May 9, 2022
Dear Friends and Family,
In the Nihilism Epilogue 3, the author, Vivek Ramaswamy, posits that Wokeness is a New Religion. To that end, I looked up the definition of religion in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. It provides four definitions.
1. A personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices.
2. a(1) The service and worship of God or the supernatural.
a(2) Commitment or devotion to religious faith or observation.
b The state of religious.
3. A cause, principle, or system of beliefs held with ardor and faith.
4. Scrupulous conformity: CONSCIENTIOUSNESS
Given that many scholars view wokeness as Marxism, I looked up Marxism’s view of religion. It states:
So, if the scholars are correct, it knocks out the second definition of religion. After you read the excerpts, you can judge Ramaswamy’s posit relative to the other three definitions.
Next: Epilogue 4 features Pulitzer Prize winning playwright David Mamet’s book Recessional which examines how politics and cultural attitudes about rebellion have shifted the United States in the last generation and if it is not confronted our country will be transformed into a dictatorship – the aim of the Woke.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
In the Nihilism Epilogue 3, the author, Vivek Ramaswamy, posits that Wokeness is a New Religion. To that end, I looked up the definition of religion in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. It provides four definitions.
1. A personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices.
2. a(1) The service and worship of God or the supernatural.
a(2) Commitment or devotion to religious faith or observation.
b The state of religious.
3. A cause, principle, or system of beliefs held with ardor and faith.
4. Scrupulous conformity: CONSCIENTIOUSNESS
Given that many scholars view wokeness as Marxism, I looked up Marxism’s view of religion. It states:
- Religion is the opium of the people: Marxism advocates atheism.
So, if the scholars are correct, it knocks out the second definition of religion. After you read the excerpts, you can judge Ramaswamy’s posit relative to the other three definitions.
Next: Epilogue 4 features Pulitzer Prize winning playwright David Mamet’s book Recessional which examines how politics and cultural attitudes about rebellion have shifted the United States in the last generation and if it is not confronted our country will be transformed into a dictatorship – the aim of the Woke.
Happy Learning,
Harley
NIHILISM EPILOGUES – EPILOGUE 3
WOKENESS, A NEW RELIGION – EXCERPTS
All the excerpts in this segment are from Woke, Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy (2021)
THE TEMPLE OF DIVERSITY: Wokeness sacrifices true diversity, diversity of thought, so that skin-deep symbols of diversity like race and gender can thrive. Diversity experts like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are the Grand Inquisitors of our time. Corporate CEOs are the followers in the square who kneel to them. Some kneel out of worship, some out of fear, some a mixture of the two. If they confess themselves to be sinners and acknowledge their racism and sexism, the Inquisitors will absolve them of these sins. The woke CEOs and their employee’s cry. “I am blind to my white privilege – make me see!” If they show a penitent heart and contrite spirit, the diversity experts graciously bless them and then move on to their next speaking engagements.
Robin DiAngelo is the author of White Fragility. She believes that whites are “an undifferentiated racist collective, socialized to ‘fundamentally hate blackness’ and to institutionalize that prejudice in politics and culture.” DiAngelo’s rise is emblematic of the increased adoption of a previous fringe school of thought that has now spread across corporate America through mandated Diversity trainings and has even made its way into exhibits at the Smithsonian. DiAngelo and her devotees seem to believe that things like the scientific method, use of written word, punctuality, and hard work are “hallmarks of whiteness” and that it perpetuates white supremacy for employers and teachers to valorize them. In DiAngelo’s telling, the idea of meritocracy is a white supremacist myth meant to justify existing racial hierarchies as the product of hard work. One journalist interviewing DiAngelo questioned her about her objection to the supposedly white practices of hiring professors based on how rational they are. The journalist asked whether hiring rational teachers might produce rational students. DiAngelo ultimately responded that if any practice leads to the outcome of minorities doing poorly, that practice must be racist. She then noted, incidentally, that under capitalism, minorities do poorly.
You’ll find more of the same in Ibram Kendi’s work on Diversity, although without the nauseating self-flagellation you can only find in woke white people. He makes such assertions as if you claim to be racist, you obviously are. If you claim not to be racist, you’re hiding your racism, which is even worse. It’s a woke catch-22. It turns out that one of Diversity’s central tenets is that everyone is racist, just as part of Catholicism is accepting that everyone is a sinner.
Wokeness has become a religion in every meaningful sense of the word – practically, morally, and even legally. The Church of Diversity is as real as Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism, and its membership is growing every day. It has now grown powerful enough that, like many dominant churches throughout history, it has decided to begin punishing all the nonbelievers. A democracy may thrive on dissent, but a theocracy can’t tolerate it.
POLITICAL BELIEFS IN THE WORKPLACE: Diversity is here and now. And it’s spreading its woke tendrils from the seminar rooms of the ivory tower to the boardrooms of corporate America. Woke capitalism has moved beyond bland corporate statements about diversity. Frighteningly, it now demands the firing of employees who don’t share its enlightened worldview. There are three archetypal models when it comes to political beliefs in the workplace: apolitical, deliberative, and orthodox. Whether an employee’s political speech will get them fired or not depends on which of these models their employer subscribes to.
First, there’s the apolitical model, a workplace where the focus is work and employees check their political opinions at the door. Many companies outright ban political speech at work. The firestorm of visceral criticism to this is probably best summed up by former Twitter CEO Dick Costelo’s reaction. Costelo declared in a now-deleted tweet, “me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.” The message is clear: damned be all who don’t bow at the altar of woke stakeholderism.
There’s a natural human itch to discuss the issues of the day, and some businesses reject the apolitical model by embracing that urge and encouraging their employees to speak their minds. This is the deliberative model, where a workplace is a site of discussion and debate on any and all topics – essentially a faculty lounge at most 20th century universities. A lot of modern-day Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook claim to fall into this category.
Last, there’s the orthodox model, where employees are a self-selecting group who must swear fealty to a set of principles to retain employment, like the instructors at a religious school who must affirm a denominational catechism. Historically, businesses with religious owners have been the main adherents to the orthodox model, whether formally or informally. But wokeness is the new orthodoxy, the new religion, one that disguises itself in secular clothing. Because its disciples worship the secular force of identity rather than any supernatural one, it’s much easier for the Church of Diversity to infiltrate the workplace. For many years universities have been in the process of lurching quite dramatically from the deliberative model to the orthodox one, and now corporations are trending in that direction as well. Any they’re firing anyone who doesn’t toe the new party line.
HERETICS: The left and the right each discriminates in its own ways, but one thing that distinguishes the left is that it loves to eat its own. Feminists, and their insistence that transgender women should be considered separate from biological women is motivated by their feminism – they think that transgender women and biological women have meaningfully different experiences that are obscured when their identities are treated the same.
This internecine squabbling for ideological control makes perfect sense under the view that wokeness is a religion. Many religions have one kind of contempt for nonbelievers and a special kind of hatred for heretics, who must be punished even more violently because they threaten to lead the faithful astray. The Church of Diversity works the same way. Traitors for violating the tenets of a belief system that they’d been understood to have implicitly agreed to are treated with special contempt because their tribe thought they should’ve known better. When they signed on for feminism, they were supposed to have understood that it came with support for transgender women attached. If you’re not on board for the whole acronym, you’re against all of it. That’s just how religious belief systems work – you don’t get to pick your five favorite commandments and follow those. And now corporations are firing people for violating the woke articles of faith, which they are understood to have implicitly agreed to by applying for a job at a woke company.
The Church of Diversity’s beliefs require it to silence classical liberals, but classical liberals -- which in today’s climate includes political conservatives like me – can’t forget that our beliefs require us to listen to it. Yes, the playing field is uneven, but that’s what defines the choice we make when committing to true diversity of thought. The American people are beginning to let the Church of Diversity know that they’ve had enough of its preaching. But the best way to do that isn’t to attempt to “cancel” woke culture itself. Rather, we need to take its concerns seriously and provide a better answer to those very concerns than wokeism does.
WOKENESS IS LITERALLY A RELIGION: There are actually a growing number of academics who argue that wokeness really is a religion in the fullest sense of the word. Georgetown professor Johua Mitchell argues that America has “relocated its religion to the realm of politics” and that identity politics shares the same core premises as Christianity.
Mitchell’s right. The analogy between Christianity and the Church of Diversity is so strong that it’s evident that wokeness plays a religious role in one’s life, and therefore really is a religion for legal purposes. Under the woke worldview, being born white, straight, male, or – worse – all three is an original sin that one must spend their life atoning for. Just as Catholics think we inherited the sins of Adam and Eve even if we’ve done nothing wrong, disciples of wokeness think we’ve inherited the sins of the Founding Fathers – the mechanism for group guilt is just called systemic racism instead of original sin. And the woke left punishes its heretics with the same fervor as any inquisition and for the same reasons – even more important than bringing infidels to the light is keeping the faithful on the straight and narrow path. Any deviation from orthodoxy must be punished.
That’s a key part of why wokeness really does play a religious role in one’s life: it’s a system of beliefs that stands as one indivisible unit and touches on all aspects of one’s existence. You aren’t allowed to consider the evidence and pick and choose which parts of wokeness you like. Like Christianity or Islam, wokeness purports to provide a system of beliefs that explains everything, and it doesn’t allow its believers to pick and choose which of its explanations they like. Wokeness counts as a religion for the EEOC’s purposes because, like other religions, it provides unified, systematic explanations that order one’s entire life. And like other religions, wokeness gives commands, not suggestions. And its disciples are expected to obey all of its commands, not just the ones that make sense to them. You’re not allowed to be a little woke, just like Christians can’t follow their five favorite commandments.
It’s not a religion I subscribe to, but wokeness really is a religion. It does meet the EEOC’s two-part definition because its adherents cling to it fervently and it dictates all their thoughts and deeds. Wokeness touches every part of its disciples’ lives. Like any other religion, being woke isn’t supposed to be a narrow, one-off commitment – it’s supposed to be a way of life. It gives its believers purpose and meaning. It’s the structure that they use to make sense of the universe. Where a non-woke person sees ordinary interactions, for instance, a disciple of wokeness sees microaggressions. Just as a Christian sees God’s hands in all of Creation, someone who’s woke sees the guiding hand of identity-based power relations everywhere they look.
CONCLUSION: According to wokeness, we are each defined by a small handful of characteristics that we inherit on the day we’re born. In a woke world, we are each defined by the innate and the immutable, by the visible and the skin-deep. This narrative now permeates our social consciousness in America. It’s reinforced by not only the people who lead our government but the people who lead the companies where we work and the schools where our children learn. According to this worldview, you are simply a fault line at the intersection of the tectonic plates of group identity. You aren’t really a free agent in the world, but simply a member of your “group“ who is supposed to advance your group’s interests. Your race isn’t just the color your skin happens to be. It’s essential to your voice, your ideas, and your identity. This is what woke essentialism is all about: it posits that your genetically inherited attributes are the true essence of who you are.
I reject that narrative, and I think every American should too. I’m not just a man, I’m a proud father, a loyal husband, and a grateful son. I’m not just a person of color. I’m a Hindu, a child of immigrants, an American citizen, and a proud native of Ohio. I’m not just a former CEO, but a scientist and an entrepreneur. I’m the author of my own destiny, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, but always unlimited by what someone else thinks I should be. I’m not defined by any single one of these things. Rather, I am all of those things at once and a great deal more. Each of those identities is part of my personal mosaic – the mosaic that together comprises who I am as an American. That’s what true American pluralism is all about. Pluralism means rising above the narrow demands of woke culture to discover that there’s more to each of us than our immutable characteristics.
The fundamental problem with wokeness isn’t just that it offers the wrong answer to the question of who we are. The problem is that it forecloses the possibility of shared solidarity as Americans. If we see each other as nothing more than the color of our skin, our gender, our sexual orientation, or the number of digits in our bank accounts, then it becomes impossibly difficult to find commonality with those who don’t share those characteristics. Yet if we define ourselves on a plurality of attributes, then we find our path to true solidarity as a people.
For example, I’m brown, conservative, and Hindu. The person I recently elevated to the position of CEO of my company is white, liberal, and Jewish. He’s progressive. I’m not. But we both share a passion for discovering new drugs for patients who need them. My neighbor is black, progressive, and Christian. I’m none of those things. But we are both fathers of children who I hope will one day play sports together, go to class together, and learn from one another. We don’t need to have everything in common with one another. We only need a few things that bind us together as a people.
America is like each of us: our country isn’t just one thing either. That’s what makes America unique. Historically, most countries were defined on the basis of a single attribute – a single ethnicity, a single language, a single religion, a single monarch. Not America. We were the first and greatest country defined exclusively on the basis of a set of ideas, enshrined under a single Constitution. America wasn’t just a place. It was a vision of what a place could be. America was about democracy. Capitalism. Reason, science, and enlightenment. Faith and purpose. Freedom. Individualism. Solidarity through a commitment to something greater than ourselves. These are quintessentially American values and ideals. We should care to about preserving each of them.
Forty years ago, it was completely normal to live alongside people who had different politics than you, but today it’s strange. The country’s been slowly but surely brought to a boil in a partisan pot. As we’ve gradually become more aware of our differences, we’ve increasingly chosen to surround ourselves with people who think the same way as us. Social media companies promised to bring people together, but instead they provide echo chambers where like-minded people reinforce each other’s biases. Technology has made it easier for us to travel where we want and talk to whom we want, but it turns out what most of us wanted was to reaffirm our beliefs.
But the woke diagnosis of America’s problems is that they can be attributed to lingering racism and sexism. My diagnosis is that we lack a shared national identity. We think of ourselves as black or white, male or female, Republican or Democrat, we don’t think of ourselves as Americans. And so, it becomes natural to make decisions based on what’s good for our race, gender, or party rather than what’s good for America. Wokeness flourishes in the absence of a shared national identity and then further divides us because we split ourselves into factions based on other commonalities. Corporate wokeness deepens that division by selling us symbols we can use to identify people who think like us.
The Founding Fathers thought our diversity would be our strength, while their opponents thought it would be our doom because it would divide us. Diversity itself is not the problem. But when diversity is all you have – when you have diversity without commonality – that diversity becomes a source of division because people sort themselves into tribes. Once that happens, the tribes start fighting each other over who get what, the way humans always have.
Source: Woke, Inc. Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy (2021).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
WOKENESS, A NEW RELIGION – EXCERPTS
All the excerpts in this segment are from Woke, Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy (2021)
THE TEMPLE OF DIVERSITY: Wokeness sacrifices true diversity, diversity of thought, so that skin-deep symbols of diversity like race and gender can thrive. Diversity experts like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are the Grand Inquisitors of our time. Corporate CEOs are the followers in the square who kneel to them. Some kneel out of worship, some out of fear, some a mixture of the two. If they confess themselves to be sinners and acknowledge their racism and sexism, the Inquisitors will absolve them of these sins. The woke CEOs and their employee’s cry. “I am blind to my white privilege – make me see!” If they show a penitent heart and contrite spirit, the diversity experts graciously bless them and then move on to their next speaking engagements.
Robin DiAngelo is the author of White Fragility. She believes that whites are “an undifferentiated racist collective, socialized to ‘fundamentally hate blackness’ and to institutionalize that prejudice in politics and culture.” DiAngelo’s rise is emblematic of the increased adoption of a previous fringe school of thought that has now spread across corporate America through mandated Diversity trainings and has even made its way into exhibits at the Smithsonian. DiAngelo and her devotees seem to believe that things like the scientific method, use of written word, punctuality, and hard work are “hallmarks of whiteness” and that it perpetuates white supremacy for employers and teachers to valorize them. In DiAngelo’s telling, the idea of meritocracy is a white supremacist myth meant to justify existing racial hierarchies as the product of hard work. One journalist interviewing DiAngelo questioned her about her objection to the supposedly white practices of hiring professors based on how rational they are. The journalist asked whether hiring rational teachers might produce rational students. DiAngelo ultimately responded that if any practice leads to the outcome of minorities doing poorly, that practice must be racist. She then noted, incidentally, that under capitalism, minorities do poorly.
You’ll find more of the same in Ibram Kendi’s work on Diversity, although without the nauseating self-flagellation you can only find in woke white people. He makes such assertions as if you claim to be racist, you obviously are. If you claim not to be racist, you’re hiding your racism, which is even worse. It’s a woke catch-22. It turns out that one of Diversity’s central tenets is that everyone is racist, just as part of Catholicism is accepting that everyone is a sinner.
Wokeness has become a religion in every meaningful sense of the word – practically, morally, and even legally. The Church of Diversity is as real as Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism, and its membership is growing every day. It has now grown powerful enough that, like many dominant churches throughout history, it has decided to begin punishing all the nonbelievers. A democracy may thrive on dissent, but a theocracy can’t tolerate it.
POLITICAL BELIEFS IN THE WORKPLACE: Diversity is here and now. And it’s spreading its woke tendrils from the seminar rooms of the ivory tower to the boardrooms of corporate America. Woke capitalism has moved beyond bland corporate statements about diversity. Frighteningly, it now demands the firing of employees who don’t share its enlightened worldview. There are three archetypal models when it comes to political beliefs in the workplace: apolitical, deliberative, and orthodox. Whether an employee’s political speech will get them fired or not depends on which of these models their employer subscribes to.
First, there’s the apolitical model, a workplace where the focus is work and employees check their political opinions at the door. Many companies outright ban political speech at work. The firestorm of visceral criticism to this is probably best summed up by former Twitter CEO Dick Costelo’s reaction. Costelo declared in a now-deleted tweet, “me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.” The message is clear: damned be all who don’t bow at the altar of woke stakeholderism.
There’s a natural human itch to discuss the issues of the day, and some businesses reject the apolitical model by embracing that urge and encouraging their employees to speak their minds. This is the deliberative model, where a workplace is a site of discussion and debate on any and all topics – essentially a faculty lounge at most 20th century universities. A lot of modern-day Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook claim to fall into this category.
Last, there’s the orthodox model, where employees are a self-selecting group who must swear fealty to a set of principles to retain employment, like the instructors at a religious school who must affirm a denominational catechism. Historically, businesses with religious owners have been the main adherents to the orthodox model, whether formally or informally. But wokeness is the new orthodoxy, the new religion, one that disguises itself in secular clothing. Because its disciples worship the secular force of identity rather than any supernatural one, it’s much easier for the Church of Diversity to infiltrate the workplace. For many years universities have been in the process of lurching quite dramatically from the deliberative model to the orthodox one, and now corporations are trending in that direction as well. Any they’re firing anyone who doesn’t toe the new party line.
HERETICS: The left and the right each discriminates in its own ways, but one thing that distinguishes the left is that it loves to eat its own. Feminists, and their insistence that transgender women should be considered separate from biological women is motivated by their feminism – they think that transgender women and biological women have meaningfully different experiences that are obscured when their identities are treated the same.
This internecine squabbling for ideological control makes perfect sense under the view that wokeness is a religion. Many religions have one kind of contempt for nonbelievers and a special kind of hatred for heretics, who must be punished even more violently because they threaten to lead the faithful astray. The Church of Diversity works the same way. Traitors for violating the tenets of a belief system that they’d been understood to have implicitly agreed to are treated with special contempt because their tribe thought they should’ve known better. When they signed on for feminism, they were supposed to have understood that it came with support for transgender women attached. If you’re not on board for the whole acronym, you’re against all of it. That’s just how religious belief systems work – you don’t get to pick your five favorite commandments and follow those. And now corporations are firing people for violating the woke articles of faith, which they are understood to have implicitly agreed to by applying for a job at a woke company.
The Church of Diversity’s beliefs require it to silence classical liberals, but classical liberals -- which in today’s climate includes political conservatives like me – can’t forget that our beliefs require us to listen to it. Yes, the playing field is uneven, but that’s what defines the choice we make when committing to true diversity of thought. The American people are beginning to let the Church of Diversity know that they’ve had enough of its preaching. But the best way to do that isn’t to attempt to “cancel” woke culture itself. Rather, we need to take its concerns seriously and provide a better answer to those very concerns than wokeism does.
WOKENESS IS LITERALLY A RELIGION: There are actually a growing number of academics who argue that wokeness really is a religion in the fullest sense of the word. Georgetown professor Johua Mitchell argues that America has “relocated its religion to the realm of politics” and that identity politics shares the same core premises as Christianity.
Mitchell’s right. The analogy between Christianity and the Church of Diversity is so strong that it’s evident that wokeness plays a religious role in one’s life, and therefore really is a religion for legal purposes. Under the woke worldview, being born white, straight, male, or – worse – all three is an original sin that one must spend their life atoning for. Just as Catholics think we inherited the sins of Adam and Eve even if we’ve done nothing wrong, disciples of wokeness think we’ve inherited the sins of the Founding Fathers – the mechanism for group guilt is just called systemic racism instead of original sin. And the woke left punishes its heretics with the same fervor as any inquisition and for the same reasons – even more important than bringing infidels to the light is keeping the faithful on the straight and narrow path. Any deviation from orthodoxy must be punished.
That’s a key part of why wokeness really does play a religious role in one’s life: it’s a system of beliefs that stands as one indivisible unit and touches on all aspects of one’s existence. You aren’t allowed to consider the evidence and pick and choose which parts of wokeness you like. Like Christianity or Islam, wokeness purports to provide a system of beliefs that explains everything, and it doesn’t allow its believers to pick and choose which of its explanations they like. Wokeness counts as a religion for the EEOC’s purposes because, like other religions, it provides unified, systematic explanations that order one’s entire life. And like other religions, wokeness gives commands, not suggestions. And its disciples are expected to obey all of its commands, not just the ones that make sense to them. You’re not allowed to be a little woke, just like Christians can’t follow their five favorite commandments.
It’s not a religion I subscribe to, but wokeness really is a religion. It does meet the EEOC’s two-part definition because its adherents cling to it fervently and it dictates all their thoughts and deeds. Wokeness touches every part of its disciples’ lives. Like any other religion, being woke isn’t supposed to be a narrow, one-off commitment – it’s supposed to be a way of life. It gives its believers purpose and meaning. It’s the structure that they use to make sense of the universe. Where a non-woke person sees ordinary interactions, for instance, a disciple of wokeness sees microaggressions. Just as a Christian sees God’s hands in all of Creation, someone who’s woke sees the guiding hand of identity-based power relations everywhere they look.
CONCLUSION: According to wokeness, we are each defined by a small handful of characteristics that we inherit on the day we’re born. In a woke world, we are each defined by the innate and the immutable, by the visible and the skin-deep. This narrative now permeates our social consciousness in America. It’s reinforced by not only the people who lead our government but the people who lead the companies where we work and the schools where our children learn. According to this worldview, you are simply a fault line at the intersection of the tectonic plates of group identity. You aren’t really a free agent in the world, but simply a member of your “group“ who is supposed to advance your group’s interests. Your race isn’t just the color your skin happens to be. It’s essential to your voice, your ideas, and your identity. This is what woke essentialism is all about: it posits that your genetically inherited attributes are the true essence of who you are.
I reject that narrative, and I think every American should too. I’m not just a man, I’m a proud father, a loyal husband, and a grateful son. I’m not just a person of color. I’m a Hindu, a child of immigrants, an American citizen, and a proud native of Ohio. I’m not just a former CEO, but a scientist and an entrepreneur. I’m the author of my own destiny, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, but always unlimited by what someone else thinks I should be. I’m not defined by any single one of these things. Rather, I am all of those things at once and a great deal more. Each of those identities is part of my personal mosaic – the mosaic that together comprises who I am as an American. That’s what true American pluralism is all about. Pluralism means rising above the narrow demands of woke culture to discover that there’s more to each of us than our immutable characteristics.
The fundamental problem with wokeness isn’t just that it offers the wrong answer to the question of who we are. The problem is that it forecloses the possibility of shared solidarity as Americans. If we see each other as nothing more than the color of our skin, our gender, our sexual orientation, or the number of digits in our bank accounts, then it becomes impossibly difficult to find commonality with those who don’t share those characteristics. Yet if we define ourselves on a plurality of attributes, then we find our path to true solidarity as a people.
For example, I’m brown, conservative, and Hindu. The person I recently elevated to the position of CEO of my company is white, liberal, and Jewish. He’s progressive. I’m not. But we both share a passion for discovering new drugs for patients who need them. My neighbor is black, progressive, and Christian. I’m none of those things. But we are both fathers of children who I hope will one day play sports together, go to class together, and learn from one another. We don’t need to have everything in common with one another. We only need a few things that bind us together as a people.
America is like each of us: our country isn’t just one thing either. That’s what makes America unique. Historically, most countries were defined on the basis of a single attribute – a single ethnicity, a single language, a single religion, a single monarch. Not America. We were the first and greatest country defined exclusively on the basis of a set of ideas, enshrined under a single Constitution. America wasn’t just a place. It was a vision of what a place could be. America was about democracy. Capitalism. Reason, science, and enlightenment. Faith and purpose. Freedom. Individualism. Solidarity through a commitment to something greater than ourselves. These are quintessentially American values and ideals. We should care to about preserving each of them.
Forty years ago, it was completely normal to live alongside people who had different politics than you, but today it’s strange. The country’s been slowly but surely brought to a boil in a partisan pot. As we’ve gradually become more aware of our differences, we’ve increasingly chosen to surround ourselves with people who think the same way as us. Social media companies promised to bring people together, but instead they provide echo chambers where like-minded people reinforce each other’s biases. Technology has made it easier for us to travel where we want and talk to whom we want, but it turns out what most of us wanted was to reaffirm our beliefs.
But the woke diagnosis of America’s problems is that they can be attributed to lingering racism and sexism. My diagnosis is that we lack a shared national identity. We think of ourselves as black or white, male or female, Republican or Democrat, we don’t think of ourselves as Americans. And so, it becomes natural to make decisions based on what’s good for our race, gender, or party rather than what’s good for America. Wokeness flourishes in the absence of a shared national identity and then further divides us because we split ourselves into factions based on other commonalities. Corporate wokeness deepens that division by selling us symbols we can use to identify people who think like us.
The Founding Fathers thought our diversity would be our strength, while their opponents thought it would be our doom because it would divide us. Diversity itself is not the problem. But when diversity is all you have – when you have diversity without commonality – that diversity becomes a source of division because people sort themselves into tribes. Once that happens, the tribes start fighting each other over who get what, the way humans always have.
Source: Woke, Inc. Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy (2021).
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| nihl_e3l_wokeness_a_new_religion_--_epilogue_3_.pdf |