I figure I know pretty much everything there is to know. The last time I was wrong about anything was June 1997. I predicted Mike Tyson would bite off Evander Holyfield’s ear in the 4th round of their prize fight in Las Vegas. I got it wrong. It happened in the 3rd round. Since then I have been on a 24-year run of righteous rightness. If y’all want to contact me and have me unlock any of the universe’s mysteries, you can reach me through my lawyer, Michael Avenatti.
Lately, I have been in a state of despair as I have discovered that there is something I don’t understand! If you were to ask me, “Big Rob, Smartest Man in the Universe, please explain to me the psychology of wokeness?,” I could not give you a concrete answer. My pride is very much wounded. Wokeness to me, is much like Churchill’s explanation of Russia, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”
I am a creature of the Aristotelean, Western mind. Furthermore, if things do not work with Teutonic efficiency and order, it upsets me, in fact it drives me crazy, and I then become obsessed with how to fix that which obsesses me. I use empirical evidence to drill down and get to the truth of a particular issue, and then apply reason and logic to solve the problem. Thus, I “think” through a problem. How I “feel” about an issue is not relevant. Like everyone else, I have emotions, but the left side of my brain swats emotion across the room when emotion gets in the way of truth. I have the mind of a political conservative. The mere fact that I am so frustrated about understanding what makes the loony left so loony is a prima facie example of why I am not some Haight-Ashbury, hacky sack playing, pot smoking freak. Remember the scene in Dirty Harry when he points the 44 Magnum at the punk, and at the end the punk says, “I just gots to know!” Well, “I just gots to know.” It drives me crazy not to understand the illogic, indeed the insanity of woke culture.
I have been rolling all this over in my mind for months. If I was tasked with writing the Catechism for the Book of Woke, the opening paragraph might go something like this:
“I am a loser and hate my life. All the dysfunction in my life is someone else’s fault. Therefore, in order to not think about how I might address my own problems, I will virtue signal to the world. This will make me feel better about myself. It will feel good to blame others, especially those rich conservatives who seem to be happy and successful (I hate them).”
I find the phenomenon of Rich White Woman Wokeness particularly disturbing, mostly because I feel so sorry for my buds living with this particular form of mental disease. This catechism might read:
“My white male father worked his ass off and sent me to Madeira and my sister to Miss Porters (elite girls boarding schools). Despite having every creature comfort possible and loving parents, my childhood sucked. Dad said something to me when I was 11 that hurt my feelings, and he would not pay to have an ice sculpture at my debutante party. I don’t have much purpose in life, other than to complain to my husband and virtue signal on Facebook. My neighbor’s husband bought her a new Range Rover, but mine is three years old. I ate a box of jelly donuts this morning. I think it will make me feel better to hold up a “White Male Privilege Sucks” sign at a Black Lives Matter protest.”
It would be fun to write the Woke Catechism for Episcopalian clergy, but I must stay focused.
I can’t exactly put my finger on what makes people woke, but it definitely has something to do with anger and jealousy.
It also has something to do with insecurity and longing to be accepted as “part of a group.” I live in a tony, historic neighborhood with old houses and cobblestone streets and alleys. Liberals love these types of neighborhoods because they can walk to “market” (liberals love to say things like “market,” instead of grocery store) and carry their own re-usable shopping bags (this makes them look cool to their liberal neighbors). There is a huge public university nearby thought to be one of the top undergraduate and graduate art schools in the nation. Thus, there are a lot of earthy “I want to save the planet by not showering types” walking around. Black clothing, nose rings, purple hair and hideous tattoos are the fashion norm for this particular “culture.” Interesting, none of the men of the artsy set are wearing Brooks Brothers shirts and nice slacks; none of the women are wearing pastel sun dresses. One would think that in a “free thinking” artist community, there might be true diversity in clothing and appearance. There appears to be none. What’s more troubling is how the tattoos and face jewelry have permanently scarred their bodies. Many have these huge holes in their elongated earlobes. It is as though a giant Ugly Convention is in town all the time. All of this illustrates, the extraordinary lengths some people will go to feel “part of an accepted group.”
The faculty who live in my hood are not quite as ugly. The men look like Druids, long white hair and beards, but generally don’t have hammer and sickle tattoos on their foreheads like the students. The women wear peasant dresses and don’t believe in hair washing or make up. Since they get paid 3 times more than they are worth (govt employees), they all have perfectly manicured lawns. Many have these stupid signs that say, “in this house, we believe that Black Lives Matter, Science is Real, Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, blah, blah.” But it is clear, they have no real interest in solving any problems associated with these signs. They think that their woke duty is to “feel,” not to “fix.” If they really cared about black people, they would be knocking on doors “in the hood” extolling the virtues of two parent families and urging black folks to quit killing each other. As far as science goes, these are the Einsteins who think there are more than two genders. And if women’s rights are human rights, wouldn’t they be mildly concerned about 50% of infanticide victims, a practice now legalized in a number of states? Thus, one has to conclude that these woke folks associate their “feelings” with some sort of exalted nobility but have no self-imposed duty to validate the veracity of their feelings to any kind of rationality.
So right now we can identify these elements of wokeness, 1) the need to unleash anger and blame others for one’s own inadequacies, 2) the need to assuage one’s inner self by virtue signaling, 3) the need to be part of a group and 4) the self-worth associated with “feelings,” even though their feelings are not grounded in any evidence or logic.
This leads me to think that wokeness is a form of narcissism. Why? All of these actions are about soothing oneself with no external duty to help others (or country) by getting to the root of a problem and fixing it.
Now, is there any science associated with this behavior? Can we pinpoint something demonstrably neurological with the disease of wokeness? Can we fix it and save America from this dreadful malady? We have established that virtue signaling is a mechanism that unhappy/dysfunctional people use. Virtue signaling assuages their inner turmoil, and as long as they can proclaim how virtuous they are, they feel no need to address their own dysfunction. Therefore, I theorize that each time they virtue signal, they get a dopamine hit. If anyone has ever had a loved one with an addiction problem, you probably know that dopamine is a chemical released in the medulla oblongata (the animalistic part of the brain) that keeps addicts “using” when they know they shouldn’t. For more information on the medulla oblongata see THE WATERBOY. Thus, every time the “wokester” gets a dopamine hit, it reinforces their belief in their own great virtue.
So, I must conclude that being woke is much like being an alcoholic. To support a loved one who went to rehab, I once went to a fancy rehab boot camp for a week to learn about addiction. I read a bunch of books. Alcoholics have low self-esteem, are highly sensitive, entitled and love to blame others for their problems. The characteristics are virtually the same as the woke virtue signalers.
Have you ever tried having a rational conversation with an alcoholic? It takes about 11 seconds before they blow their top and start calling you a NAZI, whereas it takes 9 seconds for a woke liberal to do so.
Until someone proves me wrong, I think my theory should be accepted science. You are welcome America.
