Why woke is the ruling ideology

Sep 29, 2020 by

By Aris Roussinos, unherd:

[…] Almost anyone who works in a university or a large corporation will by now have been forced to attend the instruction sessions in the dogma of the new faith which have rapidly become mandatory. When we see a handful of MPs proclaim on Twitter that they refuse to attend the struggle sessions to which they have been ordered by the faceless bureaucracy, trying feebly to assert some degree of autonomy against the managerial state, we appreciate clearly the hierarchies of power which govern our system.

Like the wave of statue-toppling earlier this summer, which immediately subsumed itself into the endless bureaucracy of commissions and panels, overseen by the quangos and opaquely-funded NGOs which actually run this country, we realise that true power in Britain rests neither in the streets nor at the ballot box, but in the hands of the professional managerial class. The spread of the successor ideology is not, despite the urban violence which occasionally attends its spread, a revolutionary moment, but the very opposite, a counterrevolution of HR managers, the means by which managerial liberalism reasserts its authority over the organs of the state.

The sheer zeal with which middle managers and HR executives, as well as the students rioting in the streets aspiring to join their numbers, have latched onto the successor ideology reveals their grasp of the potential power it affords them…the apparatuses of the new ideology are the education system, the mass media and the culture industry: go to university, read the newspaper, listen to Radio 4: there is no escape from the ideology of the administrative class.

When we hear the righteous indignation of middle-class young women, lecturing soldiers for cleaning graffiti off the Cenotaph that they are furthering a system of structural racism or whatever, we hear the nasal tones of the future managerial class asserting itself, drunk with its own power. Imagine the sound of a passive-aggressive email from HR plinking into your inbox, forever: that is the sound of ideology taking the helm of the state.

Read here

[Editor’s note: I don’t agree with the author that this powerful ideology has nothing to do with Marxism, but otherwise his analysis points out some important truths.]

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