The woke mind virus
This is not a post about how wrong the social justice movement is about everything.
Unlike Jordan Peterson I think that postmodernism has merit. He who studies existence through contemplation must recognize that reality is in fact much more fluid than our culture would have us believe, that absolute truths and duality are difficult to come by and that the solid self does not hold up to scrutiny.
And yet, those who have succumbed to the woke mind virus have thrown the baby of meaning out with the bath water of meta-narratives. Meaning can co-exist alongside ambiguity just like content can exist alongside emptiness.
In order to exist in the world we need to engage with it as a solid self. And we need to agree to certain landscapes of meaning. Now, clinging to that solid self and being overly committed to one particular landscape is the source of many an ailment of our culture, but denying the existence of any such structure is just as harmful.
Once again, we need to dance on the slackline of paradox in order to “make sense” of it.
William Frederick Yeames’s “And When Did You Last See Your Father?” (1878)
