On of the most cult-like elements of wokeism, or critical theory, or whatever you wish to call it, is its persistence in separating you from your culture by any means necessary. It’s adherents are orphans of time, isolated and cut off from their family, their culture, their history, all the traditional anchors of the self. Your history exists to be criticized and deconstructed, your family must be challenged and deconstructed. You’re told of your family, your history, your life, your cultural artifacts, not that they might be sinful, but that the only question is finding the sin and exposing it. They are all inherently and fundamentally sinful. And your job is to be the inquisitor taking them apart. Only by making yourself their informer can you escape their punishment.
This is a typical tactic of all cults. People must be separated and orphaned from their traditional identity structures, as they might provide competition or refuges against the annointed vision. I’ve known people who did fall into cults, and one of the first tasks undertaken was to separate them from their parents, so they have to look to the group for what their parents were providing. And so on it goes, to friends, community, culture, and all other competing loves. All other refuges and avenues of stability and sanity and meaning and self are eliminated as options. That way the full self can be devoted to the cause and the society to be, the new structure, the new history, new family, new culture.
That’s why socialism has so often emphasized the breaking down of local and familial affiliations. As long as you had loyalty to someone just because they were your father, you might not inform on them to the state. So long as you had loyalty to someone just because they were your neighbor or countryman, you might not consent to letting them be purged as an agent of oppression. And both of these were considered serious problems in the Soviet Union. Familial attachment and community attachment were an impediment to the state’s monopoly on your love, loyalty, meaning, and morality.
Never mind that the state can’t really love you or care about you as your parents do. The promise is there. These are things standing in the way of your happiness, and you can’t reach that paradise or vision of righteousness unless you can let go of all lesser attachments and subject them to the rule of the vision.
There’s a sacrificial instinct in humanity, an understanding that giving up something now can help you secure something better. And the more precious the sacrifice, the more pleasing it is, the more devout you are, the more righteous you then become, and the more you do to advance the kingdom. And that instinct isn’t exactly wrong. But it can certainly go wrong. That’s the trickiest thing about it.
Wokeism demands human sacrifice. It is a greedy and devouring and merciless god. Unlike the Christian God who pays the penalty for us, who forgives us and loves us and provides the ram, wokeism possesses no such mercies and offers no such redemption or substitution. Only sacrifice, forever and of all. Sin is innate in all things. It is not a question of if you and your family and culture and gender and history were sinful, but only how. Only exposure and crucifixion can cure them, only fire, only sacrifice. The more precious and dear, the better, the more true your devotion.
The sacrifices must be continual. You must always be giving something or someone up to show your devotion to the cause. In the big things and in the small things. Bring your movies, your books, your jokes, your music, your friendships, your food, your profession, your government, your money, your speech. Bring it all so that it can be offered up, in hope that the perfume of it will rise up to the great judge, and that it will satisfy her, so that she will pass over you for today.
For she is a devouring and perfecting flame that promises all and devours all, a god of guilt who judges all the powers and products of man and demands they be given up, because only in her hands can they be pure and righteous and just. Only when all differences and all particulars, all earthly loyalties and all freedoms are consumed and made obesiant to her, will all be perfect. Then all will be as one, in her. This is the kindness she offers, the equality, the love.
And her name is Ammit.
Making Nobody Happy 