Lose Your Muscles and Make Yourself Useless!

What we now call "wokeness" is the transformation and internalization of a mechanism -- political correctness -- into a person.

If we're going to be perfectly accurate, it results in the destruction of the person, which is one of its purposes, because it sacrifices the individual to the collective, when the whole point of the collective is to serve the individual -- not, of course, in a selfish way, but rather, to facilitate the actualization and flourishing of personhood per se. And critically, personhood is intrinsically intersubjective, so an atomized person is no person at all.

In short, there are two wrong ways of being a person: for the individual to be swallowed by the collective, or for the individual to exist entirely apart from the matrix of trinitarian intersubjectivity -- on one end socialism, on the other a largely irrelevant fringe of radical libertarianism represented by oddballs such as Murray Rothbard.

The Woke Person is nothing new. Rather, he is simply Socialist Man, or again, the successful eradication of man -- successful because the man does it to himself. Free will is turned against itself, strangling the individual in the approved and predigested line of the day. Someone else has done the "thinking," and it is for the woke person to simply take it on board, like an update for your computer operating system.

For example, no properly woke person knows why he is so passionate about transgenderism, or why it even became such an urgent topic of discussion. Thinking is not the point for the woke. Rather, your job as a woke person is to act on these thoughts, not to think them. Same with the redefinition of marriage, or giving free stuff to criminals who break into the country, or forcing female athletes to compete with men who think they're women.

This may sound a little odd when I first describe it, but when you think about it, you will understand that your Gagdad is speaking unalloyed truth: that for many, if not most, people, their minds operate more like a muscle than a mind. Yes, I am being literal, because when we come into the world our minds are largely submerged in the body, and only with development do we become increasingly de-somatized, so to speak, capable of genuine conceptual thinking instead of the musclebound kind.

Example. Okay, take "projection," which used to be (and still is) a psychoanalytic term of art, but has now become a colloquialism that is sloppily deployed by all and sundry. But when I use the word, I mean it in the precise sense as a primitive psychological defense mechanism that operates like a muscle, evacuating thoughts and feelings from Person A (the projector) and forcing them into Person B (the projectee).

The projector -- by definition -- doesn't know when he is projecting, whereas the target of the projections can tell when he is the recipient. To cite an obvious example, the president and his supporters are constantly being called "racist" by unhinged leftists. But we aren't racists, so why is this happening? What's going on?

Easy: the mental muscle of the leftist shoves this nasty sentiment into us, so he may then legitimately attack us for harboring these nasty sentiments. As such, you can see that the initial action (the projection) legitimizes literal muscular action, up to and including violence (e.g., Antifa, attacking conservative speakers on college campuses, chasing us out of restaurants, etc.).

But none of this is my point. My Real Point is that leftism is always totalitarian in its essence, and that political correctness is by no means an accidental accretion, but rather, an intrinsic feature: no muscular denial of thinking, no left. Everywhere and everywhen. Period.

(And importantly, just because the left uses this mechanism, it doesn't imply that everyone who uses it is a leftist; rather, leftism is simply the institutionalization of a pathological form of thinking that is a universal and permanent possibility of the human condition. It can only permeate collectives because it first infiltrates individuals.)

All of the above was provoked by the following passage in an essay called Philosophy and the Common Good, by Mr. Pieper:

It is an essential characteristic of every totalitarian regime that those who have political power claim to define, exhaustively and definitively, the concrete content of the bonum commune [common good].... [E]verything which does not meet the criterion is declared "socially unimportant" and "undesirable" if not forbidden, and is suppressed.

Boom. Notice the muscularity of the process: forbidden and suppressed by power. To be Woke means to have the punitive power to suppress and forbid.

The other day I heard Dave Rubin compare it to a vast circle of wokery, with each person holding a gun to the head of the person next to him. This explains how they can adjust their thinking muscles in an instant (Just Like That, as the meme teaches us). Look at Joe Biden: now that he's in the circle, he will say whatever he has to in order to prevent the guy next to him from putting a bullet into his head, even if it means disavowing everything he's ever thought, said, or done.

Since we've discussed fake muscular thinking, what about the real kind? The first thing to understand is that their are degrees of thinking, with ideology at one end, philosophy at the other; the former always has an explicit content, while the latter is an asymptotic process that can never fully grasp its object, only love it from afar. Which is why it is called philo-sophy and not possessophy.

The philosopher

who wants to know what all that is [is] fundamentally about, what "reality" "really" means -- or who seeks this kind of knowledge does not start out with a definitely formulated question in the way a scientist does.

Precisely this attitude of wordless listening [(---) and (o), respectively] enables him, on the one hand, to see all information from every branch of knowledge as a contribution to the answer he is really looking for; on the other hand, it disposes him not to be satisfied with any of these items of information but to remain open to the ultimate "wisdom," aspiring to which is central to the concept of philo-sophia (Pieper).

Now, philosophy can never be "practical" because it can never be "muscular." It can never force, only show. It can be detached from neither love nor freedom, because its essence is the free exercise of a loving relationship to wisdom hersoph. If philosophy becomes "for" something other than its own sake, then it is no longer philosophy.

The bottom line is that we have too many useful idiots running around, when we need more useless ones. Any imbecile can see there are problems, but it takes real wisdom to ignore them.

Only a discerning encounter with the mystery -- which consists in the fact that something is -- only this experience gives us the awareness that the light which makes things "positively" knowable, is simply unfathomable and inexhaustible and thus, at the same time, makes things incomprehensible.

It is true that the world is intelligible and that the mind may attain knowledge of it. However, the deeper truth is that we can never know it completely, for this would reduce to a closed ideology and therefore hypertrophic muscleheadedness.