Christian Parenti, professor at John Jay College, journalist and author, joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to make the case that what he and many others define as “woke” is actually a weapon used to further suppress marginalized people, prevent the awareness of class politics and class struggle and further divide the working class.
Now that the Soviet Union is gone, and People Of Influence And Authority no longer have to toss the masses a bone or two, they would much prefer that we dissipate our energy on dreary arguments about cultural appropriation and how many LGTBQXYZPDQ+ can dance on the head of a pin, endless and endlessly performative struggle sessions, rather than raise uncomfortable questions about how the economic pie is sliced, why the humans are feasting on salmon and prime steak and the family pets must be content with off-brand dry kibble that smells musty.
Put another way - to paraphrase our very own Chris Hedges - elites will gladly discuss race, they will decry gender inequality most piteously, they will demonstrate a touching concern for the rights of sexual and gender minorities so oppressed that they have not even been discovered yet. They are so open-minded that they will even feign sensitivity to those who call themselves a different species, for Bastet's sake. Those same elites will not readily discuss economic class.
Or, in the negative formulation - if, to give one example, businesses were to stop opposing unionization of their workers, the result would be a transfer of wealth, of *concrete* *material* *benefits*, to brown and black and yellow and tabby and white working class people and cats greater than all the allyship statements ever penned, all the diversity committees ever instituted, all the preferred pronoun tags ever attached to a corporate email. Which is precisely why they will not do this.
With foregoing in mind:
1. Always remember to keep your eye on the money.
2. Never forget to keep your eye on the money.
3. Always remember to never forget to keep your eye on the money.
4. Never forget to always remember to keep your eye on the money.
Everything else is smoke and mirrors designed to get you to violate one or more of above-listed tenets and dissipate your energy into something harmless.
Well said, Feral Finster, and thank you for including Bastet.
Number 5 might also be: Never forget to always remember to keep your eye on the violence and perpetual wars as well, as that will lead directly to obscene amounts of money.
Yes, sort of. I disagree for some nuanced reasons the details of which are posted below. Ah, Bastet though...I have a statue of her atop my shelf of theology, mysticism, and spirituality books. Seems appropriate. I'm not either/or on those subjects, either.
This was a very informative interview. Parenti's views are new to me. May I suggest that you invite him back after his new essay appears? Thank you for all the great work.
I see several red flags here. This line of argument slouches toward the oft posted dogmatic leftist lecture to us inferiors about how yet again we fail. The moral admonishment that class issues good and issues of identity bad. Most often by white male armchair theorists who've never had to fight to be recognized for who they are. Nor, for that matter, ever held a tool in their lives.
I was a blue collar rank and file labor union activist and for close to 30 years. Trained in the late '60s by people who'd been '30s union organizers (CIO.) Plus I fit both sets of suspect letters: BIPOC and LGBTQ. By long experience and through realizing we live in a post Einstein world of relativity and uncertainty, I see that the old Aristotelian either/or, the law of the excluded middle, no longer holds. Thus no need for dichotomies in the name of some assumed greater good. Why not both/and?
Seems to me Parenti's argument is an unwarranted conflation of the struggle for recognition with the self-congratulatory "diversity" of the administrative and professional elites. Like the Ivy Ds where race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation are no problem. As long as you have the right academic credentials to fit with their 'meritocracy.' The type of arrogance so thoroughly examined in Halberstam's //The Best and the Brightest.// This conflation leads to a dangerous ceding the meaning of "woke" (derived from AAVE/Black experience) to right wing derision. As if being kindly, having respect for your own cultural traditions and of others, and enjoying the wild diversities of life were by any definition bad, bad, bad.
Of course we workers appreciate expertise. Just not to the extent of outside professionals brought in to run our organization. As if we're too stupid to manage ourselves. Fannie Lou Hamer knew better. So did Studs Terkel. So did Delores Huerta. So did Eugene V. Debs. So did my logger grandfather, the Wobbly (IWW.) To hell with self-appointed vanguards.
The motto of the I.W.W. was: "An Injury To One Is An Injury To All." ALL! Not just our class, our ethnicity, our skills, our spirituality, or any other exclusive, erroneous, imposed homogeneity.
This interview and the comments on it address many important issues, and everyone has expressed different, interesting opinions about them. But one might also address the approach one takes in addressing these issues, as opposed to addressing the issues themselves.
The interview, in terms of its approach, is informed by the concept of ideology. The word “ideology” means a system of ideas, which is to say, a set of rational propositions. The propositions of an ideology may ramify into such areas as empirical observations, moral judgements, or economic, political, and psychological issues, among other areas. But every ideology is, in its nature, based on and fundamentally informed by rational propositions.
The problem with any ideological, which is to say rational, approach to the problems of humanity is that to build concentration camps or nuclear weapons is as rational as it is to build a peaceful, happy, prosperous, and egalitarian society. As the recent movie, “Oppenheimer,” reminds us, the greatest rational minds in history can work at the highest level for the purpose of creating instruments of global annihilation. The rational apparatus of democratic government will put those instruments to use. And all this activity will be fully rationalized by intellectuals acting in the service of the existing power structure of society. In fact, during the past three-quarters of a century, the US has invested more resources in precisely this kind of project than have been directly invested in any other project in the world.
For reason—our rational faculty—the idol of the Enlightenment—serves the death instinct as readily as it serves the life instinct. In fact, reason serves the death instinct far more readily than it serves the life instinct. Cultivating the life instinct can be done only one individual at a time, through tremendous dedication and labor. By comparison, it is easy to create a nation of spiritual zombies educated only in the STEM fields, as every US president instructs us we must do. When, for the sake of the rational faculty, the whole individual is thus neglected (or rather, cast into the dirt) and left undeveloped, the resulting vacuum will inevitably be filled by the selfish ego, which is to say, by the death instinct.
Every ideology consists of rational propositions—the currency of reason—and therefore no ideology can transcend the limits of reason. But human beings do not and cannot actually live by rational propositions. CH does not, Christian Parenti does not, I do not, and none of the other commenters does. No reasonably psychologically healthy person raises a child to live by rational propositions. If you try to make human beings live according to an ideology, you are trying to make them live by rational propositions. If a good society could be created on the basis of rational propositions, it would already have been done many times throughout history. The only possible result of trying to make people live by ideology, and therefore by the rational propositions of an ideology, is to produce deformed human beings whose humanity has largely been eradicated. We see such human beings all around us; in fact, they run the world. If you base your civilization on any ideology, it will eventually dedicate itself to building nuclear weapons and concentration camps.
Have we not conducted enough experiments on human beings (experiments few ever have consented to) in order to test the ideology of Enlightenment reason, the ideology of communism, the ideology of liberalism, the ideology of capitalism, the ideology of neoliberalism, the ideology of empire, the ideologies of pseudo-intellectualism serving the existing power structure of society, the ideologies of organized religions masquerading as spirituality? Can we not finally abandon ideology itself as the folly it is?
No ideology has ever contributed anything to humanity that is remotely comparable to what the spiritual leaders of humanity and artists have contributed to it. What is art? In the broadest sense, it is simply everything that is worth doing and is done well. And what are the highest creations of art but the creations of the spirit, the only creations worth pursuing? Living as we do in the controlled hallucinations of our super-rational society, to many this point of view sounds hopelessly lofty, nebulous, and idealistic. But to let the good be the enemy of the best means to dwell forever in this sick world of controlled hallucination.
I agree with you. If you haven't already, look up Iain McGilchrist. A prof of English Lit, he wondered why analysis of poetry (or any art) never really captured its subjects. He suspected it had something to do with how the brain worked so he went to med school,becoming a neuroscientist specializing in the differences between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. While the R hemisphere is aware of the L, the reverse is not the case.
Seems you pretty much get the right hemisphere stuff; understanding gestalts, metaphors and symbols, both/and, etc. The realm of the humanities. Also what quantum physicists have been telling us about reality for a hundred years now. The left? Linear thinking, rationalism, reductionism, etc. It wants certainty and control. Disliking ambiguity, it insists on either/or. Sounds like what's wrong in the western Euro/Euro descent world, doesn't it?
I also recommend //Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West)// by John Ralston Saul. Written in 1992, a lot of it is prescient.
Where it comes from is not the same as who it has infected. I know many low income people who espouse woke ideology while also hating the rich. This highlights what the speaker said about the divisions of identity politics within the working class, while also reinforcing the idea that there are class divisions within the identity groups. I hate to use the word "intersectional", i would rather call them different ways and models and lenses of looking at social problems.
Thank you, Chris, for this very fine and timely interview with Christian Parenti as he unpacks the roots and progressions of Woke ideology (I've been increasingly confused by its contradictory messages - is it right? left? what is it? etc.), and its embedded connections to identity politics, increasingly divisive politics, its weaponization (creation?) by the system itself, anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism and, importantly, the absence of "confronting the class hierarchy of the society which is where the power really lies," and much more. I appreciate the complexity of Parenti's thinking and breakdown and am interested in reading where he is going with this in his next article(s). The connection with the over-emphasis on subjectivity in some mainstream psychotherapies is interesting to me - in depth psychotherapy which I practice and which is not mainstream, subjectivity and objectivity become inseparable and inner development invariably leads to more authentic outer actions in the world.
This was not talked about, but I personally think about the escalation of divisiveness we are experiencing culturally, and exporting globally, and its connection to the loss (and vacuum) of relationship to the sacred - to the sacredness of life, not necessarily any particular religion - and to the greater universal laws governing life on Earth.
Truly an impressive interview . And a very sad commentary on what passes today for "leftism" and liberalism in our universities, schools, churches, non profits and other social spaces in our declining Empire. Thank you Chris and Christian!
What a thing to be worried about when we face genuine existential threats on multiple fronts! "Woke culture" doesn't keep the working class from uniting against their oppressors, that's the job of the endless, ubiquitous propaganda, a sub group of which claims Black Trans people are coming for your children.. Getting stuck on form over content, which is what left "anti-woke" takes mostly amount to, is a diversion much more concerning.
Wokeness is a straw man, just as Biden introduce LGB he also said that white supremacy is greatest threat.
So we saw Florida Governor Ronald Dion DeSantis, (the neo-con) go up against Disney in a play by play bit of Biden intended theater to win over the Christian Right, but of course failed miserably, with contracts lost, money lost, lawsuits and an unhappy state of Florida.
Not to mention the late Gonzalo Lira that recognized the “Christian supremacy guys” Biden paraded around were actually feds.
It was intended to be a bunch of hay about nothing but an attempt to be misdirected emotional and religious BS baggage and Chris fell victim to it.
Now that the Soviet Union is gone, and People Of Influence And Authority no longer have to toss the masses a bone or two, they would much prefer that we dissipate our energy on dreary arguments about cultural appropriation and how many LGTBQXYZPDQ+ can dance on the head of a pin, endless and endlessly performative struggle sessions, rather than raise uncomfortable questions about how the economic pie is sliced, why the humans are feasting on salmon and prime steak and the family pets must be content with off-brand dry kibble that smells musty.
Put another way - to paraphrase our very own Chris Hedges - elites will gladly discuss race, they will decry gender inequality most piteously, they will demonstrate a touching concern for the rights of sexual and gender minorities so oppressed that they have not even been discovered yet. They are so open-minded that they will even feign sensitivity to those who call themselves a different species, for Bastet's sake. Those same elites will not readily discuss economic class.
Or, in the negative formulation - if, to give one example, businesses were to stop opposing unionization of their workers, the result would be a transfer of wealth, of *concrete* *material* *benefits*, to brown and black and yellow and tabby and white working class people and cats greater than all the allyship statements ever penned, all the diversity committees ever instituted, all the preferred pronoun tags ever attached to a corporate email. Which is precisely why they will not do this.
With foregoing in mind:
1. Always remember to keep your eye on the money.
2. Never forget to keep your eye on the money.
3. Always remember to never forget to keep your eye on the money.
4. Never forget to always remember to keep your eye on the money.
Everything else is smoke and mirrors designed to get you to violate one or more of above-listed tenets and dissipate your energy into something harmless.
Well said, Feral Finster, and thank you for including Bastet.
Number 5 might also be: Never forget to always remember to keep your eye on the violence and perpetual wars as well, as that will lead directly to obscene amounts of money.
Caitlin Johnstone puts it well:
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-us-empire-does-not-seek-peace/comments
Yes, sort of. I disagree for some nuanced reasons the details of which are posted below. Ah, Bastet though...I have a statue of her atop my shelf of theology, mysticism, and spirituality books. Seems appropriate. I'm not either/or on those subjects, either.
This was a very informative interview. Parenti's views are new to me. May I suggest that you invite him back after his new essay appears? Thank you for all the great work.
I see several red flags here. This line of argument slouches toward the oft posted dogmatic leftist lecture to us inferiors about how yet again we fail. The moral admonishment that class issues good and issues of identity bad. Most often by white male armchair theorists who've never had to fight to be recognized for who they are. Nor, for that matter, ever held a tool in their lives.
I was a blue collar rank and file labor union activist and for close to 30 years. Trained in the late '60s by people who'd been '30s union organizers (CIO.) Plus I fit both sets of suspect letters: BIPOC and LGBTQ. By long experience and through realizing we live in a post Einstein world of relativity and uncertainty, I see that the old Aristotelian either/or, the law of the excluded middle, no longer holds. Thus no need for dichotomies in the name of some assumed greater good. Why not both/and?
Seems to me Parenti's argument is an unwarranted conflation of the struggle for recognition with the self-congratulatory "diversity" of the administrative and professional elites. Like the Ivy Ds where race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation are no problem. As long as you have the right academic credentials to fit with their 'meritocracy.' The type of arrogance so thoroughly examined in Halberstam's //The Best and the Brightest.// This conflation leads to a dangerous ceding the meaning of "woke" (derived from AAVE/Black experience) to right wing derision. As if being kindly, having respect for your own cultural traditions and of others, and enjoying the wild diversities of life were by any definition bad, bad, bad.
Of course we workers appreciate expertise. Just not to the extent of outside professionals brought in to run our organization. As if we're too stupid to manage ourselves. Fannie Lou Hamer knew better. So did Studs Terkel. So did Delores Huerta. So did Eugene V. Debs. So did my logger grandfather, the Wobbly (IWW.) To hell with self-appointed vanguards.
The motto of the I.W.W. was: "An Injury To One Is An Injury To All." ALL! Not just our class, our ethnicity, our skills, our spirituality, or any other exclusive, erroneous, imposed homogeneity.
This interview and the comments on it address many important issues, and everyone has expressed different, interesting opinions about them. But one might also address the approach one takes in addressing these issues, as opposed to addressing the issues themselves.
The interview, in terms of its approach, is informed by the concept of ideology. The word “ideology” means a system of ideas, which is to say, a set of rational propositions. The propositions of an ideology may ramify into such areas as empirical observations, moral judgements, or economic, political, and psychological issues, among other areas. But every ideology is, in its nature, based on and fundamentally informed by rational propositions.
The problem with any ideological, which is to say rational, approach to the problems of humanity is that to build concentration camps or nuclear weapons is as rational as it is to build a peaceful, happy, prosperous, and egalitarian society. As the recent movie, “Oppenheimer,” reminds us, the greatest rational minds in history can work at the highest level for the purpose of creating instruments of global annihilation. The rational apparatus of democratic government will put those instruments to use. And all this activity will be fully rationalized by intellectuals acting in the service of the existing power structure of society. In fact, during the past three-quarters of a century, the US has invested more resources in precisely this kind of project than have been directly invested in any other project in the world.
For reason—our rational faculty—the idol of the Enlightenment—serves the death instinct as readily as it serves the life instinct. In fact, reason serves the death instinct far more readily than it serves the life instinct. Cultivating the life instinct can be done only one individual at a time, through tremendous dedication and labor. By comparison, it is easy to create a nation of spiritual zombies educated only in the STEM fields, as every US president instructs us we must do. When, for the sake of the rational faculty, the whole individual is thus neglected (or rather, cast into the dirt) and left undeveloped, the resulting vacuum will inevitably be filled by the selfish ego, which is to say, by the death instinct.
Every ideology consists of rational propositions—the currency of reason—and therefore no ideology can transcend the limits of reason. But human beings do not and cannot actually live by rational propositions. CH does not, Christian Parenti does not, I do not, and none of the other commenters does. No reasonably psychologically healthy person raises a child to live by rational propositions. If you try to make human beings live according to an ideology, you are trying to make them live by rational propositions. If a good society could be created on the basis of rational propositions, it would already have been done many times throughout history. The only possible result of trying to make people live by ideology, and therefore by the rational propositions of an ideology, is to produce deformed human beings whose humanity has largely been eradicated. We see such human beings all around us; in fact, they run the world. If you base your civilization on any ideology, it will eventually dedicate itself to building nuclear weapons and concentration camps.
Have we not conducted enough experiments on human beings (experiments few ever have consented to) in order to test the ideology of Enlightenment reason, the ideology of communism, the ideology of liberalism, the ideology of capitalism, the ideology of neoliberalism, the ideology of empire, the ideologies of pseudo-intellectualism serving the existing power structure of society, the ideologies of organized religions masquerading as spirituality? Can we not finally abandon ideology itself as the folly it is?
No ideology has ever contributed anything to humanity that is remotely comparable to what the spiritual leaders of humanity and artists have contributed to it. What is art? In the broadest sense, it is simply everything that is worth doing and is done well. And what are the highest creations of art but the creations of the spirit, the only creations worth pursuing? Living as we do in the controlled hallucinations of our super-rational society, to many this point of view sounds hopelessly lofty, nebulous, and idealistic. But to let the good be the enemy of the best means to dwell forever in this sick world of controlled hallucination.
I agree with you. If you haven't already, look up Iain McGilchrist. A prof of English Lit, he wondered why analysis of poetry (or any art) never really captured its subjects. He suspected it had something to do with how the brain worked so he went to med school,becoming a neuroscientist specializing in the differences between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. While the R hemisphere is aware of the L, the reverse is not the case.
Seems you pretty much get the right hemisphere stuff; understanding gestalts, metaphors and symbols, both/and, etc. The realm of the humanities. Also what quantum physicists have been telling us about reality for a hundred years now. The left? Linear thinking, rationalism, reductionism, etc. It wants certainty and control. Disliking ambiguity, it insists on either/or. Sounds like what's wrong in the western Euro/Euro descent world, doesn't it?
I also recommend //Voltaire's Bastards (The Dictatorship of Reason in the West)// by John Ralston Saul. Written in 1992, a lot of it is prescient.
Except that I don't believe that "wokeness" comes from "the left," since those people aren't leftists.
They are what you yourself named, Chris, "the liberal class," which is the best description of them that I've ever seen.
Where it comes from is not the same as who it has infected. I know many low income people who espouse woke ideology while also hating the rich. This highlights what the speaker said about the divisions of identity politics within the working class, while also reinforcing the idea that there are class divisions within the identity groups. I hate to use the word "intersectional", i would rather call them different ways and models and lenses of looking at social problems.
I don't think you got my point.
I was discussing who "the left" actually is, not where wokeness comes from.
Thank you, Chris, for this very fine and timely interview with Christian Parenti as he unpacks the roots and progressions of Woke ideology (I've been increasingly confused by its contradictory messages - is it right? left? what is it? etc.), and its embedded connections to identity politics, increasingly divisive politics, its weaponization (creation?) by the system itself, anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism and, importantly, the absence of "confronting the class hierarchy of the society which is where the power really lies," and much more. I appreciate the complexity of Parenti's thinking and breakdown and am interested in reading where he is going with this in his next article(s). The connection with the over-emphasis on subjectivity in some mainstream psychotherapies is interesting to me - in depth psychotherapy which I practice and which is not mainstream, subjectivity and objectivity become inseparable and inner development invariably leads to more authentic outer actions in the world.
This was not talked about, but I personally think about the escalation of divisiveness we are experiencing culturally, and exporting globally, and its connection to the loss (and vacuum) of relationship to the sacred - to the sacredness of life, not necessarily any particular religion - and to the greater universal laws governing life on Earth.
Truly an impressive interview . And a very sad commentary on what passes today for "leftism" and liberalism in our universities, schools, churches, non profits and other social spaces in our declining Empire. Thank you Chris and Christian!
The Rumble link goes only to an old video and even the Chris Hedges page does not show this video. Just FYI...
Thank you Chris for all of your efforts and analysis over the years
Also FYI this is the second video post where the rumble link goes to the incorrect video... I suspect manipulation but that's just me...
What a thing to be worried about when we face genuine existential threats on multiple fronts! "Woke culture" doesn't keep the working class from uniting against their oppressors, that's the job of the endless, ubiquitous propaganda, a sub group of which claims Black Trans people are coming for your children.. Getting stuck on form over content, which is what left "anti-woke" takes mostly amount to, is a diversion much more concerning.
Wokeness is a straw man, just as Biden introduce LGB he also said that white supremacy is greatest threat.
So we saw Florida Governor Ronald Dion DeSantis, (the neo-con) go up against Disney in a play by play bit of Biden intended theater to win over the Christian Right, but of course failed miserably, with contracts lost, money lost, lawsuits and an unhappy state of Florida.
Not to mention the late Gonzalo Lira that recognized the “Christian supremacy guys” Biden paraded around were actually feds.
It was intended to be a bunch of hay about nothing but an attempt to be misdirected emotional and religious BS baggage and Chris fell victim to it.