“Woke” the word is on everyone's lips. Meaning "awake" in English, it designates a political current that intends to deconstruct the foundations of Western society, perceived as oppressive. This ideological current has often been analyzed from the angle of its content. But it is advisable to make a sociological and psychological analysis, even psychiatric one. Indeed, political ideologies - especially the most radical - are above all a psychological sensitivity. Nazism thus corresponds to the paranoid and authoritarian whiff of a German society disoriented by too rapid industrialization, galloping demography, the decline of religious beliefs, the defeat of 1918 and an economic crisis of incredible violence. So let's try to understand the psychic logic of wokism.
Being labeled "awake" brings the cult member immense narcissistic satisfaction, based on total contempt for the rest of humanity.
Jean-Loup Bonnamy
Let's start at the beginning, that is to say with the word. One thing that is hardly ever noticed is that the term "woke" (or its equivalents in other languages) is first and foremost an integral part of the vocabulary of religious sects. Many "new age" sects indeed divide the world in two: on the one hand, the few "awakened" members of the sect, who would see reality as it is, and on the other the rest of the world. humanity, asleep and unconscious. Joining the sect is seen as a process of "awakening", "awakening", "ascension". To be qualified as “awake” thus allows to bring to the member of the sect an immense narcissistic satisfaction, based on a total contempt for the rest of humanity. From then on, the follower has no need for criticism sincethey emanate from blind people who have understood nothing. There is nothing fortuitous about this semantic parallelism between political Wokism and sects: even if they do not speak of the same object, Wokism and sects share many traits in common: messianism, obsessions, difficulties in communicating with someone else. 'outside the movement, pride in belonging to the group and contempt for all those who are not part of it, decline of critical thinking, frequent internal purges, spirit of seriousness, desire for purity, aggressiveness ... Wokism is a political sect .difficulty communicating with someone outside the movement, pride in belonging to the group and contempt for those outside it, decline in critical thinking, frequent internal purges, seriousness, desire for purity, aggressiveness ... Wokism is a political sect.difficulty communicating with someone outside the movement, pride in belonging to the group and contempt for those outside it, decline in critical thinking, frequent internal purges, seriousness, desire for purity, aggressiveness ... Wokism is a political sect.
In terms of group psychology, the mechanisms at work in Wokism are very banal. Thus the analogy between Wokism and the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China is striking: youthism, activist minority which takes control, humiliation of teachers forced to make their self-criticism by students, iconoclastic impulse which pushes to destroy the past, history , statues, images, internal purges ... Understanding the functioning of sects or the great delirium that was the Chinese Cultural Revolution is therefore a good entry point to understand the psychology of Wokism, because it is the same type of phenomena. More distantly, wokism recalls the gesture of Brother Jérôme Savonarola, a monk who established a theocratic dictatorship in Florence at the end of the 15th century,burning books and works of art on immense "pyres of vanities". The great painter Botticelli burned his paintings there, like a vulgar American academic, forced to castigate himself by his woke students.
Then, even if the woke discourse is spreading in American society, its starting point and its epicenter remain the universities. However, since its birth, the university world has always been a place of effervescence and turmoil. Indeed, universities are a place where one brings together young people - with all that that implies of radicalism, of excitement, of idealism and inexperience, inexperience which makes it impossible to grasp the nuances and the complexities of the life. These young students are generally idle and turned towards intellectual activities. And, as George Orwell wrote,
"intellectuals are inclined to totalitarianism much more than ordinary people"
, because of their thirst for the absolute, their spirit of system and their taste for abstraction. Already in 1229, a strike of teachers and students, in a fight against the bishop of Paris and the queen, paralyzed the University of Paris for two years. In the 15th century, the Sorbonne, frequented by François Villon, poet and delinquent, was a place of great agitation. The May-1968 crisis started at the universities (notably at Nanterre and the Sorbonne) and on May 14, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou, who had understood everything, declared:
"I see no precedent in our history until this period. the 15th century was in despair, when the structures of the Middle Ages collapsed and where, already, students revolted at the Sorbonne ”
. Let us not forget either the now exorbitant cost of university enrollment in American faculties. To study at the mediocre Evergreen University, temple of Wokism, you have to spend $ 7,500 (and even 21,000 if you come from another state), to which is added 9,000 dollars for boarding school. The figure even climbs to $ 34,000 for Yale. Student loan debt is $ 1.6 trillion. The student has therefore become a customer who must be satisfied. This explains the degree of anxiety and susceptibility of American students and their ease of feeling offended, as well as the readiness of university directors to give in to the pressures and demands of Wokism.
The idea of starting from zero is therefore the founding element of the American imagination: it is found [...] with the affirmation that everything could be deconstructed and rebuilt at will (including its genre) ...
Jean-Loup Bonnamy
Finally, wokism is deeply rooted in the long history and collective unconscious of the United States. In the 17th century, Puritan Protestants left England to flee religious persecution. They saw in America an immense nature virgin of any historical heritage, a clean slate, a new Eden, where they could flee the sins of old Europe. Their religious ideology and the repression they had to endure already predisposed them to paranoia, feelings of insecurity, fanaticism and sectarianism. The idea of starting from zero is therefore the founding element of the American imagination: it is found both in business with the model of the self-made man and in wokism with theassertion that everything could be deconstructed and reconstructed at will (including its genre) or cancel culture. Like Guillaume Bigot's analysis,
"The woke replay the epic of the founding fathers of America and intend to abolish the hated past to found a new land of purity"
. This Protestant Puritanism nourishes an obsession with evil, fault, sin and guilt. It is a question of flushing out the evil at home and at the other, thanks to a real hysterical and paranoid inquisition. As Alexandre Devecchio and Guillaume Bigot write, American Wokism is
“the expression of the old prudish fund inherited from the WASPs. You should read Tocqueville's pages on the contribution of religious communities to the American spirit. The pettiness or resentment expressed by the claims of gays, supporters of gender theory or black pride is prophetically described. "
To read alsohttps: //etudiant.lefigaro.fr/article/selon-jean-michel-blanquer-le-wokisme-est-une-forme-d-obscurantisme_7feb596a-357b-11ec-b432-550d95ffe968/
This sin-stalking phenomenon was manifested in the famous Salem Witch Trial where fourteen women and six men were executed for being believed to be engaged in witchcraft (1693). This tragic episode was the result of a collective delirium where religious extremism, isolation of small communities, hallucinations, false accusations and procedural errors were mixed. In the 1950s, it was with McCarthyism that the American Puritan paranoia reappeared. The parallelism between the McCarthyite psychosis and the witches of Salem had escaped no one since there was talk of a "witch hunt" and Arthur Miller wrote a play called The witches of Salem to actually denounce McCarthyism. The summary that thehistorian Pierre Milza makes McCarthyism seems written for current wokism and cancel culture:
"The witch hunt is in full swing, striking thousands of officials, politicians, journalists, personalities belonging to the world of the arts, letters, and entertainment, driven to confess or to denounce their colleagues, often dismissed from their functions or forced into unemployment by registration on blacklists, sometimes in exile (Charlie Chaplin, Jules Dassin, father of Joe Dassin, Losey). ”
Wokism is a far-left McCarthyism. After the trauma of September 11, 2001, it was towards terrorism and the Muslim Middle East that the American tendency towards paranoia was directed, with liberticidal laws (Patriot Act, etc.), delirious wars and a discourse on "l 'Axis of Evil'. But the failure of military interventions sparked a loathing for military adventurism in the Middle East and shifted American paranoia towards wokism and debates related to race and gender issues. Today, the woke hunt down supposed forms of racism or homophobia with the same fierceness that their ancestors hunted down witches, seeking to flush out evil deep within human beings, even in their thoughts.
The fear of aggression, the community withdrawal into oneself, the desire for isolation and separation, the constitution of closed and autistic enclaves are by no means the monopoly of the woke, but are at the heart of the American mentality.
Jean-Loup Bonnamy
In addition, the United States is haunted by violence and feelings of insecurity. Their obsession with evil and violence translates well into their film production, especially in their taste for horror film. For three centuries, families lived there in anguish of an Indian attack (a problem that was resolved by mass extermination). And it is questionable whether the monster or the killer of horror movies is not just an update of the figure of the Indian. Today, the homicide rate per 100,000 population is 5.4 in the United States. It is more than in Pakistan or in Angola and in France, it is 1.5. As Guillaume Perrault writes,
“We drive carefully in the United States. Because in the event of an accident and a dispute between two motorists, each one knows the possibility that the stranger in front of you pulls out an assault rifle to settle the dispute, or at least take you to conciliation. The possibility of violence is there, present in the background. The citizens have integrated it. ”
Woke activists are not immune to this collective feeling of anxiety and insecurity. They see “micro-aggressions” everywhere and want to constitute “safe spaces”, non-mixed security spaces where women would find themselves among themselves, gays among themselves, blacks among themselves… sheltered from any harm. sexist, homophobic or racist assault. It seems delusional to us.
But the "safe space" is only the leftist political equivalent of the "panic room" (fortified rooms that many Americans have built at home to take refuge there in the event of a hostile intrusion into their home) or “Gated communities” (closed and secure American residential neighborhoods for the rich). And opposite these “gated communities” stand Indian reserves or black ghettos, in which we are born, we live and we die. The "safe-space" of the woke is also the equivalent of the atomic bunkers that American families had built themselves at the bottom of their gardens during the 1950s and 1960s in the event of a nuclear war with the USSR or shelters equipped with weapons. and food, which activists of the American extreme right-wing survivalist are building today. Likewise,American military bases (in Afghanistan, Iraq, but even on American soil) are real cities, independent entrenched camps, unrelated to the local population, on the model of the forts built on Indian soil. The fear of aggression, the community withdrawal into oneself, the desire for isolation and separation (perceived as remedies for insecurity), the constitution of closed and autistic enclaves are by no means the monopoly of the woke, but are at the heart of the American mentality. Wokism only takes over, in a militant and exacerbated manner, this common matrix.The fear of aggression, the community withdrawal into oneself, the desire for isolation and separation (perceived as remedies for insecurity), the constitution of closed and autistic enclaves are by no means the monopoly of the woke, but are at the heart of the American mentality. Wokism only takes over, in a militant and exacerbated manner, this common matrix.The fear of aggression, the community withdrawal into oneself, the desire for isolation and separation (seen as remedies for insecurity), the constitution of closed and autistic enclaves are by no means the monopoly of the woke, but are at the heart of the American mentality. Wokism only takes over, in a militant and exacerbated manner, this common matrix.
There are two favorite subjects that neurotically obsess American Puritanism: gender and race. However, these are two subjects that the woke talk about all the time. This obsession with race has long manifested itself in deep racism (Ku Klux Klan, segregation…). But now, this same racialist obsession is also manifested through the discourse of the woke. So-called woke anti-racism is itself racialist, and even racist. By activating for non-mixing, wokism takes up the logic of the Ku Klux Klan and the partisans of Segregation (who are nevertheless supposed to be its enemies and situated at the opposite end of the political spectrum). Racist segregation and single-sex woke work the same in practice (separate whites and blacks) and have the same psychological roots: obsession with race,incomprehension in the face of otherness linked to a feeling of insecurity (the other is necessarily a threat) ...
We are also surprised by the woke delusions on sexuality and gender, but they are the exact counterpart of the delusions of the American religious right. In California in the early 1980s, godly mothers imagined that textbooks were filled with pornographic images placed there by Democrats. So they set about examining all the textbooks in detail under a microscope, and eventually they found tiny subliminal images of a sexual nature (which they were the only ones to see). They obtained the withdrawal of the textbooks. Recently, a woman did thanks to a video where she explained that she would campaign against teachers who force her children to wear masks and that she will take action to ensure thatthey are made redundant and never find a job again. This hysterical right-wing activist practices a form of cancel culture that has nothing to envy to the totalitarian uses of Wokism.
To read also Eugenie Bastié: "Wokism, product of the unarmed soul"
Wokism is an ideological fever linked to developments in American Protestantism. Indeed, the large traditional Protestant churches have seen their influence recede, leaving individuals on their own and in metaphysical crisis, in search of meaning. Some responded to this decline by converting to Catholicism, many by opting for evangelical neo-Protestantism (much more demonstrative than the old Calvinism), still others, among the youngest, by switching to Wokism. Wokism takes up the matrix of Protestantism but secularizes it and hysterizes it. He inherits from the protesting software the obsession with purity, sin, guilt. As the academic Joseph Bottum said in a fascinating interview with Le Figaro:
“When I tell my students that they are the heirs of their Protestant grandparents, they are offended. But they have exactly the same moralizing approach and the same heightened sense of their importance, the same condescension and the same exasperating and ridiculous sense of superiority, as the Puritan Protestants. There are dozens of examples of religiosity visible in woke behavior: they lie on the floor facing the floor and moan, like consecrated priests. They held a ceremony in Portland where they washed the feet of black people to show their repentance for the white guilt. They kneel down. All this without knowing that it is religious! ”
Does this mean that Wokism, a typically American phenomenon, will fail to take root in France?
Not necessarily.
As Tocqueville, Georges Duhamel and Bernanos predicted, one of the major trends of our time is the Americanization of the world.
Fast food restaurants are a typically American invention: you can't understand them if you forget that they come from the United States.
However, they abound today in France.
If we do not operate our essential moral and intellectual recovery, then the same will be true of wokism.