Woke and Weaponized Bureaucracy Pt. 2

How the woke us "Equity" to take over and weaponize bureaucracies and institutions.

Recently, the Center for Disease Control released a paper on it’s website that claimed that in the CDC should promote free housing, free broadband internet access, and affordable bussing.¹ The question that should immediately come to mind is “why is the CDC, which is supposed to be focused on healthcare and disease attempting to promote progressive policy goal concerning internet access and bussing?” Most of us would agree that the CDC should focus on health and allow the department of transportation to deal with things like bussing. So, why is the CDC engaging in advocacy for a progressive policy position in a totally different area?

This is an important thing to study if we wish to understand how woke activists weaponize institutions and bureaucracies in the name of wokeness (AKA Critical Social Justice).

The answer is going to rest on a combination of how Critical Social Justice (AKA “WOKENESS”) thinks about “systems” and “systemic power,” and how they define “equity.” Once you understand how wokeness thinks about systemic power and equity, you will understand why they think it is not just appropriate, but actually necessary for the CDC to engage in progressive policy advocacy. Many things that Critical Social Justice does appear to make no sense to the average person, but once you understand how Critical Social Justice activists see the world you will see that there actually is a method to their madness, and a strangely consistent logic to what they are doing.

So let’s tackle the issue of what the woke mean by “systemic power.”

First lets talk about what they mean by “systemic.”

The woke see society as a system, or set of systems. You might think of it as a large systems comprised of smaller systems. These systems include institutions, groups, families, paradigms, social conventions, morals, values, norms, the economy, housing, transportation, the military, social expectations, discourses and so fourth. On woke theory, everything that exists in society is either a part of these systems or is produced, created, and maintained by them. So when the Critical Social Justice activists talks about “systems” they are talking about all the social elements of society which structure society. This means that they analysis of every social phenomena that the woke do is about how various social phenomena interact with these systems.

For example, when a woke person does an analysis of the idea of truth, they do not try to get clear about how to make sure our beliefs match the world, they are doing an analysis of the role that truth play in society. What matters to the woke is the roles that things play in the system (or systems) and the way that those roles interact with POWER.

With that said, let’s now talk about what the woke mean when they talk about “power.”

One of the central concerns of wokeness is social power. Wokeness is, above all else, obsessed to the point of distraction with who has power. Wokeness thinks power is the thing which primarily mediates relationships and that power is the fundamental thing that governs all social interactions.

Let’s use an example to clarify.

Suppose a group of people are trying to decide which resteraunt they want to eat at. Each persons tates which restaurant they think would be best and why, and then the group decides. Most of us would think this is just a group of people trying to decide what to eat, and they are mediating the question fairly by making a group decision in an informal but fair way. Wokeness on the other hand would see this very differently. Wokenss would say that what is going on beneath the surface is a battle of will that is being fought out according to the rules of informal social debate. The woke view of the world would say that each person in the group is attempting to use various social tools in order to influence the rest of the group to go along with their own idea. As such, what is really happening is that each person is trying to get their own way, and the person that can convince everyone else to pick their restaurant is the person who has the most influence, and therefore power.

To make matters worse, following the philosophy of Michael Foucault, Critical Social Justice has come to believe that claims about what is true are in fact also loaded with questions, concerns, and issues regarding power. According to Critical Social Justice labeling a belief as “true” elevates that belief to  higher social status, and privileges that belief over and above other beliefs. Because people want to act according to beliefs that are true, the people who get to decide which beliefs a society thinks are true has a tremendous amount of power, and such a person will likely decide which beliefs are true according to their own interests.

According to woke theory everything is like this. Such things as facts, science, standards, norms, rules, decisions, law, legislation, policy, and so on are not neutral matters we decide on the basis of what is true. Instead, what is true is decided by people who have the power to decide what is true and those decisions are warped by the biases and interests of those who decide what is true.  The fundamental questions the a woke activists asks about everything are “who has the power to decide, whose interests are served, and who benefits.” The result of all of this is that wokeness thinks that at the end of the day everything rules, norms, facts, science, law, policy, **MERIT** and everything else is warped by jockeying for social power, and what really matter is who has power, who wields power, whose interests are served, and who benefits.

Taken together, we can now see that when the Critical Social Justice activist talks about systemic power, what they are talking about is the various ways in which society is built, and how the structuring of society allows for the creation, allocation, validation, and legitimization of the use of power.

The primary concern of wokeness is not finding out what is true, right, good, useful, helpful, beautiful, moral, etc, and trying to use that to make the world better. Rather, the chief end of wokeness is the redistribution of power within society. What the woke want is to redistribute money, resources, influence, prestige, clout, and power in order to “level the playing-field.”

However, it is not enough (according to wokeness) to give everyone equal opportunity because even if we hand out equal opportunities, the systems which make up society are designed to ensure that the straight white males always have an advantage. As such, what the Critical Social Justice activist is after is EQUITY: a redistribution of shares in society such that everyone has and equal share in everything because that is only way to ensure everyone has the same amount of power. What this means is that in practice the Critical Social Justice activist wants to ensure equal OUTCOMES between groups because that is the only way to ensure that power is equally and evenly distributed.

Now, the woke see everything in terms of systems, it thinks that nearly all of the major problems in society are the product of the way that the systems of society are built and how they interact with one another. Further, because the chief end of wokeness is the redistribution of power the only way to fix these systems it to completely re-order, reconfigure, and rebuild them so that they produce equal outcomes.

So how does this explain why the CDC is trying to get people access to internet, bussing, and housing?

Well, when the woke analyze healthcare they analyze it as a system, and how it relates to all the other systems in society. What this means is that they want to rebuild the healthcare system, including the CDC, so that it is directed toward equal outcomes. However, because they analysis is systemic that means it relates to ALL the systems in society. As such, in order to fix the healthcare system and create truly equal outcomes, all the other systems in society (the economy, educations, housing, transportation, etc) also need to be fixed by being rebuilt in order to attain equal outcomes. This turns out to mean that in order for the CD to be doing its job, it has to look at how the other systems might interact with the healthcare system, and advocate for rebuilding those other systems so that those other systems are also directed toward equal outcomes.

The result of this is that when the woke ideologically capture an institution they always redirect the resources of that institution away from its original mission and attempting to use that institution to fix inequality by advocating for equity in all of society. Further, they will end up using the credibility of that institution to launder the ideas of Critical Social Justice to give them legitimacy. Practically, this means that they hollow out institutions and then use the prestige, validity, clout, influence and credibility of these institutions to advance Critical Social Justice instead of doing what the institution was designed to do.

This is how the CDC ends up being used as a vehicle to advocate for affordable broadband internet.

What we see here is that the major Achilles heel of Critical Social Justice is that it does all its analysis through the lens of systemic power. This prevents it from being able to fix easily fixable problem that can be observed and fixed through other means. Further, because Critical Social Justice uses institutions to advocate for its own ideas, views, policies, and preferences, Critical Social Justice is a major drain on the resources and effectiveness of any institution that it gets a foothold in.

These are not the only problem of Critical Social Justice. It’s approach to truth, reason, science, goodness, beauty, art, and meaning inevitably leads to relativism and nihilism. However, what I wanted to focus on here is what the woke mean when they talk about equity, and what they are trying to do when they say they want things to be equitable.

This concludes part two of my series on the woke and weaponized bureaucracy.

I hope you found this helpful.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/whatis/index.html (archived here: https://archive.ph/c0HuW)