Bruce Logan
Every now and then a significant event along with the reaction to it reveals the character of an entire society. Harry’s and Meghan’s embrace of the victimhood cult on the Oprah Winfrey Show is just that. It is a symptom and portent of Western civilisation in thrall to 21st century “Pharisees”: those who worship at the Temple of the Wokerati. Those insulted by censure of any kind. To offend is to blaspheme.
The one-time royal victims are the mirror to see what we are becoming. At the very least, they have amplified the pretentious patois of “compassion” labelled by the British press “Sussex-ese”.
The House of Sussex informs us that Meghan is “determined to continue her work and compassion around the world and will keep striving to set an example for doing what is right and doing what is good.” Like her contemporary Wokists she and her husband are above criticism because they are only doing good in the world.
The Wokerati must, in order to retain power and the illusion of legitimacy, control language and thought. No name is given but everyone is guilty. There is no satire in that utopian safe “unhurting” space. Hate speech legislation is their baby.
The Sussexes are fuzzy icons for the religion of Woke. One’s identity is to be found ultimately, absolutely and unequivocally, in the “heroic” authority of self. Linguistic redundancy is everywhere. Even two public figures as privileged as Harry and Megan can, without embarrassment, claim victimhood because the credentials of victimhood have supreme moral status. And it is around this astonishing self-serving ideology that the cancel culture must spin.
The new Pharisees boldly deny the culture of restraint necessary to sustain democracy because they misunderstand freedom. They seem unaware that liberty does not draw from the raw freedom of self-justification but on the convention of family order, common law, and a universal and objective understanding of human dignity and transcendent truth.
For example, Harry, in defence of his own prodigality, dishonoured his parents and broke the fifth commandment. Now he may well have suffered a range of various injustices in the context of his family, but to publicly declare his spin on those “injustices” can only increase the suffering of misunderstanding. No good can come of it.
Harry, whose entire dignity, and identity comes from his family, rejects that in order to justify his imagined victimhood. A desire for justification that forces him to take refuge in the continuously self-justifying sentimentalism of the Wokerati.
Meghan and Harry might talk the good talk of compassion, but they and their co-Wokists would have us manufacture a solidarity of intolerant conformism. We must all submit to their group identifying and adolescent immaturity.
The Wokerati would turn personal offence into a primary evil that must be punished by the state. They are tone deaf to the irony of suppressed folly. Their freedom to express themselves as they see fit must overrule any sense of duty to their family or their country.
The rest of us who endure the privilege of white privilege, become tools of some collectivist national agreement shaped by their sentimentalised compassion and personal hurt.
Defence is impossible because our privilege is oppressive by definition, so anything that reduces that self-evident oppression is good. It is morally therapeutic to discuss one’s perceived and self-defining mental health issues in public.
The new egocentric religion takes it for granted that institutional and personal bias are enforced by tradition and relieved by the compassion of Wokery. The privileged must admit their privilege, practice self-criticism, and censor their thought and speech daily.
Failure to discipline one’s tongue or pen is so serious that the perpetrator must be cancelled. The Wokerati cannot admit even the suggestion of dissent because their foundation is found only in self-assertion. One crack, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, and the light gets in.
The Wokerati, like their Pharisee forerunners, are blind to the obvious. Their concept of group identity destroys the individuality of everyone. You are your race, your sexual identity, or your transgender identity. The old Christian beliefs of sin and salvation, grace and redemption are obliterated. I am who I am, was, or want to be. And that’s the end to it.
So we have returned to a kind of racism worse than that before the 1960s. Everyone is identified by the group that Woke dogma assigns for them. Prescribed group identity overwhelms character; image submerges virtue. Martin Luther Jr’s dream was really a nightmare.
So it is compulsory to identify everyone by the group to which they claim to belong. Justice is buried and over her grave all the little gods dance.
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