Friedrich Nietzsche first wrote “god is dead” in his 1882 book The Gay Science, and then in his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, which he published in four volumes between 1883 and 1885.
When he spoke of the death of god, he didn’t mean this literally, of course — he seemed to be an atheist and so, much like myself, never believed that such a creator deity existed in the first place. What he meant to convey is that the rise and successes of science had killed our notions of such a creator-being. Along with this, I’ve always assumed he meant religion as a whole as well, and on the surface, this shows signs of becoming increasingly accurate. After all, according to a 2022 Gallup poll, people who claim no religion — the “nones” — were at 21%, and it’s been 20% or higher since 2017. That’s the highest it’s ever been.
While some have applauded this, I think they’re overlooking the fact that this doesn’t mean the “spirit” of religion has been exorcized. Not in the fucking least. Its poisonous spirit is alive and well, dwelling in new costumes, hiding behind different masks. In The Gay Science, he articulates this fact in his typical style.
“After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries,” he wrote, “ — a colossal, terrible shadow. God is dead, but given the way people are, there may still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is displayed. — And we — we must still defeat his shadow as well!”
While I appreciate Nietzsche as a thinker and when I read him he always inspired my writing, this is certainly not to say I’ve always agreed with him, or for that matter always felt certain what he even meant. Even so, this quotation has risen in my mind several times as of late and I am confident that I understand, at the very least, what it means to me, at least at present. What it says to me is that, to the contrary, the spirit or shadow of god and religion persists — it has merely vacated its former, decaying vessel and gone on to possess (drum roll) politics.
Concerning the extremes on both the Left and the Right of the political spectrum, at least in the United States, the ideologies embraced have essentially turned into political cults. On the Right, you have what I often refer to as the “Trumpanzees.” This is the MAGA crowd who still rallies around the former president like he is the second coming and accepts all he says with blind faith. On the Left, you have the “Woke” crowd, who essentially constitute a sort of cultural authoritarianism — though they as of yet have no central figure that they rally around like a band of lunatics.
Nonetheless: lunatics they most certainly are.
The MAGA Cult seems to strive to dominate the populace primarily through political and moral avenues, which makes sense, as they see themselves as the forces fighting to uphold traditional and established morals, values, and ideals. The Woke Cult seems to strive to dominate the populace primarily through cultural and educational avenues, which also makes sense, as they see themselves as fighting to destroy those traditional and established morals, values, and ideals. Or, perhaps more accurately, to invert them, at least concerning how they see them from their perspective, particularly in the style detailed in Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals.
The MAGA Cult seems to clearly be a cult to those on the Left, and the Woke Cult seems just as clearly to be a cult to those on the Right — but few, it seems to me, accept the cult-like qualities of both.
Naturally, the reader may question: where do I reside on the political spectrum?
In the interest of full disclosure, while I pledge allegiance to neither party, by my very nature I lean to the left side of the political spectrum. I’ve taken the Political Compass test numerous times. Whatever your perception of the test may be, I’ve always landed in the lower, left-hand, green-colored quadrant, which is to say that the test would describe me as a member of the Libertarian Left. In any case, perhaps this is why I feel calling the MAGA Cult a cult requires little to no explanation, and why I’ll dedicate my time here to focusing on the Woke Cult.
Another reason I’d like to focus on the Woke is that I value the freedom of expression quite highly, and while the Right exercises its own forms of censorship and compelled expression, it’s been that way since as far back as I can remember. Back in the 90s, even more recently, it seemed to me that the Left was on my side on this general issue, but clearly, a terrible shift happened somewhere along the line.
One such way in which the Woke Cult exercises this is by taking already-established words with well-understood meanings, redefining them, and pushing those definitions on others. Interestingly enough, the Woke Cult did this very thing with the word “woke” itself, a fact that was first brought to my attention by comedian Bill Burr during one of his bits, and which some subsequent Googling on my behalf appears to have confirmed. In essence, the term “Stay Woke” derived from black culture, where it was intended as a term alerting the community in question to remain aware of racial prejudice, inequality, injustice, and associated issues that it continued to deal with.
While the Woke Cult condemns “cultural appropriation,” in its eyes this apparently does not extend to their appropriation of this very word, which began somewhere during the 2010s, when they started using it to refer to far, far broader issues they perceived to be similar if not synonymous.
Now, given that people (often but not always those aligned with the Right) have often thrown around the word “woke” without making any sincere effort to define it, and it has certainly endured considerable mutation since its original use in its native context, I’m going to define what I personally mean in my use of the term in as much detail as I can manage so that there is no confusion.
It should be understood that the definition I provide here is by no means universal, but merely the definition that has arisen in my mind over time and encapsulates the qualities and characteristics of a movement I have watched evolve over time since its apparent conception on college campuses.
I do not demand that anyone adopt my definition and it should be understood that I only use it here, and have come to use it elsewhere, out of convenience.
In short, what I have come to call the Woke Cult is the extreme, authoritarian, sanctimonious, and often humorless faction of the Left in the ol’ US of A that consistently displays aggressive prejudice against those who so much as question their rigid, faith-based ideology – and who are utterly blind to their hypocrisy.
They are so unquestionably devoted to their own political ideology that they feel it is not merely their right but their duty to push it on everyone through force rather than engage those who oppose or fail to see their rigid belief structures as self-evident in discourse and try to persuade them through reasoned argument or strategic means of eliciting empathy.
They embrace censorship and compelled expression, for instance – they not only feel they have the right to force everyone to not say certain things, in other words, but to force everyone to say certain things. In their minds, they are the absolute authority regarding both what cannot be said and what must be said.
And while I plan to write more on this subject soon, for now, I’d like to zoom in on their insane love of censorship in particular.
If they are students on a college campus, for instance, they may hear that a guest speaker who they disagree with – or, for whatever reason, assume they will disagree with despite knowing diddly fuckity fuck about them – is scheduled to give a lecture. Or imagine, instead of college students, they are employees of a streaming service, and this streaming service provides a wide variety of content to its many viewers – much as a campus does, or at the very least should, provide for its students – but one day, the service provides a comedy special by a comedian that speaks about topics near and dear to a certain segment of their employees and who holds views that those employees consider offensive.
Now, to my mind, there are rational, reasonable approaches that could be taken here. They could attend the lecture and listen to the guest speaker or watch the special and listen to the comedian and come up with arguments against his perspective. In a lecture, when the speaker often takes questions, they could engage with them through asking questions or providing critiques. If a comedy special, or if it’s a lecture and they are somehow unable or unwilling to engage with the speaker, they could write a rebuttal of the speaker’s views that they could publish in a newspaper or online, perhaps on a blog, or even create a video stating their case and speaking their mind that they subsequently post on YouTube or TikTok. They could even create a documentary creatively portraying their arguments.
Any of these perfectly reasonable approaches would shine a spotlight on whatever issue is at hand, give them the ability to state their position clearly and spawn conversation with those who agree, disagree, and all of those in between.
This, in my opinion, is the appropriate way to respond to those who exercise their right to freedom of expression: exercise your own freedom of expression. More specifically tailored to the above examples, the answer to what one considers “hate speech” is not less speech, but more speech.
There is still another rational, reasonable, course of action that could be taken here, however, as not all people are inspired to debate an issue they feel strongly about. Perhaps they lack the skill, or merely the will, or perhaps they recognize that the issue inspires too much emotional reactivity in them and it makes them so uncomfortable that it would swiftly become unbearable.
In today’s language, they would feel “triggered.”
I’m not disparaging such reactions or the individuals who suffer from them, understand, but the best course of action in such a case would be to simply not attend the damned lecture or not watch the comedy special.
The Woke mindset seems to inspire them to invest little time and energy into such strategies, however. Instead, when such college kids hear that a controversial guest speaker is to present his case on campus, what they do in response is organize a protest to cancel the lecture. If the lecture indeed goes forward despite their protests, they will continue to protest outside the lecture hall and even get inside the lecture hall and interrupt the speaker with dramatic demonstrations, which sometimes include rushing the stage. Or when employed at, say, Netflix, for example, they may do something similar if the company dares to keep a controversial comedian such as Dave Chappelle on their platform.
What this suggests to me is that the Woke mob considers themselves the ultimate authority on what is absolute good and absolute evil. They equate speech that contradicts their rigid viewpoints with violence. In their minds, such speech is not only spoken by agents of evil and inflicts danger and violence upon the vulnerable and innocent that they have taken it upon themselves to protect at all costs but feeds and empowers other agents of evil to do the same.
To make matters worse, it threatens to infect others with this urge to inflict such danger, evil, and violence through such vile incantations, so silencing and destroying these agents of evil is their duty. So faithful are they in their morally righteous position, as a matter of fact, that no debate is necessary, no conversation is permitted. They already know all they need to know, and so they feel justified in silencing and destroying their opponents by any means necessary.
No half-measures are acceptable, either. It must be the Inquisition 2.0, all the fucking way. After all, they are morally righteous. They have absolute authority regarding both what cannot be said and what must be said.
This manifests not only in their war against opposing viewpoints, mind you, but even in what they regard as problematic words.
As an easy example, consider the word “retarded.” As explained by the grossly underrated comedian Doug Stanhope in his 2016 release, No Place Like Home, the word “retarded” was not a term born of hatred, but rather of sensitivity. Doctors, he tells us, used to call such individuals imbeciles and morons, but people eventually co-opted those words to refer to, as he put it, “our friend when he does something incredibly stupid,” and so, over time, those words became regarded as an insult. So to distance those afflicted with the actual condition from this problematic association, doctors decided to change the medical term, and so began referring to them as mentally retarded.
Soon enough, however, can you take a wild stab at what happened?
As you could probably guess, the same damned thing as before: we appropriated the term to refer to people who did something we regard as incredibly stupid. And so now the word has changed again. This, Stanhope tells us, is what Stephen Pinker refers to as the “Euphemism Treadmill.” Regardless of what new word is attached to individuals with this condition, the same thing is always going to happen.
It seems to me that the stupidity in this particular, modern example is actually compounded now thanks to the fierce and anti-intellectual ideology of the Woke mob, for not only are we no longer permitted to refer to those actually afflicted with this condition as “retarded,” but we are also no longer to use it in the appropriated sense. In other words, the word “retarded” is to be stricken from our vocabulary entirely. It must be banished. In no context is it ever permitted to be used again, which seems absurd.
After all, if the authentically retarded can no longer be referred to as retarded, then what’s the harm in using it in its appropriated form? And if we can no longer use it in its appropriated form, what’s the harm in continuing to call those authentically retarded as retarded?
In the condemnation of this term in all conceivable contexts, would this not accelerate the euphemism treadmill to a dizzying speed, ensuring that whatever new word is acceptable when referring to those who are legitimately afflicted with the condition will be far more swiftly appropriated to use to refer to the stupidity displayed by ourselves and others?
In other words, however noble the intent here, doesn’t this only serve to exacerbate the issue they seek to squash? Doesn’t this strike you as not only censorship – bad enough in and of itself – but unenlightened censorship at that? Doesn’t it strike you as silly? Stupid?
Dare I say: retarded?
Transmissions to Earth 