Quite recently I read a Substack post by Michael Shellenberger in which he detailed his observation that the anglophone “Intelligence Community” is completely on board with the censorship zeal of Big Tech Wokeness:
while doing research related to the Twitter Files and the broader Censorship Industrial Complex, I kept coming across individuals who effortlessly combined the language of the Woke and the language of national security types, and indeed demanded censorship in the name of fighting racism.
An ominous sign; it’s one thing to take on the “Democrat” Party and the Woke college professoriat, another to take on them and the entire Deep State spy apparatus as one and the same. Yes, an ominous sign, but a very believable one, and one which led me to rethink the principles behind it.
Sure, one can invoke Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Un, and Bernie Sanders, but I think I’ve identified an idea much closer to home (home being “Western Civilization,”) an ideology which tends to get ignored these days: The Divine Right of Kings.
The idea is rather simple: the King (or whoever replaces him) gets to rule without interference or question because he was put there by God.
But in our era of Wokeness, we in the USA and most of the English-speaking world don’t have a King. We have a Government.
And although we profess in our era of Wokeness that everyone is allowed to believe in any God of his (their, her, zer) choice, we can’t attribute to that god, gods, or God the power to make the Government an absolute monarchy.
Unless…
Unless what?
Unless we have the divine rule of Social Justice.
And there you have it. The Woke reign of Social Justice has created the Divine Right of Kings 2.0.
No divinity and no kings, just Social Justice and the jackboot. Or in the terminology of Wokeness, DEI and ESG.
The idea of the Divine Right of Kings goes back a long time. In Roman times, the Emperor actually was a god, one among others. In ancient Persia, there was a similar principle called Kvaranah. There is an ancient Chinese principle called the Mandate of Heaven.
In the French Revolution’s National Assembly of 1789, those who sat to the right of the president were in favor of the Divine Right of Kings, and those who sat to the left were against it. (I myself am against that abominable idea of royal Divine Right, and therefore I call myself technically, not a right-winger nor a right-wing extremist, but a Lafayette Leftist.)
But if the aforegoing premise is accurate, that is, if the West’s spy apparatus and the Woke ideologues are in cahoots, how can I justify the idea conveyed in the title of this sub-series, the idea that Big Tech will eventually abandon Wokeness?
Well, maybe they won’t. And, in fact, maybe humanity will be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. Or by global warming. Or by another pandemic caused by a Gain-of-Function experiment gone bad. Or by an artificial intelligence taking over and deciding that humans are too ornery to leave around in the universe.
But let’s try to be a little optimistic. Why not? After all, we’re all going to die anyhow, so let’s make the best of life while we have it?
So I’ll give it a shot with this:
There is a basic incompatibility between Big Tech and any divine right of any King or King facsimile. Steve Jobs summed it up with his slogan, think outside the box.
And what is a government? Any government? Any King? Any version of DEI-ESG?
All of the above are the box.