The question this article is a response to was originally posted in its full length as, “What are people feelings regarding this whole ‘woke and extreme leftist’ ideology that seems to be so prevalent nowadays? Is the push back that I’m feeling actually gathering pace, with ever more people speaking up against it, actually happening?”
Describing a capacity for empathy as “extreme” is evidence of an extreme disparity on behalf of people who justify abusive behaviours toward others.
People who describe “woke” as extreme are the people responsible for the widespread character of casual cruelty permeating our societies.
Such people are bullies in society who cannot seem to exist without demeaning and disparaging vulnerable others.
These people make the most significant contributions to the most embarrassing statistics we face as a species and as societies attempting to live up to our self-declared state of “advanced civilization.”
These people are not the civilized citizens among us but the barbarian holdouts who refuse to evolve within the protections of civilized society that they mock and undermine at every turn with their atavistic predilections.
These people are the uncivilized extremes who threaten social stability while routinely betraying the social contract as they function in the limited capacities of predators and parasites, draining the best from among us while disparaging it as they gorge themselves on their benefits.
People are getting so sick and tired of their disgusting behaviours that we are seeing pushback in many different ways.
We can tell that progress is being made by the increasing extremes in their behaviours as they ramp up their disparagements to be perceived as the crazy relatives in everyone’s family.
In his debate with Kamala Harris on September 9th, Donald Trump’s performance has shown how people are tired of a steady diet of manufactured moral outrage.
How people responded to Tim Walz’s son, who openly displayed his emotionally charged pride for his father, is a distinctly different attitude of intolerance for abusive behaviour than was the case when Trump openly mocked a disabled person like the extremely psychopathic monster he is.
The hatred porn peddled by those who perpetually disparage the “bleeding hearts” in society is running its course.
The meek are well on their way now to inherit the Earth, as those who hypocritically pretend to worship a god of love and peace have known for ages. They don’t want to relinquish their power and privilege now that their end is nigh.
It is time for the barbarians to rest into eternity as the disturbing nightmares of primitive existence they embody.
We are all in this mess together, and we’re sick and tired of the crabs dragging us down to face oblivion together. Such is their fate, not the rest of humanity.
We are destined to explore the stars, and we will never make it there while burdened by the toxicity of hate-mongers among us.
They can grow up or crawl into their dank holes and wallow for all the benefits they offer with their whining negativity.
It’s time for the haters to wake up and rejoin the human race.
It’s hard work. We know.
Stop being so lazy about it, get off your rocking horse, and get to work.
It means everyone is free to be who they are and to do what they choose as long as they do not infringe on the freedoms of others.
It means “freedom” is not a licence to abuse others or violate the freedoms of others.
It means religious people do not get to dictate how other people choose to live their lives, and that includes the freedom to seek a remedy to a medical condition without suffering from subjectively applied restraints or conditions by others.
It means freedom from religious persecution and the freedom to practice one’s religion without persecution for one’s personal choices.
It means the right to self-determination and bodily autonomy without restriction.
It does not mean the freedom to impose one’s views onto others because that violates their freedoms.
It does not mean the freedom to abuse others because that violates their freedoms.
It does not mean the institution of laws to dictate the personal choices of others because that violates their freedoms.
It means do whatever you want to do, think whatever you want, and believe whatever you want, but don’t be an asshole to others about it.
It means “The Golden Rule” — “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
It means reciprocity — treat others as you want to be treated, but if you’re a masochist who wants to suffer, it does not mean that you have an excuse to indulge in sadistic behaviours toward others.
It means trying to be a decent human being toward other people. It means trying to respect their identical right to be who they are and to do what they want to do, think, and believe without having to endure your assaults.
It means learning to respect other people’s boundaries.
Freedom means developing empathy, compassion, and sensitivity toward others.
It means freedom isn’t free. Freedom comes with boundaries and at the cost of eternal vigilance.
This question as it was originally posted on Quora in its complete form is: Why do so many MAGA elitists come off as spoiled rotten, whiny and ungrateful babies who are in desperate need of a diaper change?
Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist, and his success at achieving such a high degree of public awareness and top of mind bolstered by all the corporate media driving him to the Whitehouse with their tacit support for his return to power is like a Midas Touch inspiring narcissists everywhere.
That’s why Elon Musk, owner of the world’s most enormous megaphone, fawns over the grifter in chief.
Donald Trump appears to naturally have what Elon had to pay $44 billion to have and with less fawning attention as he’s finding his audience of worshippers dwindling instead of doubling down in their support of him as a saviour equal to Trump. (That must also not be very pleasant for him because he is naturally much more intelligent than Trump.)
He’s like catnip for ego masturbators everywhere, and every single one of them is characterized by the image of a spoiled rotten, whiny, and ungrateful child. Anyone who has had any direct experience with a malignant narcissist, and chances are that it’s more than most realize because many still don’t get what that implies, will see the pattern in his behaviour and understand it for the malignancy that it is.
Powerless narcissists everywhere see him as the embodiment of their dreams of power for themselves, even on the smallest of levels, by permitting them the ability to act locally on their toxic impulses. It’s why hate crimes escalated while he was in office. His presence there was a license for every narcissist, malignant and covert, to feel justified in every destructive action they took against those they deem their enemies.
When we say a leader leads by example or when a role model sets the stage for all the performers to play similar roles, this is what is meant. Humans emulate acceptable behaviour. This is how we learn to socialize.
When long-repressed behaviours are allowed to let loose, they do precisely that. We saw that in spades on January 6th. — narcissists like the Q-Anon Shaman dood (Jacob Chansley), through to their flying monkeys, got into the acting out stage of rage against the system of their oppression.
Jacob even requested a special diet of organic food for him during his 41 months of incarceration, which was granted to him for “religious and health” reasons.
“Because of his “shamanic belief system and way of life,” eating food that isn’t organic or has “unnatural chemicals” would cause the client, Jacob Chansley, “systemic responses that are not simply discomforting, but debilitating and, notably, dehydrating,” attorney Albert Watkins wrote in a filing on Wednesday. Chansley had lost more than 20 pounds, and his condition was “declining,” Watkins wrote”
Narcissists don’t much care for anything that doesn’t cater to their self-centred sensibilities, and having a malignant narcissist at the top of the power hierarchy meant they were and are entitled to their entitlements.
A narcissist will expect the world to conform to them, and any form of compromise they are expected to make is perceived as an assault against them. Living in society is already a condition of oppression they must conform to if they wish to survive and succeed in life. They don’t want to conform to a world that does not cater to them, but they learn to do precisely that to get what they want.
MAGAts don’t care about anything beyond whatever serves their ego, and that’s why you can hit them with a mountain of facts and evidence. They’ll keep coming back with yet another fiction they can present to avoid the admission of defeat and score what they can conceive of as a win. Their egos will permit them nothing less because that risks a full-blown narcissistic collapse.
They would rather die than face that hit to their ego.
Their incapacity to admit error or publicly acknowledge a weakness is what makes these freaks a severe threat to democracies everywhere. This is how and why they destroy families everywhere.
They are psychological children trapped in adult bodies as a consequence of having their emotional maturity halted at a young age due to severe trauma.
There is no cure for them beyond addressing the cause, and that cause is a horrendous problem statistically represented by a whopping majority (70%-80%) of families being dysfunctional. That also spills out to statistics involving a mental health pandemic visibly affecting a minimum of one in five people today.
We must prioritize mental health in society to have any hope of solving our common problems and preventing another Drumpf catastrophe. Our only other choice is to wait for the next Drumpf to capture public attention, while the media will be much more prepared to ensure the oligarchs win complete control over the nation.
It’s incredible how much of an impact a non-existent thing can have on people.
It’s much like religion and a non-existent paternal figure.
“Woke” is a word that describes an attitude of awareness over systemic injustices that must be corrected in society.
That’s it.
There is no “ideology” exactly like no “woke mind virus” exists.
All of the hysteria surrounding the term “woke” amounts to nothing more than the whining of children who don’t want to be held accountable for their abusive behaviours.
An ideology is, by definition, a collection of beliefs organized under a dogmatic banner, but to be woke isn’t a belief unto itself. It’s an attitude favouring the support of justice in society and equal access to it for all people — not just the privileged few.
“Woke” itself leads to nothing because it’s not an ideology people rally around in protest of making the world “woke.” There is no singular image of “woke.” There are no collections of rules defining “woke.” There is no institution, group or body of people who represent “woke” as any organized movement for change in society.
“Woke” means simply that a person has realized a corrupt status quo is not sustainable.
“Woke” simply means a person understands and accepts how wrong it is for police to barge into a private residence and shoot people to death while they’re sleeping.
A person who is described as “woke” is just someone who is not only capable of empathy and compassion but is also not intimidated into keeping silent when injustices occur.
That’s what pisses off the people who whine about “woke” as an ideology and invent childish slurs like “woke mind virus” to serve as a boogeyman to fear and attack it out of an illusory need to protect oneself from an imaginary threat.
Some people don’t want social justice.
Some people want to hate.
It’s an addiction for those people, and the media feeds it with a steady diet of conflict porn.
Conservative politicians build their careers around hating groups of easily victimized people.
History is filled with the graves of millions sacrificed on the altar of hatred.
To be “woke” is to know this and be horrified by what humanity has done.
To be “woke” is to want better for themselves, their families, friends, and their communities.
To be “woke” is to want a better future for one’s children and all of us as humans striving to reach our potential as a species.
Some, however, are just mentally ill. Unfortunately, that group comprising “some” amounts to one in five people in our dysfunctional society.
In a city of one million residents, that means 200,000 people are suffering from visible mental health issues.
In a nation of 350 million citizens, that means 70 million citizens are in desperate need of professional mental health services.
The COVID-19 pandemic shut down the entire world for fewer infectees than that, and we live with it every day in society instead by pretending it doesn’t exist or that it’s just normal — like almost daily mass shootings that extinguish the lives of thousands of children every year.
How do the mentally ill who want this nightmare to continue deal with these horrifying facts?
They invent disparagements like a “woke ideology” or a “woke mind virus” because fixing these problems means they will no longer be able to enjoy watching people suffer. They will no longer be able to feel better about themselves if they can’t see other people suffering more than they do.
They can’t stand the idea that they have to work on themselves because they can’t accept how utterly broken they are as human beings. Some no longer even qualify for that distinction.
When people suffer from economic struggles, particularly over a prolonged period, they become desperate for someone to step up to the plate and offer solutions they cannot devise for themselves. People become conditioned through desperation for a strong leader to take charge and “lead the way to prosperity.”
Desperation causes people to lose perspective, while critical thinking skills suffer from a need to quell the pain. Anyone who can convincingly present themselves as a saviour will be welcomed with open arms.
Even though the solutions to economic problems may be obvious, they’re also too far out of reach of hope to implement them.
In today’s world, we are dominated by a handful of wealthy people who control all our systems with deaf ears to the cries of the suffering. Most of their focus is on their well-being, fortunes, and plans for their futures and legacies. The rest of us matter only insofar as we can be useful to them.
As our economies have become global and our economic infrastructures have become multinational entities, we have lost our communities.
Only a few decades ago, our communities thrived by our connectedness to each other.
We have lost that, while those who have been the greatest beneficiaries of a global economy have lost their sense of community attachment because the entire globe is their playground.
The plutocrats among us who are most responsible for the economic hardships suffered by millions are entirely due to their wins at the expense of the millions suffering today. Their goal has never been to raise humanity out of poverty, even though that has been the promise of capitalism.
They have their armies of servants at their disposal to secure themselves against resistance and to continue reshaping the world into their image. They are perceived as being too far beyond the reach of laws to allow the little people any sense of hope for justice.
Anyone who can present themselves as a leader capable of alleviating their suffering is welcomed with a total investment of all their hopes and dreams, while a widespread perception of one capable of rising to that need is one from among the untouchable class. That’s why someone like Donald Trump can succeed in assuming control of an entire party through a cult level of worship.
The trouble is that leaders who claim to be their solution also demand their unquestioning loyalty and obedience. That’s the key which opens the door to fascism because the only way for a single leader to wield enough power is to align themselves with the existing status quo of power.
The term “weird” has been a success due to having correctly pegged their audience.
One of the worst insults for a child in grade school struggling to fit in is being called weird, and being called weird means being ostracized by the group while one’s socialization skills have barely begun developing.
To be called weird at that age means being forced into becoming an outsider, and that induces a deep sense of loneliness and despair within a child.
Drumpf is an extreme and highly malignant narcissist who craves validation through attention. He’s been able to buy and bully his way into always being the centre of attention throughout his life.
Becoming president is a way for him to convince himself that he is relevant to society, and that soothed the young boy inside who had never grown up.
Weird strikes at the heart of his dysfunction and throws him off balance because it confronts his addiction to attention at its core.
It is particularly effective because it’s a relatively benign word for most mature adults with little impact on healthy psychology.
It’s also a word that can be used in many cases. Practically anything can be described as weird, but it’s a word that “has a frequency effect,” like a dog whistle no one else can hear but him and those who (ironically) empathize with him. It gives him a headache while everyone else wonders what’s happening because they can’t hear anything.
This word choice is three-dimensional chess like the word “woke” is. They’re both fun words to use because they’re simple and punchy without being offensive.
They are words that “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,”… and that pisses all the Reichtoids off to no end.
It’s like the logic problem Captain Kirk gave Norman to cause it to overload in the episode, “I, Mudd.”
This is the question as it was asked in its original form: “Will something like the “voluntary human extinction movement” become more and more popular in the future as the Earth’s destruction due to our unending greed becomes more difficult to ignore?”
So… Every human who voluntarily refuses to reproduce does so from a motivation of compassionate care for the environment to lay the entire future of human reproduction at the feet of those who don’t care about our impact on the environment.
This sounds very much like people choosing not to vote in an election because they feel their government is too corrupt, so they decide not to participate in the corruption as a form of protest. The result of that strategy is for the corrupt psychopaths among us to take up the slack of government operations. Abstention facilitates government transformation into a sociopathic entity that the abstainers chose to rebel against by stepping aside and letting the corruption continue without resistance.
Self-sacrifice may seem humane as a movement, but it merely hands unrestrained power to wreak ecological havoc over to those most responsible for environmental destruction.
By culling the portion of our population who have the most developed sensitivities of empathy and compassion, we leave behind a world of psychopaths and sociopaths who are free to do as they please without resistance.
As noble as people may want to make themselves out to be by adopting this attitude, it neither solves the problem of protecting the environment nor does it result in the extinction of humanity by attrition. What it accomplishes is to breed out the most crucial qualities of humanity that would protect our environment while allowing us as a species to achieve a balanced cohabitation with all other life on this planet.
This isn’t a solution to the planet’s problems. It’s a way of hastening them and the destruction of our environment.
It’s doomed to fail as a long-term strategy, but as a form of protest, it might successfully make a statement that could motivate the rest to rise and fight against corruption.
It is otherwise a way of stripping humanity’s only hope for evolving beyond our most destructive impulses. We need to encourage the development of empathy, not cull it from our population.
The main problem with the notion of passivist approaches toward resolving issues created by the psychopaths among us is the naivety involved in believing the most vile amongst us will experience a magical epiphany and become woke enough to care about their destruction.
They won’t.
They’ll destroy everything, and when they’re done, they’ll bemoan their fate while blaming something other than their actions for the consequences of those actions.
This would be like expecting Donald Trump to end up in prison and realizing, “Gee, maybe I should have behaved better.”
Not a friggin’ chance in hell that will happen.
If he ends up in prison, he’ll rail against the injustice of a witch hunt and believe himself unfairly persecuted until his last breath.
Neither cowardice nor apathy are solutions to saving our asses.
A democratic form of governance demands engagement, while the quickest way to destroy democracy is apathy. We’ve been doing a remarkable job of dismantling our democracies since Reagan by meekly handing over power to the powerful predators that have been reshaping human society into a collection of sociopaths who think nothing of exploiting their neighbour for a minor trinket serving as a temporary distraction from despair.
We must do the hard work of facing our monsters and reigning them in.
No shortcuts exist that will save humanity from itself.
No peaceful Kumbaya has ever prevailed against the barbarians at the gates.
This movement may signal a voluntary extinction of humanity, but it’s an extinction that will take every other creature with us. It won’t save them from our psychopathic predations.
This phrase was first coined by a Founding Father, John Dickinson. His pre-Revolutionary War song, “The Liberty Song” was published on July 7, 1768.
“Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all, By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall; In so righteous a cause let us hope to succeed, For heaven approves of each generous deed.”
It’s a bit dated and difficult to listen to now, but it reflects the spirit of the people who rebelled against an oppressive ruler and founded a new nation.
The meaning of “united we stand, divided we fall” is timeless.
It speaks to the survival success of the human species. It invokes Margaret Mead’s insight when she describes a knit bone as the beginning of civilized humanity. We have survived by uniting together and we began that journey of survival by being united when we hunted large animals in groups to feed and clothe ourselves.
To be united is more than just a word describing proximity. To be united is a pact we make to survive and prosper as families, friends, local communities, cities, regions, states/provinces, and nations.
Now that our world has shrunk to the level where geography is no longer a boundary between people, to be united now means continents and continental trading blocks. As our global environmental emergency escalates, united means the entire globe must come together as a species to restore our home to its natural state of sustaining humanity or we may not survive the culling. Our current efforts to mitigate environmental destruction already indicate many millions won’t if we don’t begin taking bold steps to fix our mess now.
Insofar as the efficiency of managing groups of people is concerned, the larger the group, the less efficiently they can be managed, and the less able any administrative body is to meet the group’s needs.
This dynamic creates a tension between individual needs and group needs that scale beyond individuals and their tribes into tensions of needs between tribes and regions, regions and their nations, and a global community comprised of a nesting doll of associations.
Even corporate structures are defined by layers of independence within a hierarchy of authority. Sections, departments, divisions, regions, and boards represent independent areas of authority limited by scope and subordinate to an escalated chain in a hierarchy of authority.
The human mind also works similarly within a structure of escalated authority in processing information. Our AI development efforts mimic that structure because it is the most efficient way of processing and managing escalated levels of complexity at escalated degrees of abstraction.
At any rate, after all that preamble, there are limits to what any state is capable of simply because of limited resources. In Canada, the differences between provinces are a little more obvious in my mind simply because of my familiarity with differences in resources across regions. In the western province of British Columbia, forestry is the primary industry and source of economic growth for the entire world. Next door in Alberta, the oil industry has generated its wealth. Its rich resources have had its provincial politics polluted by greedy Americans like the Koch brothers. Next door to Alberta is the province of Saskatchewan, which has a farming output that has fed the world. Manitoba has a greater diversity of resources to exploit but has had essentially enough to sustain its economy. The same is true for Ontario, where national equalization payments across provinces have helped to stabilize the country’s economies during periods of instability.
I’m not as clear on the specific details of U.S. methods of assisting member states — but the point of being united, over and above the typical answer of a military force to protect the nation from foreign aggression, is the national security arising from economic stability across all states.
Each state has the freedom to operate and manage its affairs as the citizens of each state determine what is best for them.
Freedom, however, and as this question implies — along with all the numerous exclamations by many people and groups like libertarians and anarchists fail to appreciate that freedom is not free. Freedom is always defined by limitations and accompanied by obligations.
For each state to exist as its own country would make each state vulnerable to numerous enemies ranging from foreign agents (including all other states), economic volatility, and bad actors within each state. Operating as a united states means all states are members of a community working together to ensure mutual security, stability, survival, and prosperity.
Many Americans have lost sight of the significance of community synergy and have allowed themselves to buy into the toxic competitiveness that justifies selling their own families down the river for a few extra pennies in their pockets.
These Americans, Canadians, and essentially the whole of conservative ideology all across the globe today have lost sight of the value of the community while pursuing a cutthroat agenda of “I’ve got mine so fuck you”.
It is this perversion of individual desires above the needs of the many that has led the nation down a path of toxic fascism that threatens the end of 243 years of democracy. If Americans lose their crucial battle for freedom in their next election, if they install a convicted felon as their head, then that will serve as a severe blow to freedom for all people all across the globe. The hegemony of plutocrats and their medieval infrastructures of authoritarian operations we casually refer to as corporations will assert their ascendance above all who are reduced to disposable cogs in a modern facsimile of ancient serfdom.
Each state should want to be an integral part of a larger community if it wishes to survive as an independent community. It’s as much in their best interests to be united as a nation as it is in the best interests of their citizens, families, and communities, as it is also in the best interests of all citizens as a united whole.
For the reasons cited above, the citizens of the U.K. are now suffering from their childish error in judgment by voting for Brexit. They are learning to cope with their grievous error of impetuous judgment, like the petulant child in a family who decides they can cope well enough with a treacherous world to survive on their own while they still haven’t reached adulthood. They often can’t and are converted into forgotten faces buried within statistics.
The way forward for the survival of our species is not to fractionate ourselves into warring tribal units but to unite as a community to stand tall as we meet challenges far more monumental than we have ever faced.
Here’s a song based on the phrase “United we stand, divided we fall” in an easier-to-listen-to version of the expression as interpreted by “Flower Children” from the “Age of Aquarius”:
“For united we stand Divided we fall And if our backs should ever be against the wall We’ll be together, together, you and I.”
As a child growing up in an era where television programming ended at the end of each day with a closing message, this song inspired me even as I struggled within my fractured community.
It still holds meaning for me, and I believe more firmly than ever before in my life that this is the way forward because the nightmare of toxic individuality we have been cultivating is responsible for creating a world of psychopaths I do not want to live in.
BONUS:
While doing some basic research to answer this question, I discovered a modern variation of the expression “United We Stand, Divided We Fall” by the group “Two Steps from Hell”. Of the three musical examples provided, this one is far less literal, far more emotive, and far easier to listen to:
I also learned it was music used in an advertisement for the MCU release of Captain America’s Civil War:
thotbag 