It is the year of our Lord nineteen hundred. David Hilbert has just issued his list of Great Unsolved Problems in Mathematics.
You, dear reader, are an aspiring mathematician, anxious to get ahead. You want to be acknowledged by your peers and the men of your time as a fellow worth consideration. What is the best way to advance yourself?
Simple: memorize, by slow painful repetition and re-proving, the great body of work produced by the giants who came before you. Then, considering that work for a time, and half a time, see how it all fits with Hilbert’s list. And then, and only then, proposing a fascinating, and true, extension, or even a solution to one of the twenty three problems.
To succeed requires years of brutal hard work, married to substantial luck in circumstance, and being blessed with a mind capable of rare feats. Chances are you won’t make it. At best, you will be one of the vast horde of math appreciators who never manage to make out clearly enough the vague dark shapes you dimly perceive. You, like most of us, are more likely to be a Salieri than a Mozart.
Such is life. It is useless to complain, and even pathetic, if not outright effeminate.
Let’s jump in our minds’ time machine a century ahead. It is now the glorious year of our Lord two thousand and twenty two. You, as before, want to get ahead in mathematics. How?
Skip the old way. Much too hard! Besides, even if you could put in the labor, you suspect you couldn’t even reach Salieri level, let alone anything higher.
What to do? Simple: tweet that “Math is white supremacy”, or “Correct answers be white thinking”, or “Memorization is patriarchal”, or “Math is literally violence”. You follow this up with a column or two, submitted to the most prominent mathematical journals, who eagerly accept them, and which contain statements like those tweets, composed of words tossed as a salad in a chaotic manner that would make even Kamala Harris blush.
If you are lucky, you won’t pass out from the dizzy speed at which you are promoted.
There is noting special about our mathematics example. It applies with equal vigor to all fields, from physics to photography. Woke works wherever it is tried. And the reason is obvious:
Work is hard, woke is easy.
It takes no special intelligence to be woke. It is not that lack of intelligence is beneficial to woke, because it takes something like average to slightly above average intelligence to use woke to manipulate the system and propel yourself forward. It is hard for those of great intelligence (in their own fields) to be woke, unless they are devoid of conscience or have evil motives. You will have noted the parenthetical condition, to be joined with another below.
Our paradigmatic example of woke is this tweet:
https://twitter.com/EdwardGLuce/status/1557984573354565633
This is a false flippant statement, given only to gain applause, giving an opinion everybody, most especially its author, knows is false. It is woke because it is an opinion the intellectually feeble and unscrupulous know they should be seen agreeing with. It is also very, very easy to make, consuming no intellectual resources.
Because lying is painful (as we have often observed), and because (hint hint) the midwit excels at inventing evidence for cherished beliefs (and fails to consider evidence which refutes these beliefs), doubtless those who nod along with Luce will conjure observations which “prove” Republicans are the most evil force evah. This is easy.
Woke appeals best to the midwit because it is easy but can be made to appear difficult. The “difficult” part are the airy theories the woke invent for themselves that, to them, sound like thinking has gone on.
You have the idea. But this theory of incapability married to envy glued to ambition is insufficient. Consider if you parroted Luce-like idiocies to mathematicians in 1900. “I refuse to do proofs because they are white supremacist!” You’d be fortunate not to end up in a padded room.
Woke needs at least this one more thing for it to work: cowardice. Woke in a world of men with chests backfires. Woke requires fear, woke builds on an absence of courage.
Bonus This was originally going to run last week, but events. In the meantime, I discovered some who say it’s now too late, and that we all must DIE. This, as we’ll see in some essays to come, is likely correct.
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In the age of perversion by academisized nescience, civilization is supposedly being rebuilt, to always the next dernier cri with utopian consequences, so that a self-detonating implosion bomb is created.
I’ve noticed a similar issue with government support of “the arts” that pre-dates wokeism. Artists will line up for various grants, favored exhibition space, recognition, etc. from government bodies because (perhaps) their artistic talent isn’t sufficient. These artists can’t survive on their own abilities unless they create pieces that include government-approved themes.
The hive mind is programed first in academia and then through mass
media. Here’s an interesting study that proves it:
A Window on the Orwellian Dystopia of America
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/35/2/themes-in-academic-literature-prejudice-and-social-justice
This the New Tweedledum & Dee…
““I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum: “but it isn’t so, nohow.”
“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
“I was thinking,” Alice said very politely, “which is the best way out of this wood: it’s getting so dark. Would you tell me, please?”
But the little men only looked at each other and grinned.”
So yes, you ask me if I’m Qualified and I, of course, reply: “Indeed I am! I declare it so!”
You ask for proof…and down the rabbit hole we tumble.
First I deny that you are even qualified to ask for my qualifications , let alone proof of same. The very act of asking is yet another form of patriarchal oppression — and we all well know that is no good, very bad, terrible, horrible.
And the very idea that such things as qualifications exist, implies standards, and where do those standards come from? Well right here in River City, Where We Got Trouble, OF COURSE: Standards, of course, are the obsolete detritus of a Cisgendered, Transphobic, Heteronormative, Misogynistic, Racist & Deplorable Western Civilization that enslaved all the rest of the world including especially BIPOC’s! And we all well know that is no good, very bad, terrible, horrible.
So no — I don’t accept that you have the right to ask me for qualifications. And no, I don’t accept the fact that there are even are such things as objectively knowable qualifications, let alone qualifications that someone could evaluate to see if I can do the job. FIDDLESTICKS, SAY I.
What I offer and declare ‘more than sufficient’ is my lived realities! What more is there? What more is required? Besides, ya wanna be Inclusive, dontcha? And did I mention Equity and Diversity?!!
“Let’s fight till six, and then have dinner,” said Tweedledum.
“Very well,” the other said, rather sadly: “and she can watch us—only you’d better not come very close,” he added: “I generally hit everything I can see—when I get really excited.”
“And I hit everything within reach,” cried Tweedledum, “whether I can see it or not!”
And so down and down and down we go.
Nice piece.
I suppose this is a specific instance of the general truth that destruction is very easy, therefore common; while creation is very difficult, hence rare.
What is unprecedented in this age of the world is that destruction is socially valued above creation; destruction is propagandized, subsidized, indeed mandatory. The term for which is ‘evil, triumphant’.
On the other side, there are very few things in life as deeply and lastingly satisfying to the soul as creation; disinterestedly pursued and eventually successful – even when in a small way.
Wokeism is part of the evolutionary process so it is to be celebrated.
In the future, women in charge of STEM will teach their charges about all of the superstitions visited upon our crummy culture by white men which is why it evolved to an enlightened existence.
They will joke about how their ancient sisters had to endure all of the sweaty, dirty and humiliating activity once thought necessary to reproduce the human species and try to explain how it was once thought important to do sums and such as though that made people happy
Us white men must die if we are to survive
The late great Rush Hudson Limbaugh III put it this way about liberalism (aka wokeism): “Its the most gutless choice you can make.”
Excerpts from: https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2008/01/14/de_tocqueville_on_the_nanny_state/
But liberalism, Nanny Statism, why, it’s easy. It’s the most gutless choice you can make. Just tell everybody you care about them, understand that they can’t survive against the odds and they’re going to punish the people who do. We’re going to try to make everybody equal, and we’re going to make sure you’re as happy as you can be, and we’re going to make sure that you don’t do any damage to the country, you don’t do any damage to the planet, you don’t do any damage to the neighborhood, you don’t do any damage to your house. If you engage in fraudulent or mistaken practices that cost you econonically, don’t worry about it, no harm, no foul, because you were too stupid to know what you were doing in the first place, so we will fix it and make you indentured servants of ours, constantly owing us in the government for whatever pleasure and happiness you find in life, and that will keep you dependent on it and will keep you looking everywhere but yourself for contentment, for happiness, for satisfaction, and for pleasure. That, my friends, is what he’s talking about. That’s what liberalism is, and it pains me to say, we have Republicans running on the same premise for the presidency in this campaign.
AND about conservatism:
I’ve always said, conservatism is hard, conservatism does not baby people. It doesn’t do what de Tocqueville was describing here. It doesn’t keep you a perpetual child. Conservatism doesn’t try to find a way to keep you happy. Conservatism is about making yourself happy and productive and fulfilled and making sure that there are as few obstacles in your path to all that as possible.
These people are giving desperate cries for help for the white man to reassert himself and kick their ass. The miss the parental white man because they know they need a whoopin.
Edward Luce is the offspring of political aristocrats, his father Baron Luce, after a long political career with many distinguished appointments, was Lord Chamberlain, head administrator of the royal household, appointed by the Queen. His grandfathers and great-grandfathers were similarly distinguished.
Edward is a journalist, posted to Washington, DC, which apparently is the midwit’s qualification to opine on American matters.
How the mighty have fallen.
I think the next breakthrough in the great problems will have to come from a country without screens and a schooling system based on the western model.
I see the U.S wants to send a female and black person to the moon, the West is out of control, they will have to remind these astronauts that there is no need for matches on the trip, to make a fire to keep them warm when they get there!
The “around the world” probably is missing an asterix where we discover that Lucy Luce here has been around to probably London and Hawaii and nowhere further… Perhaps the FBI should raid his home looking for travel documents…
But even then, he’d still be wrong and a blatant liar!
An early version of woke is found in the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes, which everyone here remembers it wasn’t even an illusion; everyone could see plainly that the emperior was naked but no one dared say it out loud.
In modern times, the child that spoke plainly and uttered the words that everyone else wanted to, but feared consequences of doing so, are people such as Matt Walsh who goes around asking “What is a woman?” which is easy to answer but hardly anyone dares say the words (“an adult human female”). It can imply a lot more than that, but that’s the essence of it.
Woke is fear of being accused of unwoke, unwashed, unrepentent, fill in the remaining “un” and bad words; the consequences of which are real and sometimes serious.