Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

There's a difference between the upper strata of society rediscovering Puritanism and a counterrevolution. Revolutions require means to enforce norms. If we have seen one thing it is that there is no means any more by which elite can force a discourse on the population at large.

In the same sense how old fashioned aristocrats used to live by suffocating norms I guess we now get the techbro version of the same thing but ordinary people will not throw Tinder away because Ivy league graduates adopt the values of Victorian England.

Revolutions always require a certain amount of energy and momentum in society which we don't have. You can see it with the other sort of old-fashioned ruling class attitudes that even progressive, liberal, elites have rediscovered. Veganism, exercise, obsession with health etc, it hasn't really percolated down much.

Case in point, the author of the article who I happen to follow on twitter also just retweeted this:

https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedNews/status/1395792792945844227?...

The elites have been obsessed with race and the new religion of wokeism, which has certainly percolated down.

> Veganism, exercise, obsession with health etc, it hasn't really percolated down much.

They aren't pushing exercise and health, just the opposite. "Stay inside. Obesity is beautiful. Drink coca cola."

>The elites have been obsessed with race and the new religion of wokeism, which has certainly percolated down.

"Wokeism" isn't a religion, it isn't new and it "percolated" up from Black activism to white liberalism to the elites, not down.

Yea, but then it become a religion. It has all the features except for redemption.

"John McWhorter: The Neoracists": https://www.persuasion.community/p/john-mcwhorter-the-neorac...

"The New Religion Of Anti-Racism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPHUu9sAGKo

"Wokeness: old religion in a new bottle": https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/14/wokeness-old-religi...

The elites drink Kale Juice, are decidedly non-obese, and have personal trainers. That this behavior coexists with a message of body positivity proves the point, there is no one single culture.

'Wokeism' (or at least significant parts of it) is, contrary to popular opinion, not an elite project. The reason why it has actual pull in society is because it to a large degree comes out of fairly old-school, activist organizing.

Yes, they do one thing, and say another. They're not telling their own kids that being obese is beautiful and healthy. That message is for the poors.

> 'Wokeism' (or at least significant parts of it) is, contrary to popular opinion, not an elite project. The reason why it has actual pull in society is because it to a large degree comes out of fairly old-school, activist organizing.

I think it's both, and the activist aspect is why it's so effective and embraced by the Twitter slacktivist crowd.

Identity politics was pushed by the elite to divide the underclass into small pieces. After Occupy Wall Street, they shifted the national discussion and focus away from class to identity.

"percolated down"? Since when have the elites been interested in racial equity? By elites, we're talking about the 1% or even the .01%.

There are about a hundred different ways the elite can force a discourse. Control over regulation, cultural osmosis via mass media, financial influence, etc..

I think you might be impressed just how much cultural power there is that can be wielded.

We don't live in the age of mass media any more, that's the point. In our postmodern age where everyone lives in their own internet sphere regulation and 'mass anything' doesn't matter.

You can like or it dislike it, but there is no one single reality any more where an elite of educated gentlemen sits in a room and decides what society looks like. This is why there can be no revolution, or counter-revolution. That finance and polite society do not manage discourse any more should have become clear in 2016.

As Bruno Macaes pointed out in a great recent piece[1], the world we are in now resembles Westworld theme parks. The elite can go to the Victorian park, and everyone else goes to the saloon. But this is truly virtual, we're not actually rolling the sexual revolution back.

[1]https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/what-com...

We definitely don't live in a world that transcended mass media.

We live in a world of mass recommender systems. That can be tweaked any way that those programming them want and lead to massive knock-on consequences on the rest of culture and encodes those choices in the minds of creators and consumers alike.

Trump was not that far from the elite status-quo. He had 50% of the political elite on his side, more or less, and didn't do much against finance and polite society itself. Not even a fraction of what could have been used to stop him actually was used to stop him.

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