The Spectator ‘s cover story this week is an excellent piece by Adrian Wooldridge on ‘The new elite: the rise of the progressive aristocracy‘. Taking as his theme the demolition of the meritocratic idea by woke activists, he sets out the worldview behind it and the huge amount of trouble it is causing. Here’s an excerpt.
Meritocracy is “racist” and “the antithesis of fair”, pronounced Alison Collins, a former Commissioner of Education in San Francisco. And the old idea of judging people as individuals? That’s the white man’s game of divide and rule. “Colour blindness” – what we used to regard as the absence of discrimination – is dismissed as a con, designed to draw a veil over millennia of exploitation. The entire machinery of meritocracy is rejected as a legacy of the eugenic movement or imperialism. Or, perhaps, the ‘white’ way of looking at the world. “The use of standardised tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade black minds and legally exclude black bodies,” writes Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby.
The woke revolution does not simply aim to remedy past injustice. “The only remedy to racist discrimination,” writes Kendi, “is antiracist discrimination”. The idea is some groups by virtue of their history of marginalisation and exploitation are wiser and more moral than others. The belief that racism is not confined to intentional acts of discrimination but woven into the DNA of society implies white people are automatically guilty of harbouring racist thoughts and seeing the world through racist eyes. Racial minorities inevitably enjoy a higher moral status than whites but they also enjoy something equally important – greater access to understanding and moral wisdom. This is why the woke habitually invoke ‘lived experience’ and ‘my truth’. Conversely, white people are guilty of original sin until they do what the kulaks were supposed to do and abolish themselves as a class. “Abolish whiteness!” says Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal. “White lives don’t matter. As white lives.”
These race-based arguments bring with them the exhumation of the pre-modern habit of judging people based on group characteristics rather than individual achievement. History is repeating itself as both tragedy and farce at the same time.
Rather than progressing towards a post-discriminatory future, we have a pyramid structure once again, but this time it’s inverted. Rather than the upper classes sitting at the top and the lower classes as the bottom, the former outcasts occupy the commanding heights. Under the new hierarchy, the more oppressed groups that you belong to, the more moral virtue you possess. Similarly, the more privileged characteristics you hold, the lower you are on the moral scale and the more you have to do to make amends for the past.
Being born into an oppressed group is not enough in itself. Indeed, minorities who don’t share woke beliefs are treated with particular disdain (as black conservatives have long known and gender-critical feminists are painfully discovering). You must have faith. That means more than just subscribing to a set of beliefs. It means having a heart that has been awakened through a process of conversion and ceaseless struggle. An aristocracy of faith is superimposed upon an aristocracy of caste: struggle can change your place in the caste system, though people who are born into a privileged caste will obviously have to struggle much harder than those who have the privilege of being born unprivileged. Whatever you think of Prince Harry, he is clearly ‘doing the work’.
This aristocracy of faith is hypervigilant and hyperactive – forever discovering signs of racism in even the smallest things and forever organising demonstrations and cancellations. At the same time, it’s also extremely patient. The woke aristocracy’s march through the institutions is an exercise in long-term social change that should put short-term conservatives to shame.
The old notion of IQ is being replaced with WQ – a woke quotient. This phenomenon is at its most advanced in the U.S., particularly at its universities. University students are selected for their WQ as revealed by their personal statements and extracurricular activities (“I spent my vacations fighting racism in Guatemala”), as well as by their academic grades. Indeed, a growing number of universities are reducing the weight placed on standardised test scores while increasing their emphasis on more subjective criteria. Aspiring professors are required to submit diversity statements when they apply for jobs as well as conventional academic resumes.
Yale now has as many academic administrators as it does tenured staff. Many of them have titles which include the word ‘diversity’, as in ‘Chief Diversity Officer’ and ‘Deputy Chief Diversity Officer’. Chief diversity officers have become such a familiar part of the university scene that one executive recruitment firm, Hunt Scanlon, gushes they occupy “one of the most important positions for shaping the vision, culture and very face of institutions of higher learning from coast to coast”.
It’s a golden rule of academia that what U.S. universities do today British universities will do tomorrow, but in a secretive and cut-price manner. A commitment to diversity is increasingly used as a tiebreaker in making academic appointments. When making applications for grants – the bane of the British academic’s life – candidates know that they have a much better chance of success if they explore woke themes. Some subjects – all those ‘studies’ – are predicated on the assumptions of the inverted pyramid of virtue. Others, such as history, have replaced the old history of progress and promise with a new one of oppression and guilt.
British universities may not have access to the same gargantuan bureaucracies as their U.S. cousins, though the bureaucrats they have are cut from the same ideological cloth. But they have got into the habit of relying on pressure groups to do some of the work for them. Stonewall stands ready (for a fee) to certify whether our seats of learning are LGBT+ friendly by measuring them against a diversity index and then enrolling them in its Diversity Champions scheme. Universities cannot receive research grants, the lifeblood of academia, unless they employ Athena Swan accredited ‘leads’ who use Athena Swan accredited measures to show they are inclusive employers. The organisation’s definition of diversity and inclusion involves hitting goals to increase the hiring of minorities, even if minorities constitute a majority of employees, and submitting employees to unconscious bias training.
Worth reading in full.
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Despite all of this, it’s still possible to talk to some person well below thirty on one evening and on the next, he’s wearing a really military-grade-looking (paper) face mask to protect him from something (bar staff at Spoons pub in Reading). 🙁
Must be something nasty in the kitchen to justify that!
I suspect that the kitchen serves as hangout for vanished bar staff and that he’s very likely not wearing it there.
Also from Reading. Is that the Hope Tap?
Yes.
It’s ‘Our Wonderful NHS’, if you please.
‘The envy of the world’ don’t you know?
I wish it were true, but I’m not seeing this grand public awakening. The only real acknowledgement I encounter is people openly stating they’re not taking any more jabs and a clear reluctance to go any further than that in the thought process.
The awakening is here though. Don’t underestimate the fact that this seemingly subtle acknowledgment up on the surface of the conscious mind is accompanied by a turbulent rearrangement down below, in the unconscious, where the real ‘belief making’ takes place.
As for the seeming reluctance to go any further, it is only natural. As a species we are hard-wired to avoid pain. And we sceptics are asking people to willingly inflict pain upon themselves, by facing up to the psychopathy that has engulfed us.
As Desmet has said, keep banging on about it. Persevere. Again, and again, and then some more. Fight the good fight. Truth is a manifestation of Light and has a wider spiritual redeeming purpose that makes life worth living.
And a lot of people cannot handle cognitive dissonance
I know an awful lot of people who have JRS (Jab Remorse Syndrome) and have woken up to the tyranny that’s being thrust upon us. Others say they wont have anymore but as soon as the global digital ID /Vax Passport is rolled out and you will need updated lethal injections in order to travel then these second cohorts will
crumble and revert to type aka pin cushions for Big Pharma.
I’m taking the word ‘hidden’ as a verb in that sentence. People in positions of authority must be held to account for what they did and an example made to ensure it can never happen again.
I revel in being right. Right about the LDs, Right about the dead, wounded, injured and psychologically, physically scarred from the LDs. Right about the Poisons. Right about the millions of stabbed dead and injured. Right about the Diapers. Right about the scamdemic. Right about Digital IDs. Right about losing our freedoms, free speech, our jobs, our families, our sanity, our travel, our civilisation. I remind everyone all the time I was right. What Rona taught all of us is that 80% of the pop are stupid, or compliant, or cowardly, or fascistic, or all the aforementioned.
Yes, just like my attitude to it all. What it does demonstrate is how vulnerable society is to the methods used to encourage people to fall in line. A bit like 1930’s Germany in spades, perhaps.
I certainly agree with 99% of your post. I disagree with:
“I revel in being right.”
There is nothing to revel about. What I feel is a terrible sadness at the evil that has been unleashed on the world. Instead of seeking to murder, constrain and control millions why could not decency and a genuine desire to improve the futures of our fellows be followed?
What corrupted mayhem must infect the minds of the psychos who will if they succeed destroy not just humanity but our planet? And all “For a Few Dollars More.”
The dystopian miseries that a reset will bring forward will affect the “victors” too, a bit like a child whose every wish is met at Christmas and by day’s end is so bored that he seeks solace in the discarded wrappings his presents arrived in. They too will become frustrated and bored as the realisation that every whim can be met by nothing more than touching a screen. Where is the joy in that?
Attempting to remodel humanity can only fail. The desire for love, for friendship, for company will always win out. These are hard-wired. And family; the evil attempts to undermine and destroy families will never succeed, this need is part of our birthright. It is doomed to failure.
There is going to be a reset alright but it is our duty to ensure that the evil doers amongst us are wiped from the earth and we must strive to replace their evil with the decency, goodness, compassion and fairness which really is inherent in the majority.
There is one hell of a fight before us.
There is a fight for the soul of humanity. These obsessed geneticists splicing and dicing our DNA have one goal in mind and that is to disconnect our consciousness from our physical bodies. They have no idea what they’re doing and only think of humans as hackable biological entities they can play around with in order to edit out our genetic imperfections.
https.globe.globe/category/consciousness-and-evolution/
Exactly. Seeking to literally digitise the human brain is hubris combined with grotesque ignorance on steroids.
I agree HP. My wife keeps saying to anyone who will listen that I was right from the 2nd day of lockdown when I wrote a 2ft long email to my Tory MP and set out what would happen if we locked down. I then emailed him every 5 days for a year putting him right – mostly from the now Daily Sceptic.
He may not have read it all but he certainly was left in doubt that his support for the Government’s actions was wrong and counter productive and would create a financial burden for the UK.
My next goal for the rest of my life – I am 75 – is to fight Net Zero and the cognitive dissonance that is rampant in the general public and the Green supporters.
Thank you.
Yes. Next up:
These jabs are killing millions of people some quickly, some slowly….
Yep, I’m sure you’ve heard of Dr Ryan Cole? I started following him early on in this scamdemic.
Ever wondered why not everyone is injured or dies from the Covid shots? This 2 min video embedded in this article explains why.
https://expose-news.com/2022/12/14/ryan-cole-gives-his-insights-into-covid-vaccines/
Well at least discovery is speeding up. Over in the climate nonsense world someone posted this, from 2010
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/
noting Willis Eschenbach pointing out that co2 warming effect, being logarithmic, fades (or becomes saturated, as Will Happer now details).
Comments include a chap mentioning Richard Lindzen noting that the co2/water vapour feedback loop was nothing more than a theory in IPCC-1…back in 1990.
The money force is strong in this one.
I am a big fan of Willis Eschenbach. His article about the Diamond Princess cruise ship convinced me in March 2020 that the chances of me dying from Covid (as a healthy 58 yeard old at the time) were slim.
This has all the signs of being a snowball rolling down an Alpine hill.
Let’s hope so. And line up all our recently ennobled Heroes Of The Corona in the valley below.
You need to review the data in Table 3. You’re using the wrong denominator. To get the correct figures for the “Likelihood of dying with/from Covid” the appropriate denominators would be the number of people in each cohort with and without a pre-existing condition, not the total number of people in the cohort. (I have no idea where you would get those denomiator figures though)
What you are currently showing is “the chance of (having and pre-condition) AND (dying with/from Covid)” which is not a very helpful number. What you imply, wrongly, to have shown is “the chance of dying with/from Covid given that you have (or do not have) a pre-existing condition”. Using the correct denominator would make the changes of dying given a pre-existing condition substantially higher, and the chances of dying without a pre-existing condition only slightly higher. I would expect the ratio in the final column then to be much higher (particularly in the younger age groups).
I’m finding people are trying to ignore what went on. They are not willing to admit they’ve been hoodwinked. It will be interesting at Christmas as I will be meeting my step-son-in-law for the first time since we had a bust up back in Autumn 2021 when he refused to let me into his father’s house because I wasn’t jabbed. We haven’t spoken since that day. The rest of that family are total Covidians apart from my Partner. I suspect the gargantuan elephant in the room will be ignored unless….
‘ “I told you so!” Don’t tell me there isn’t a slight pleasure in that? ‘
I disagree. It’s not slight… it’s huge and glorious! 😄
It would be interesting to see the same analysis for deaths from influenza and other respiratory infections. I would suggest likely the same, deaths skewed to the elderly with comorbidity.
So CoV 2 was in fact Just Another Respiratory Virus.
197 000 deaths from ‘flu and pneumonia to date since January 2020, just about the same as alleged CoVid deaths, yet not a number you see published.
Source: https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/selected-deaths-vs-covid-19-united-kingdom