values. They overlook the pain that the rapes and killings inflicted on their victims.

Hannah Arendt rightly invoked the concept of the banality of evil. When civilizational constraints fall away, you are left with savagery and barbarism, even when you mostly see innocent-looking people around you.

Evil hardly ever is a fierce-looking, sharp-toothed devil. It is usually alluring. It caters to our animalistic instincts.

Those who grow up in a culture that subliminally enculturates ten commandments, compassion, and empathy might assume that these values occur naturally to human beings. These values came to exist in the West over several millennia after a tremendous struggle, a civilization-building process. These values are conspicuous by their absence in the Third World and among the wokes in the West—and there is a reason why the wokes have an affinity for the Third World cultures. They are the same.

What happens when society has no values? Does it become free, where people can do whatever they intend to do with their personal lives? Unfortunately, having a civilization requires certain boundaries and fences and a moral code of conduct, where people’s animalistic desires are fenced in to at least ensure that the liberties of others are not violated. A civilization requires social opprobrium for certain acts, even for what does not seem to hurt others.

Wokes are not communists. They haven’t faced the hardships of life that underpinned the communist revolutions. They aren’t idealists. They might invoke the image of Karl Marx or Lenin, but they have no clue what those images mean. The patron saint of the wokes is George Floyd, who the communists would have hanged, drawn, and quartered as they would have the wokes.

Is wokeism worse than communism, which killed millions in the last century? Yes. An unmoored boat does not drift away to the open ocean right away. In the initial stages, society’s lack of moral structure might look like relaxation of social constraints and liberty. Still, the result is evident in cultures of the Third World, where moral values are conspicuous by their absence. Indians killed four million people in a three-country settlement after the so-called independence from the British. They have no empathy for over a billion people who live lives worse than that of cockroaches, generation after generation.

Wokeism is the ultimate in no-civilization and must lead to a feral existence, where the only value is the animalistic might-is-right, a freewheeling life of substance abuse, and abusing others.

I spent many days observing the anti-government and pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Knowing that I was a tourist, the protestors were exceptionally kind in ensuring I didn’t get hurt. They were polite and, apart from fighting with the police, never stole or destroyed public property. In late 2019, I was sitting next to the Chinese flagpole of the government headquarters when a protestor climbed up the pole, took off the Chinese flag, and desecrated it.

In the 60s, western people, led perhaps by the Beatles and their guru Maharishi, romanticized Indian society. There was an allure in promiscuity and easy access to drugs. Hinduism came to be seen as offering liberty from the religious constraints of Christianity.

I have nothing personally against HK protestors or the people of the freewheeling 1960s. But the ultimate consequence of wokeism, the mysticism of Indian religions, and sub-Saharan paganism is barbarism and savagery.

Communist countries always did much better than India and sub-Saharan Africa’s feral, chaotic, woke countries. I prefer to call their economic structure neither socialism nor communism. I call it chaos-ism, feral-ism, and what has come to be known as wokeism in the West.

The western world faces the actual devil. The Third World, which was partly civilized by the infusion of some Christian values, is inevitably going back to its pre-colonial wretched existence.

There are a whole range of gradations between what were the progressives of the past and this emergent popular culture, wokeism, represented by the Canadian PM, Justin Trudeau and his team of federal ministers, the US President, Joe Biden, the Vice President, Kamla Harris, the Supreme Court Justice who cannot define “woman.” None of these people would have come to power had we not upended meritocracy by choosing our leaders through democracy, handing over institutional control in the West to the lowest common denominator, the bread-and-circuses masses, the bottom 51% of the voters.

With the rising woke movement, would the West eventually resemble the wretched existence of India and sub-Saharan Africa? No. India, sub-Saharan Africa, and much of Latin America have no affinity for civilizational values. They must revert to their pre-colonial barbaric existence if they are not already there. That said, under the influence of wokeism, the West will fall a lot, and there is nothing to redeem it.