The Pathological Nature of WokenessLeftist cancel culture is being driven by the emotionally deranged agenda of teenage girls.
By Bill Hurrell
April 15, 2022
It is not often that two contrasting mainstream media events reveal so completely the nature of the deep dysfunction of modern culture. Yet that is precisely what happened last month.
Those two events are as follows: First, contrarian Substack writer and known anti-woke crusader Andrew Sullivan appeared on Jon Stewart’s new show, “The Problem With Jon Stewart.” I do not think I am being uncharitable when I call the appearance a disaster. Which, to be fair, is not entirely Sullivan’s fault, seeing as he was thrust into what was effectively a three-on-one fight (more like a dozens-on-one fight, if you include the studio audience). He was the lone dissenter against a pack of braying fanatics, egged on by a motley trio consisting of a grifter and two useful idiots, one of whom is the most famed enforcer of liberal dogma from decades past.
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The second event was the appearance of former New York Times tech journalist Taylor Lorenz on MSNBC, where she broke down in tears describing the alleged online harassment she has received for (as she tells it) just doing her job, and how it has given her PTSD. The interviewer was infinitely more charitable, as were Lorenz’s fellow guests. Yet in spite of every attempt to make Lorenz look like a wounded victim, her appearance still prompted memes and derision, as well as some very well-deserved criticism from one of her alleged “harassers.”
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I think, if we are to understand the Left, it behooves us to ask why these two events should be scored this way. The easy answer would be that Lorenz confirmed leftist prejudices, while Sullivan tried unsuccessfully to combat them and ended up reinforcing them by mistake. And while this explanation no doubt has merit, it misses a fundamental difference between Lorenz and Sullivan that almost certainly played a role in why Lorenz knew how to play her emotional reaction so perfectly for a liberal audience, while Sullivan did not. That difference can be summed up in a single word: age.
The Role of Tumblr In Advancing Wokeness* * *
There is a very simple reason for this: Andrew Sullivan never had a Tumblr account. Taylor Lorenz does, and according to her, it was at least partially responsible for her choice to enter journalism as a profession. As someone who has written about Tumblr at length, especially (and infamously) the “Glee” fandom, this is the equivalent of the Bat-Signal, given my belief that Tumblr is responsible not just for wokeness, but for its entire melodramatic, maudlin, adolescent girl aesthetic and style of communication.
In this case, however, I do not want to rely on my own writing as evidence. Rather, I want to rely on the work of a young writer named Helena Kerschner who has explained Tumblr from firsthand knowledge in a way that I despair of equaling:
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The reader should direct his attention to something crucial in Kerschner’s quote: the hierarchy of oppression. The reason a “cishet white girl” would automatically have her suffering dismissed on Tumblr if she was born with the wrong skin color and wrong gender identity and sexual orientation, is because on a female-dominated website there were no cishet white men to persecute, so cishet white women became the “most powerful” group. This shows very well how easily the Left will turn on itself when the bogeyman of the straight white male ceases to exist. This is why they have such a fervent desire to keep up the scapegoating of that one group. It is all that protects their other constituents from having empathy for them cut off.
But more than that, consider the options this hierarchy of oppression presented for young Helena. She could either accept her place as a cishet white girl, and gain approval by spending her entire life trying to make other people’s lives better, explicitly at the expense of her own mental well-being, or she could adopt a trans identity. That she chose the latter speaks to the sheer unreasonableness of the demands wokeness makes on its adherents.
But, you may ask, why does Taylor Lorenz get away with crying, then, seeing as she is (to all appearances) a “cishet white girl” with no particular inner-conflict about her sexual orientation or gender identity? Well, because Lorenz’s antagonists are (or are presumed to be) white males, the only group higher on the food chain than she is, and therefore, her trauma can be validated without risking the oppression hierarchy.
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The Scarcity of EmpathySo, we must ask ourselves, who is often the most psychologically vulnerable? Obviously, the mentally ill is one answer, hence why Tumblr leftism elevates transgenderism (i.e., gender dysphoria) over even race as the civil rights issue of our time. But notice what their remedy is for gender dysphoria: not therapy (“conversion therapy!” the leftists shriek), but rather hormones, surgery, and changing the structure of society to make the dysphoria no longer false. Similarly, Tumblr’s solution to trauma around rape, sexual assault, or any number of other disturbing topics is not therapy to make the trauma less, but rather to slap trigger warnings on everything so that the traumatized never have to move past their pain.
In short, Tumblr’s solution to mental illness is affirmation of the mental illness’s truth. In other words, if you’ve been hurt, don’t adapt, make reality adapt so that your hurt can never happen again, and you never need to be reminded of it again. The ambition would be impressive, if the reason for it weren’t so pitiable.* * *
Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/15/the-pathological-nature-of-wokeness/
