Our mainstream culture is so saturated with wokeness and social justice that it’s become far more normalized than it should have ever been. One bit of fallout from this hyper-sensitive and constantly outraged trend is “cancel culture,” the idea that anyone who steps out of line from the approved social guidelines should have their lives destroyed.
It doesn’t always take but even one person destroyed is too many, and there are far too many cases where cancel culture wins the day.
It is easy to describe the current culture of our country as autoritarian and even despotic. Everybody, from small businesses to large corporations, is scared to move beyond the line, for fear that they will be subject to the wrathful media and politicians who are forever outraged. If you were an alien observing America from afar, you’d guess that the most powerful force in the country is the extreme-left, who managed to normalize anti-science, violence, racism, sexism, and irrationality, and then make too many obedient to it.
While this has affected many, it’s done a real number on Gen Zennials, the generation currently making their way into adulthood. So saturated with this woke mentality is this generation that many don’t see its hypocrisy or evil in it. They are even more zealous about enforcing it. While this may be a trend among the young, it’s a tale as old as time.
Since ancient times, despots have used children to promote extremist politics. This is what we can see in America, thanks to the advice column of Slate written by a parent concerned.
The mother discovered an excel spreadsheet on her 14-year-old son’s laptop that had his classmates featured on it. Below their names were dates and bits of data. The data consisted of descriptions and times for non-woke behaviour.
My son, “Jack,” 14, has been maintaining a spreadsheet that tracks all of his classmate’s problematic actions. Jack, a 14-year-old boy with a disability, is intelligent and compassionate. To prevent our children from being radicalized by the alt-right, we don’t allow them to own their computers. Our kids have a shared laptop which is monitored and controlled. We found an excel spreadsheet in Jack’s folder that listed the names of all of his classmates, as well as dates and descriptions of their problematic behavior. Some of the descriptions I saw include “has a mom who is a cop,” “no pronouns in insta bio,” “laughed at a fat joke,” “lists problematic show as one of their favorites,” “mimicked a foreign accent,” and “used cis-normative language.”
“Jack” denies to his obviously leftist parents that the list is actually his and to her credit, the advice given is to recommend he delete the list to see if he’s lying to them and recommended enrolling him in therapy so a professional could help dissuade him from making these kinds of lists.
Interestingly, Jack’s parents were closely monitoring his online activity in order to stop him from being radicalized to the right but ended up with a son radicalized to the left instead. They clearly weren’t looking for that kind of behavior but the truth is that in today’s society, radicalization to the extreme left is far more likely to happen as it’s accepted by mainstream society.
Perhaps even more fascinating is Jack’s list. You have to wonder how he intended to use it.
He probably intended to leverage it over his peers at some future date. Jack is likely to have felt it was his duty, being radicalized to left. He likely also understands that social justice ideologies are the current king of society. In his teenage mind, might was right. He was able to cancel anyone and was happy to be an observer to report the un-woken behavior society shuns. He’s been made a true believer and he wants to enforce his belief…just as woke society has taught him to.
Journalist Ian Miles Cheong, who first brought this story to the public’s attention, noted that this kind of behavior was foreseen by author George OrwellWho wrote the 1984 despotic dystopia. The book describes how children were made to spy for the government and parents began to fear their children.
“Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. The worst part was their transformation into little savages through organizations such as the Spies. But this didn’t produce in them any desire to rebel against the Party’s discipline. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it…. They were fiercely against enemies of the state, foreigners, traitors and thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.”
Orwell saw the results of authoritarians. He had also been a propagandist for a while and was well aware of their impact on others’ minds. He saw the Soviets, Nazis, and their brainwashing of their citizens.
While Jack wasn’t reporting his findings to any governmental authority, he was recording his fellow student’s behaviors for the benefit of what he saw as an authority, even if it was a nebulous one.
If you wanted proof that what the radical left is driving us toward is an Orwellian future of despotism, tyranny, and distrust, then here’s your canary in the coalmine.
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