Part Two: Baldness of the Woke
Conquered peoples see their calendars altered, their feast days changed, their banners burned, their monuments toppled. This also holds true for those conquered by subversion rather than conquest, and for humble monuments as well as great.
Humble monuments of the popular culture have fallen to dust: Blue Clues celebrates drag queens to toddlers. Dungeons and Dragons was made wheelchair-accessible. And Superman was overtaken by the Anti-Life Equation.
The woke are bold, bald-faced liars, and bad at their task. Their boldness and badness we discuss in other columns. The question here is why their deceptions are so bald, this is, so undisguised.
Part Two: Baldness of the Woke.
To lie means to tell a plausible falsehood intended to deceive another. To gaslight means to tell an impossible falsehood, one which calls sanity itself into question.
The term comes from a film of the same name, where a sneaking husband connives his trusting wife to dismiss the witness of her own eyes as hallucination. He blandly and baldly denies all; she doubts her senses.
Ironically, the bald-faced openness of the gaslighting is what makes it gaslighting. Absurdity is promoted with a straight face, or with earnest zeal. They know they are lying, we know they are lying, they know we know; when doubted, they raise their voices and double down, unleash floods of scorn and contempt, and accuse the doubter of their sins, but not his.
This last is called Ad Hominem Tu Quoque but should be called the Iron Law of Leftwing Projection. It is a law with no exceptions. We see jackasses accusing civil adults of being jackasses, idiots calling lettered adults idiots.
EXHIBIT B:
I did not concoct this image as an exaggeration to show the absurdity of the conceit: it is real.
Pictured here is a Tiefling thief, no doubt preparing his +1 dagger for a backstab, or so I assume. How he will lean from his seat and stretch with his arm to find an enemy spine while tumbling through an opposed square without provoking an attack of opportunity, I leave as an exercise to the reader’s imagination.
Myself, I would assume the fighting-man on the right will thrust his blade into the wheel-spokes to prevent further motion, while the ranger with the longsword on the left will stand well out of knife-reach to lunge and lung-puncture the motionless Tiefling.
Note that if a seated man counts as prone, he suffers a –4 penalty on armor class, and on melee attack rolls, nor he can use bows nor thrown ranged weapons.
The absurdity would be the same, or more so, if the seat-bound soldier were armed with a pike, pole-axe, or glaive-guisarme.
Now, obviously, there is no great public yearning for more cripples in wheelchairs to populate the spelunking expeditions of magic-users and men-at-arms in the Temple of Elemental Evil. Even in the faux-medieval Hyborian Age setting of the average Gary Gygax module, no one was calling for more portrayals of wheelchair-bound Conan.
It does not fit with the genre.
Captain Hook, Long John Silver, or even Odin the Wanderer or Vidar the Silent, are maimed, one-legged, one-eyed, or mute, but they are perfectly copesetic characters for boy’s adventure yarns or ancient myths from which Dungeons and Dragons takes its inspiration. But one does not simply wheel into Mordor. Dark Tower is not equipped with ramps.
So why is the paraplegic adventurer pictured above not high-level psychic? One need not dodge nor gesture to project Ego Whip or Soul Crush, or erect a Tower of Iron Will. A dismembered druid in a sedan chair carried by tame owlbears could still cast Charm Person, or a crippled cleric floating on a friendly flumph could turn undead.
These are not the character classes being promoted as dungeon-worthy when confined to wheels, however.
The whole point of the exercise is to promote as virtuous something blatantly and obviously absurd, unsightly, unworkable, and most of all, fake.
The point of the exercise is not to fit into the genre. It is meant to break the genre. It is meant to ruin the game.
The harpy quoted here dismisses as ignorant or asinine anyone unenthused about the introduction of perverse political death-cult virtue-signaling into the otherwise innocent antics of dungeon-crawling murder-hobos.
Such virtue signaling seems odd, especially in a place where the alleged virtue, namely, a cosmopolitan ecumenicalism of races and peoples from all walks of life, long has been and continues to be the common if not universal rule of the Sword and Sorcery genre.
It is not as if the Fellowship of the Ring were not already as diverse race-wise as the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, or as if Conan did not have comrades and lovers of all hues from Asgard to Zembabwei.
Most Dungeons and Dragons parties sound like the intro line of a stand up comic: “A dwarf, a halfling, a half-orc, and a wizard all walk into a bar …”
So the push is not for diversity, if that term has any honest meaning. To forge a fellowship of adventurers from differing backgrounds or races was commonplace in the genre since the pulp days, long before the modern term came into common use.
Instead, the harpies push for the one thing no adventuring party could or would actually contain, namely, an adventurer physically unfit for adventure.
Nor does this push make sense for this background. For the record, in D&D, healing spells would cure most forms of damage to the legs. There is a 7th level cleric spell called “regenerate” which allows lost limbs to be regrown or reattached. The only one who would ever need a wheelchair in this background would be a mermaid.
The idea of legless ax-brandishing dwarfs, halfling amputees, or elfish longbowmen lame in both legs trundling down in wheeled baskets through buried labyrinths and bellycrawling past watchful Beholders is absurd on its face, and meant to be.
It is gaslighting.
The Woke promoting this nonsense are merely the current breed of Cultural Marxist, a species of the genus Marxist, who descend from the family and order and class of Theosophist, Hermeticist, Gnostic: the point of the whole class of worldviews is to reject reality.
The Gnostic says the cosmos is a prison created by a devil falsely worshipped by the unwary as a god. The Marxist says the society is a prison created by oppressors falsely supported by the oppressed as legitimate. Only he is elect, hence enlightened enough, that is, woke enough, to see the hidden agenda of the oppressors.
The simple pattern of oppressor and oppressed, elect and reprobate, can set any two groups at enmity: women and men, black and white, poor and rich, perverted and decent, Jihadist and Jew. A noisy vocabulary of smear-words blooms from this deep manure: sexist, racist, homophobic, classist, Islamophobic, and so on ad infinitum et ad nauseam.
Hence, in this case, anyone unwilling to say “oh, neat!” or “representation matters!” is condemned as socially inept if not morally suspect, that is, asinine, or is mentally backward, that is, ignorant.
Ignorant here is an odd word. A Latin-scholar with a law degree would still be ignorant in the special sense in which Gnostics use this word: a scholar full of book learning is still ignorant if he lacks the special, secret knowledge that renders him superior to facts and evidence. For the Woke, as for his Gnostic ancestor, inner reality outranks outer reality.
In this case, even the consensus reality of make-believe, that is, the conventions of the genre, or of a D&D game-world, are trumped by the demands of the inner reality of the Woke.
In reality, even in the consensus reality of D&D, an adventurer in a wheelchair is silly idea, offensive to all concerned, and would be no fun to play.
But in the inner reality of the Woke, one must pretend that cripples are as fit and hale as any able-bodied men. To say otherwise is hate-speech; to think otherwise is thoughtcrime.
Likewise, in the make-believe of D&D, it is no fun to play a paraplegic polearm-master or an axman amputee.
It ruins the mood and upsets the setting. But in the inner reality of the Woke one must pretend one enjoys politically correct pastimes promoting propaganda while killing gameplay. To play otherwise is wrongfun.
Why ruin the game? Because the game is not a game to them. It has no purpose nor place aside from serving as a tool of social engineering, mass-brainwashing, propaganda.
This is true not of games only, but everything. All must serve the cause.
To see why, consider the difference between civilized men and amoeba blobs.
Civilization is organic. By definition, civilized life requires men organize themselves into a hierarchy of cooperative social roles. Each organ of the organism performs its specialized function.
The members are equal but hierarchical. Head and heart and hands are differentiated and interdependent, but the head rules. If wise, the head rules without trespassing or oppressing. Hence, the members are equal in their rights, but unequal in their resources, talents, and duties. That is what an organism is: a composite creature composed of cooperative organs.
Gnosticism is amoeboid. Unlike civilization, there is no division into sovereign and subject, knight and squire, master and prentice, scholar and student, farmer and field-hand. All share alike, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Even the distinctions between legislator and citizen, employer and employee, law-abiding and criminal are abolished. No one wins. All get a participation trophy. Male and female are abolished. All are comrades. The goal is to be a homogenous blob.
The distinction between civilized man and formless amoeba holds in all things small and great.
In the case of games and stories, civilized men, being organic creatures, see art as having an independent reality. There are rules and limits applied to art that define what it is. It is meant for something; art has a purpose in life. Art is for reflecting beauty.
Likewise, entertainment is for entertainment, and must follow the rules of being entertaining. Games are for game-play and must be playable.
For a civilized man, if art serves truth and beauty, or entertainment serves pleasure, then it is a success, regardless of politics.
As in a federalist system, each local area has its own jurisdiction. The general government is remote and touches only general issues.
With the amoeba blob it is not so. Art serves the Cause. Entertainment serves the Cause. Everything serves the Cause. All things are tools meant for social engineering. All things are weapons meant for the revolution.
All things within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.
For the amoeboid blob-men of Woke, whether art serves beauty or not is immaterial, whether entertainment entertains is immaterial. Nothing is judged on its own merits.
In a totalitarian police state, local regulations and rules are as nothing. Subordinate parishes, counties, states are subsumed in the whole. There is no federalism.
As in politics, so in art, entertainment, games. The totalitarian blob consumes all. All things serve the Cause.
In this case, for the moment, the Cause demands representation. At other times and places, as convenient, it will demand other things. All the demands are fake.
That means members of any victim mascot group, in this case, cripples, must be inserted into any walk of life, film, show, story or game where he is under-represented, no matter the reason. Men compete in women’s sports because the number of castrated cross-dressers is under-represented. Negroes must be inserted in historical costume dramas set in Medieval England.
As for table-top role-playing games for schoolboys, paralytics and amputees must be added to adventuring bands crawling through booby-trapped dungeons, dodging goblins, climbing ladders, swinging on lines, and wire-walking across pits.
None of this is to be voluntary. The state enforces the rules of fairness and representation.
And fair is whatever the state says is fair.
For civilized men, the way you moderate a role playing game in the privacy of your own basement ain’t nobody’s business but your own. For the amoeboid blob-men, everything is politics, politics is god, and the god is totalitarian. This is not the Christian God who leaves men free will to serve or to reject Him.
So, finally, why are the lies so obvious? No one, handicapped or not, actually wants to play a halfling thief in a wheelchair or a paraplegic dwarf with a halberd. Everyone knows it makes no sense and would be no fun to play.
The lies are obvious for different reasons, depending on the source.
If the lie is being spoken by a useful idiot of the Outer Party, an Eloi who is merely the food animal meant to create the revolution. He believes it only because he is told to believe it.
It is untrue, and he knows it is untrue, but he believes it any way, as an act of will, as a sign of loyalty. The fact that he believes the very opposite upon demand troubles him not. This is called doublethink.
If the lie is being spoken by a leader of the Inner Party, a Morlock who means to eat the Eloi, he believes in power, and believes the lie will aid him in gaining power.
He does not care about diversity or fairness or anything else. He does not care whether cripples in wheelchairs are included in dungeon-crawl adventures. It is all fake.
In reality, once the revolution is consummated, the useful idiots will be shot by the Cheka, and the cripples will be dumped in the ghettoes to live in pods, own nothing, be happy, and eat bugs.
In the first case, the Eloi tells the lie he knows is outrageously false to show his loyalty to the Party is so pure that he can make himself believe anything, even the absurd. It is a type of masochism.
In the second case, the Morlock tells the lie he knows is outrageously false to humiliate those forced to bow the knee to it, and recite anything they are told, even the absurd. It is a type of sadism.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
