We Must Stop Saying “The Left”

The true architects of wokeness are not what we commonly refer to as left-wing

We hear it every day. We hear it from our favourite podcasters; from the cultural heavyweights we follow on Twitter; from our red-pilled family members; even from nominally awake mainstream media personalities. Everybody chants it with such assuredness that it has assumed the form of received wisdom in much the same way as the establishment’s use of the term ‘far right’ to describe anything it wishes to discredit.

THE LEFT!

The Left! The Left! we chant in breathless outrage at the latest absurdity – be it the double standard that permitted BLM protests to break lockdown rules while anti lockdown protesters were arrested; or the gushing ‘expert’ worship that drove the drooling embrace of 2021’s mass human drug trial; or the evermore deranged permutations of the Trans cult which this last month in New Zealand saw the installation of kitty litter trays in school bathrooms for students who identify as furries.

It's the Left! we cry. Look what they’ve done now! It’s always the Left!

Among the great disservices we the common-sense commoners do ourselves daily in our good faith reading of the world, this is perhaps the worst.

It is not the Left. We have been fooled yet again.

Wokeness, identity politics, postmodern relativism… whatever you want to call the malaise that is engulfing our societies – none of it is being driven by what is colloquially known as the Left.

While it is true that these cultural forces have their origin in progressive left-wing philosophy and are staffed on the ground by foot soldiers who fit the popular definition of ‘leftist’, the true orchestrators look nothing like the ludicrous caricatures you and I imagine when we rant about the Left.

As I’ve previously discussed, the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist. And in naming ‘the Left’ as the villain in this, our Great War, we fall victim to his sleight of hand.

The true villain is as far from the stereotypical depiction of ‘left-wing’ as it is possible to go without coming full circle: he wears a $10,000 suit and flies on private jets; he travels in tinted motorcades with a security detail and a police escort; he owns mansions on every continent and high-end town houses in New York, London, and Paris; he has a stock portfolio worth a hundred times more than the accumulated earnings of your entire ancestral line; he passes international borders without a passport and is immune from prosecution; he may appear on television from time to time to dispense reassuring endorsements of the status quo, and can often be seen at A-list sporting and entertainment events.

The true villain and the architect of all that we misattribute to ‘the Left’, is the system itself; the establishment – what is mistakenly thought of by most as ‘capitalism’ but is in fact a more basic form of human organisation as old as civilisation itself: a gangster aristocracy.

Turn your eyes to the shining towers of whichever hub of global finance you dwell within and behold the so-called ‘Left’. There he sits, atop his gleaming throne of mirror glass, and as darkness falls, his neon insignia beams across the night, crisp enough against the obsidian backdrop to clearly discern from your leafy suburban remove… and never a pink dye-job or a Che Guevara T-shirt in sight – perhaps a tiny, glinting rainbow lapel pin, but no more, and this only in the month of June.

Yes, our enemy is not the hairy, soy-sipping campus agitator; he wears an Armani suit and drives a Bentley. Most of us know this, yet we continue referring indirectly to these lofty blue bloods as ‘the Left’.

I have spent the past three years deconditioning myself from this programmed response, for a program is what it is – a social engineering failsafe to direct populist ‘right wing’ attention away from the system itself and toward the ragtag clowns of the ‘far-left’. And the same method is used to hoodwink the regular socialist in the street – their gaze is directed toward us the ‘far right extremist antivax brigade’, and in our reactionism they find the requisite boogieman on whom to blame the delay of their envisioned progressive utopia.

These designations are arbitrary and meaningless. It is a farcical charade. Left and right do not exist anymore (if indeed they ever did) – there is only the system, those who serve it, and those who resist it.

As to exactly what and who the system itself is, I expect I will spend the rest of my life seeking these answers, but my working hypothesis involves a struggle between light and dark; good and evil, and that for a time in the back half of the last millennium, good was ascendant. But evil has since gained the high ground and, through a shapeshifting process of continual reinvention, established itself at every level within our societal and economic institutions. This we see most strikingly in the various iterations of Marxism over the past two centuries and, most recently, its wholesale adoption by the titans of global finance in the wake of 2008.

I am working on a novel (which I hope you may one day get to read) whose premise is this feverish adoption of wokeism by the corporate superstructure immediately following the Global Financial Crisis, and the way it has since worn wokeness as a skinsuit to shield it from populist ire. I also wrote about it in my essay I Support the Current Thing. This is not a unique position, but where I differ from many commentators is in my view that the system did not stumble upon wokeness; did not identify a popular grassroots movement, pick up the disguise and put it on – but that the system itself created wokeness.

It has been a slow process over decades which began first by subverting the popular culture, notably during the 1960s, and the societal changes this drove soon began reshaping governments – in Western Europe initially, in the former British colonies, and finally within the engine rooms of the liberal world order itself on either side of the Atlantic.

Now sixty years on, hard-left government policy is the absolute uniform norm across the West, even from so-called right-wing parties – look no further than the abomination that calls itself the British Conservative Party.

The credulous reader of The Economist or The Atlantic will tell you that this is simply emblematic of changing societal views, and stop being such a conspiracy theorist – politics is downstream from culture, didn’t you know?

Yes indeed, but who creates the culture?

We can argue about the genesis of the current system, and at what point it became irretrievably infected with Marxist ideas, but there is no question as to where the zeitgeist emanates. I could offer hundreds of sources, but few are as compelling as Larry Fink declaring that BlackRock intends to “force behaviours”. Click below to watch:

What we understand as leftism, in all its baffling lunacy, is simply the timeless will to collectivism which strips away the divinity of the individual and supplants God through the technocratic stratification of existence. It is a tool that has been employed in a variety of formats by gangster aristocracies throughout history, and in 2023 it is alive and thriving in the form of wokeness – and every day, I hear people who should know better refer to it as ‘the Left’.

It is not the Left, and we must stop walking into the trap that has been laid for us by referring to it as such.

Wokeness, and all its offshoots, as well as its underlying philosophy, are all creations of the system. They are weapons used by the machine to tribalise and divide the common people, to keep us fighting with one another, and our eyes averted from the leviathan in whose shadow we all scurry.

I’ve often expressed anger at the misnomer of ‘far right’ levelled at us by our tribal counterparts. So absurd is the label that we’ve learned to laugh it off, perhaps even embrace it in some cases. But as a cultural faction we are equally guilty of this linguistic sloppiness.

When we point and snarl and call them ‘the Left’, we commit the same cognitive omission, and we expend our wrath uselessly. 

When we hold up the degeneration of our society, the degradation of our values, and the corruption of our children and cry that the Left is to blame, we vent valuable energy in the wrong direction.

It is not the Left. It is the system. It is the establishment.

It is the banks, the news media, the entertainment industry, the government, the education system, even the church at this point.

It is not the Left, and we must stop referring to it as such.

We must accurately name the enemy, and at all times be precise in our terms of reference, for it is only when we know exactly what we are fighting that we can hope to be victorious.