Part Three: Badness of the Woke
My compliments to Fourth Age, whose insightful commentary gave the inspiration and the thread of argument I copy, in my own way, below. To hear a more careful disquisition of this argument see here: Why They/Them Can’t Write Superheroes
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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, and bad. Their boldness and baldness we discuss in other columns.
The question here is why their deceptions are so bad, this is, what make their story tales so poor, their propaganda so tin-eared, their advertisements so unconvincing.
Part Three: Badness of the Woke
Three transcendental fundamentals of the human condition are the good, the true and the beautiful.
The good they reject. We have discussed the boldness of the Woke, which springs from their zeal for evil, the moral inversion endemic to Marxist, Theosophists, Hermeticist, Gnostics, or anyone whose mental landscape is upside down and mirror-reversed.
The true they reject. We have discussed the openness of their bald-faced lies, which springs from their zeal for falsehood over truth, their love of unreality and hatred of reality.
We now turn to the final question: their ugliness. In all the cultural vandalism, historical revisionism, and graffiti scrawled over the most famous and best-beloved franchises of popular entertainment, like a computer who cannot draw a beautiful woman with the right number of fingers, those posing as authors and artists among the Woke cannot produce workmanlike storybooks, or even amateurish ones. They are absurdly, howlingly bad.
This never ceases to puzzle me. I recall seeing the film Alexander Nevsky and the television shows Star Trek and Doctor Who, not to mention reading science fiction and fantasy by George Orwell and Harlan Ellison and Ursula K LeGuin. These folk, as best I can tell, range from Liberal to Leftwing to Far Left to Stalinist, are yet their work ranges from very good, to great, to genius, so much so that I doubt I need utter a syllable to support the claim.
No one doubts these are well-crafted works which mean to support the leftwing worldview, either more obviously or less, within the stories they tell.
But the stories themselves are good, regardless of political overtones or agendas: tales of loyal warriors defending their motherland, fearless explorers in space and time; tales of dystopias and utopias peopled by Big Brother or the Ticktockman, by wizards of Roke or anarchists of Anarres.
Some say craft and genius appear more often among the liberals and freethinkers than among conservatives and traditionalists. While this is not so, merely the popularity of the boast shows that talent and skill are not absent among the utopians. Like their enemies, the Christians, utopians can imagine better worlds, and are dissatisfied with this.
Unlike their enemies, the Christians, they cannot imagine people. Utopians cannot imagine real people with real human motives, passions, ambitions and flaws, who could realistically inhabit these worlds, or maintain the tranquility of paradise. Only puppet people fit in a cardboard paradise, and only for so long as one puppeteer pulls their strings.
Armed with expansive imaginations and storytelling skill, one would assume the Woke could tell convincing an alluring stories, in the same way beautiful mermaids can sing siren-songs to lure sailors into dangerous waters, rocky shoals, and watery graves.
But the femme-fatale is only fatal when she is seductive. To seduce requires allure. Allures must lure, that is, promise a false good or pleasure found pleasing to the eye. To make a false promise of pleasure requires knowing what men find pleasing. It requires knowing men. When the siren cannot song, but only caws like a crow, she knows no men. The ugly mermaid lacks the know-how to make herself attractive.
So here. The Woke are descended from the same genus and family as Liberals and Socialists, Theosophists and Gnostics, but in them the disease of moral inversion has reached a terminal stage. Even Stalinists had a more realistic view of life.
Stalinists were monsters, but some could retain a human shape, that is, they could still promise tomorrows of peace and prosperity and true equality for all workingmen. Their false promises were things workingmen actually wanted.
Woke are ameboid and shapeless. No workingman wants his sons and daughters castrated, sterilized, mutilated, and then herded into pod-cities where they will own nothing, be happy, and eat bugs. The Woke have nothing to offer him.
The Marxist at least pretended to champion the poor and promote radical egalitarianism. The Marxist wanted to burn the World and expected Utopia to spring spontaneously from the ashes. The Woke pretend nothing and promote nothing. Like the Heath Ledger’s Joker, the Woke would burn the world merely to see it burn.
Let us remember one notorious example, which perfectly emphasizes the wrongheadedness of the Woke, and their inability to weave convincing stories to promote their propaganda.
EXHIBIT C
An illustration shows Superman, aka Jon Kent, about to kiss reporter Jay Nakamura in the comic book ‘Superman: Son of Kal-El’, after the superhero character came out as bisexual. This image coincided with National Coming Out day in the United States on October 11, 2021. DC/Handout via REUTERS
Note that this is from Reuters: the transition of Superman, the son of Superman, from man to girl-man was thought to be newsworthy enough to garner international attention.
Naturally, the title failed within a few issues. Jay Nakamura as the love-interest for the Son of Superman apparently lacks the iconic stature of the love-interests of prior Superman and Superboy versions, Lois Lane or Lana Lang, nor even Wonder Girl or Miss Martian.
Such a conceit was doomed to fail from the start. Even had the writing been well-crafted, the conceit was shallow and false. To see why, we must wax philosophical, and remind ourselves of definitions and fundamentals.
SUPERMAN: SON OF KAL-EL is a story set in the superhero genre, the modern equivalent of ancient dramas of demigods. Hero stories are meant to be operatic, larger-than-life. Superhero stories are cast in the heroic mold, but with the elements exaggerated.
A hero, to be heroic, cannot simply be strong. Strength by itself is tyrannical and repugnant. Imagine any politician given absolute power: the mind instinctively recoils at the idea of George Washington crowning himself like Napoleon, or King Arthur gathering wives and erecting pagan temples like King Solomon. Those who glory in power and grasp for it are unworthy of it.
Must everyone enjoy heroic tales? Perhaps they should, but in fact they do not: A man can be oppressed by a black mood, or a nation swept up in the madness of a crowd, and suppress the natural instinct long enough to take bitter joy in stories portraying lust for power and abuse of power. A certain black humor or gallows humor overcomes men and nations at time when suicide starts to seem appealing.
This does not alter the point. The point here is not that men are not from time to time in the mood to see a villain prevail, or a hero held to scorn. The point is that such times are sick-bed times, not natural to man, not in keeping with truth and virtue. (See, for example, The Last Jedi, or, better yet, do not see it.)
Hence in imaginary depictions of heroes, such characters in order to be heroic, must be paragons of virtue: that is, the heroes must display prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.
Superheroes in particular must display humility: it is for this reason that many a superhero hides his identity behind a mask and a code-name. Whatever other reason prompts his secrecy, his double identity prevents him from getting applause or fame: Metropolis never throws a ticker-tape parade for Clark Kent.
To be sure, a hero who has no superpowers, who is merely a skilled fighter or a clever detective, can afford the luxury of being cool and cold-eyed, or smart-mouthed, or self-pitying, or being a bit of a boaster or glory hound: superheroes from the Iron Man to the Thing, Spider-Man to Booster Gold are adorned with perfectly human mannerisms and tics like this, to no detriment of the character. Batman can be dark and grim and menacing because he is human, and can afford the luxury of solitude.
A human hero can be given human flaws, without necessarily suffering a loss of reader sympathy.
But an invulnerable demigod cannot. A dark and grim Superman is merely a tyrant ready to hatch, a figure no one can stop should he abuse his strength. Demigods must display the saintliness, that is, perfect humility, so that the idea of his abusing his strength is impossible.
Superman is the oldest and best example of the ritualized humiliation a superpowered hero must endue in his secret identity, in order to display the virtue of humility, and elicit sympathy rather than distaste in the reader:
Heroes as strong as the Hulk can be allowed to boast (“Hulk is the Strongest there is!”) only because he is Frankenstein’s monster: a figure whose dim and childlike mind makes him a figure of pity, because he cannot see how not to pose a threat to the surrounding world, and cannot grasp why he is being attacked. Ironically, the self-aware and intelligent version of the Hulk consciously controlled by Bruce Banner’s mind is less of figure of tragedy or drama, and is demoted to supporting roles in comedies.
Ben Grimm, the Thing, is equally strong, but his monstrous appearance bars him from a normal life: he is humbled in another way, involuntarily. He is hence in no position to glory in his power. It is presented as a curse.
There are those who suppose that giving Superman the flaws and shortcomings, the self pity of Spider-Man or the short temper of Ben Grimm, would be to make him more human hence more relatable. This is an understandable mistake, yet it is a mistake. Nothing is more alien to the long-established character of Superman than to hear him complain that he cannot unleash his full strength on his foes because he’d like to smash them, but dare not.
He breaks the rule by stepping down from this role as a paragon of virtue. A human can perhaps be seen wishing he were strong enough to smash his foes, but if an undefeatable demigod does this, he is simply a jerk, and a self-pitying jerk at that.
How, then, is Superman to be portrayed? I have it on good authority that no less a figure than Jim Shooter, who started writing Superman comics in his teens, and was writing and editing these books for decade upon decade, tells the secret of how to write Superman without larding the Man of Steel with the sins and flaws of mortal men, while keeping him sympathetic and appealing.
His words: ” If a Super were anything but a noble being with an iron will and tremendous self control, impervious to the failings bad writers nonetheless foisted upon him or her, the Super would have been a villain. Period. ”
In particular, Jim Shooter said one must write Superman as Galahad. And if the writer does not know how to write Galahad, find a writer who does.
Galahad, if we recall the tale, prevails and finds the Most Holy Grail not because his strength and warcraft with sword and lance excel those of his father Lancelot. It is because he is pure. Lancelot fails because he commits adultery. Galahad prevails because he humbly obeys the holy man who raises him.
Humility, please understand, is not what Moderns think it is. Moderns think humility is weakness. Moderns do not see things in terms of good and evil, virtue and vice, true and false, but only in terms of strong and weak.
Modern say everything said about good and virtue and truth is a “narrative”, that is, a false superstructure of excuses, meant only to justify the unjust social institutions which exploit the weak and benefit the strong. It is the philosophy of Thrasymachus from Plato’s Republic, that justice is just a fraud used by the weak to deceive the strong into forswearing their strength.
This philosophy has been ingrained into the modern mind so entirely, that modern are unaware of their own assumption of it, as fish are unaware of the water in which they bathe. When we hear punctuality dismissed as “White” or modesty anathematized as “Patriarchal” we are hearing Thrasymachus.
Thrasymachus and all his epigones, from Hegel to Marx to the Postmoderns, who believe truth is fluid and standards are ever-evolving and reality is perception, have all equated truth with untruth, real with unreal. Anti-Truth is also part of the Anti-Life Equation.
For humility is not weakness. Humility is honesty.
One need not believe in God, or any Supreme Being, to recognize the smallness of man in compared to the Great Scheme of Things. Atheist and Monotheist can agree that man is not at the top of the pyramid of the cosmic hierarchy, albeit they disagree on whether the throne is occupied by compassionate providence or blind necessity.
Humility, in other words, is merely another word for honesty about one’s place in life.
Heroes and superheroes, in other words, to be heroic, and not to offend the reader (that is, not to offend a reader whose appetites are natural and healthy), must either be human, as Spider-Man is, or pitiable, as are the Hulk or the Thing, or superhumanly humble, as is Superman.
But humility means submission to the truth. Humility means honesty. No writer who does not understand humility and honest can write a humble and honest character.
The Marxist or Woke or Postmodern writer is trapped by his own philosophy. Humility is not a virtue in his worldview. There is no virtue, there is only power and weakness. Honestly is not truthful in his worldview. There is not truth, there is only narratives that exploit and propaganda that liberates. Humble men are always Pharisees and fakes in the modern writer’s mind, and honesty is foolishness and weakness.
A hero cannot be a sodomite, unless the writer is willing to portray this as a flaw to be overcome. In a happy ending, it is overcome; in a tragedy, he surrenders to it. But the modern worldview does not even allow for the possibility of judging human sexual passions by any standard, nor of struggling against them. For the modern, sexual passions are unlike any other passion in the human frame, because they are idols, never to be questioned and never disobeyed. Such passions form the sole criterion of selfhood: a sodomite cannot live chastely without murdering himself, becoming another person. To resist unnatural sexual passions is tantamount, in the postmodern mind, to genocide.
The truth of the matter remains unaltered, regardless of the intensity of one’s passions, sexual or otherwise. It remains the duty of all intelligent beings to bring one’s passions under control and in line with what the reason says reality is. To abdicate the reason is vice, to misperceive reality is madness.
What is the truth of this matter?
If Superman can have Lois Lane as a love interest, why cannot Superboy be Super-Bi, and select an effete youth with a smooth buttocks as his true love? Surely sex and sodomy are one and the same? Surely to say otherwise is bigotry and wrongthink?
What is the truth of this matter?
Sodomy is sterile. No matter how energetically a sodomist ejaculates into the fundament of a catamite, no children can be conceived. Despite what you may have heard, this is a matter of fact, not opinion, and the craving for unnatural sex acts is neither natural nor salutary. Nature produces life from life, and, in mammals, this requires two sexes to couple. Sodomy, even when performed by young men in perfect health, neither forms a mating nor a marriage nor creates the next generation. It is against the point and purpose of life.
Or, to put the matter in comic book terms more suited to the subject matter, to equate sodomy with the sex act, or homosex with real sex, is the Anti-Life Equation.
To be Anti-Life is to be Anti-Truth. To equate opposites is not a sign of Hegelian dialectic enlightenment, but a sign of a lapse of reason. To say a woman is a man when she binds her breasts and cut her hair is to mistake costume for biology; to say a cross dressing castrati is a woman because he so identifies is to divorce identity from reality. To speak and think this way is to abandon factual correctness for political correctness, to shun reality for party dogma.
It is to grant absolute loyalty to falsehood and to betray the truth with irredeemable betrayal.
If sodomy cannot be glamorized in a truthful tale, then untruthfulness cannot form the basis of the tale. Humility is truthfulness. If the tale must eschew truthfulness to glamorize sodomy, it cannot be a superheroic tale, because superheroes must be humble. A superhero who is not humble offends the readers by grasping for power and glorying in it:
And to grasp for power and glory in it is pride. Despite what you have heard, pride is nothing to be proud of. It is the queen of sins and the mother of all others.
And the poison spreads outwards. Writers who believe the philosophy of pride, that is, the philosophy of Lucifer, cannot honestly portray honesty. They cannot portray virtue, only power lust and power. They cannot portray beauty, only power lust and power.
They cannot portray humans, only Dark Lords. Any attempt by these blind painters to portray a real human being results only in a caricature called Mary Sue, or a wretch called Gollum.
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.
