Midweek Musings on the Woke Mind Virus

Whose idea was this, anyway

Michel Foucault is the Godfather of Woke

And we should out him for what he was, and trigger warning, he’s ugly though he was a dandy who dressed well and shaved his impressive head.

I apologize, in the best Canadian fashion:

I was going to talk more about the topic of Beauty in everyday life as exemplified by the laconic Martijn Doolaard and the verbose Robert Pirsig, and eventually, I will get back to them; they are good people, unlike Foucault.

This entire piece is the result of my morning scroll through the headlines.

Which came to a screeching halt (me shouting into my living room) with two articles about the continuing harm of the Woke mind Virus. One was at The National Post, a Canadian publication, and the other was at The Spectator, a British version.

At the Post, the cover story was about how it is now official that the entire Toronto education system exists solely to ‘perpetuate white supremacy’, and that race should be the first thing anyone notices about a student. And that, finally, the most urgent need is to teach the kiddies that colonialism must be snuffed out. Teachers must engage with students based on their ‘identity group’. This and so much more is in a document distributed to 20,000 Toronto area schoolteachers and the author is an outfit called the TDSB Equity, Anti-Racism and Anti-Opression Department. Yep, it’s the School Board! I have never been fond of these bureaucrats, and they have just given me another reason to dislike them.

https://www.tdsb.on.ca/About-Us/Equity-Anti-Racism-and-Anti-Oppression/Voices-Jahbarie

The second piece is by Mary Wakefield, about trans-men who are now officially and ‘scientifically’ enabled to produce breast milk and how that same milk might be even better than the natural kind.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/when-trans-rights-trump-babies-rights/

That it’s a complicated lie and that nobody seems overly concerned about the actual effects on infant health is what makes Wakefield mad. That this nursing fetish is allowed to go mainstream on the BBC no less shows how far we have drifted into an actual world of madness that refuses to abide by something we used to respect: truth and reality, she says. I agree. All this gibberish from Wokeland has made me so furious that I’m in the mood to point fingers. It bothers me that we can’t seem to get a grip on what’s ailing us. For far too many people, ‘Woke’ is like pornography, hard to define but you know it when you see it. What is needed is a short, brutal outing of the roots of this cultural choke weed and a good reason to rip it out, once and for all. So here we go.

J’accuse Michel Foucault, French historian, philosopher, and incidentally, pederast. More on that later. It was he who infected western intellectuals and eventually, the entire culture, with the Woke Virus. In educated circles he is a towering figure. But he is not generally fingered as the Godfather of Woke by the rest of us, and I admit, I haven’t read him, only read about him. But that’s quite enough. It is his doing that large sections of the educated elite now believes that sex is a ‘construct’, in other words, something we can change at will. This has had terrible, real life consequences.

It’s past time to clean up this rotten misbegotten mindset. The roots of the Woke Cult go back some 80+ years, to French intellectuals, all of them Marxists to varying degrees, proving that we should be more careful who we listen to during the next round of intellectual ferment. Their ideas somehow escaped the ivory towers in which they were conceived and the name of Michel Foucault along with Derrida and others, comes up all the time. Among them, MF has few equals. He is in fact, infamous and enjoyed a very high public profile, and his debates with Chomsky are still on Youtube.

You can listen to all this or look up his bio and be none the wiser, so let’s get straight to what he is known for. Two of his most strange yet influential ideas are this:

One, he argued that there is no such thing as ‘human nature’ since humans are both objects in the real world buffeted on all sides by environmental necessity as well a subjects who can choose to develop their minds and character in any way they see fit, and since that was a perplexing and impossible situation, no humans with an actual inner life and free will ever existed. Period. He simply asserted that because we are such paradoxical creatures, we couldn’t exist. Even stranger, a majority of the highbrowed luminaries believed him. Apparently F had never heard of the Bible, novels, poetry, or music, any one of which would have shown him that humans do in fact have a sense of their individuality, express it in various ways and also are in the grip of forces over which they don’t have much control. That it is in fact our very contrarian and paradoxical nature that makes us so interesting as well as troubling.

That such an assertion would have enormous negative downstream consequences need hardly be pointed out. Because if we do not actually have a fairly consistent human nature, we are nothing but a mass of confusing reactions to outside forces, resulting in claims such as ‘men can get pregnant and nurse babies’ and bafflement as to what a ‘woman’ might be. Furthermore, if there is no human at the centre of our existence at all, there is nothing but nihilism and meaninglessness left.  

The second idea, as a corollary of this one, the quasi- Marxist assertion that all societies are but groups struggling for power over each other, makes perfect sense. Foucault proclaimed that humans are either oppressors or oppressed, and that is the entire history of humanity in an ugly nutshell. So much for leaving Marxism behind; he never really did.  Viewing history as an endless struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed is an essentially Marxist idea. The will to power is the only ‘value’ Foucault admits into this bizarre panopticon of history. He also linked this power-mad urge to the acquisition and wielding of knowledge, resulting in something known as power/knowledge. Because according to him, all knowledge is just a control mechanism. That’s all it’s good for, in Foucault’s mind. Hence the demented but quite ‘rational’ conclusions reached by the Toronto School Board. 

This reminds me strongly of Ian McGilchrist’s definition of the left brain as power-mad and in love with control. How it always keeps going in the same direction until nothing makes any sense and the original idea is completely reversed. McGilschrist calls this the convergence of opposites. Foucault, never having studied neuroscience or McGilchrist, just wasn’t aware of how much he was in thrall to the self-righteous, analytical left brain that led him—and all of us— down the garden path into the dystopia that we call life today.

As Douglas Murray points out, ‘Foucault’s obsessive analysis of everything through a quasi-Marxist lens of power relations diminished almost everything in society into a transactional punitive and meaningless dystopia’.

I should add that these nihilistic ideas are elaborate models that only exist in the mind of Foucault. Our error was to take them at face value. Instead of seeing them for what they are; castles in the mind with a tenuous relationship to the Real. Instead, we fell for the left brain’s insistence that it knows best and is always correct. We’re now faced with an intellectual garden so overrun with Woke choke weed that we can barely see the flowers that used to flourish there. Does anyone read Voltaire’s Candide or Goethe’s Faust anymore? Better still, can we point at any current authors of that ilk? In a word, no. The wealth and richness of Western Civ is under attack, but it is still with us. The question is though for how long?

Foucault is still one of the most read and quoted authors of the twentieth century and he continues to enjoy a global reputation as a brilliant, if somewhat eccentric mind. Fine. But what about my claim that he was a known pederast, who was in the habit of buying young boys for his sexual gratification while living in Tunis, where he was a professor during the early sixties? So says Douglas Murray, who outs him though he admits that he doesn’t like doing it. In The War on the West, on page 181, he says:

In March 2021, a most interesting fact emerged about the personal life of Foucault. During an interview, his fellow philosopher Guy Sorman revealed a fact that had long been rumored, Sorman revealed that in the late 1950’s, when Foucault was living near Tunis, Foucault would have sex with the local children. Sorman said that on a visit to Sidid Bou Said, near Tunis, he witnessed young children running after F asking him for the money offered other children before raping them. According to Sorman, these boys of eight, nine or ten years of age would have money thrown at them by F, who would arrange to meet them late night ‘at the usual place’. The usual place turned out to be the local cemetery…

Murray adds that Foucault also once signed a letter recommending the age of consent in his country be lowered to twelve.

Perhaps it’s time to put Foucault under the lens of the right brain and see him for what he truly is: one of those exceptionally brilliant French thinkers who got lost in the endless, sterile game of intellectual derivatives that is ripping Western Civ apart.  We followed him there. We continue to do it, allowing it to fester. And that’s on us.