Origins of wokeism

Man is a social animal. And no individual is perfect. And imperfections are relative. So you might 5’10’’ and be a tall guy among your friends. But among players of an NBA team, you may appear a dwarf.

So you have shades of perfections and imperfections in you, in a scale of 0 to 100. These imperfections may be in your physique, appearance, voice, mannerisms, conversational styles, depth of thinking, oration, mathematical skills, sports skills, etc.Some of these mannerisms can be improved at will. Some like sports skills can be improved depending on your age. Some like your height cannot be improved once you’ve stopped growing.

So lets go the first example of you being 5’10” and being surrounded by tall NBA players. A natural inferiority-complex will at once beset you. You now have two options: either you can increase your height (which may or may not be possible), or you can choose another sport/profession like soccer which doesn’t discriminate based on height. Or you still have a third option: that is to develop your own unique style of playing basketball (like Iverson did). The second and third options are the best for a happy life because there you accept your limitation without letting it define or confine your progress. However it requires effort, creativity and above all a stamina to rise above ephemeral failures again and again. Therefore many lily-livered people get stuck with the first option. This invites frustration and anxiety and depression which can have disastrous consequences. But it may also instead lead them to make certain wild and disastrous moves. Grip your seats tight because this might be frightening.

What if those short people undergo a patchy surgery to become tall? Or what if is those short people seek reservations for shorter people in basketball teams? Or what if they demand reducing the height of the basket on grounds of justice and equality? Or worse, what if those short people group together and radicalize and launch a movement for recognising the identity of shorter people, even convincing some taller guys to surgically stunt themselves and join the legion of these “proud dwarfs”? Each of these avenues is a free fall into the easy abyss of hell. If not held back, they would be willingly sucked into this blackhole of hell, because it gives them a false but sweet escape from an uneasy reality, alongwith a sense of hollow pride and identity. Its like Dr. Jekyll who got an escape in Mr. Hyde, but the result wasn’t pleasant. The result of the tour of these “hell-riders” won’t be pleasant either.

Although the above possibilities were a fiction of my mind, it may appear to you to be uncanningly similar to something going on in our world today: “wokeness”. I won’t explicitly spell out any group of people who fit tight into the description of the “hell-riders” above. But I would say that they fell into hell, and now they are bent upon justifying their position in order to avoid breaking down, just as Anakin Skywalker was so bent upon justifying the person of Darth Vader that he became a torchbearer of the dark side. No matter what their cult, every person who slips into hell starts their journey on the grease of adolescence. This is the formative stage of one’s life where if “saviours” like concerned parents, healthy upbringing, good teachers, family, friends and a healthy surrounding do not hold your hand, you’ll fall down.

And that’s why I admire the ancient Indian civilization because it understood that in a vast nation of people, it is not possible for all children of such tender age to have such “saviours” by their side. That’s why we had “Gurukuls” or boarding schools where the finest Gurus worked round-the-clock to ensure that the students were hard-trained in holistic self-development. We also had institutions of joint families where children learned the fundamentals of life-lessons like brotherhood, socializing, respecting elders and rendering selfless service. Today’s generation may be savvy in technology, enterprise and modernism, but live on shriveled cultural roots, insecurity, cheap posessiveness and shallow friendships. They’re impatient and lack the resilience to bounce back from deep failures. They want to buy that which can’t be bought. They want to live like it can’t be lived. Healthy humour and manly steadiness is eroded. Your own town folk, your own society, your own friends,even your own family are becoming strangers to your isolated prisoner. If this continues, we are slowly but surely entering a dystopian brave new world.

• Raman Butta