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Notes -
Is wokism fundamentally the same thing as so called "slave morality?"
The way this issue came up for me is that a few threads back I claimed the following:
To which another individual responded as follows:
I was only vaguely familiar with the concept of "slave morality" so I had to look it up. This actually seems like the sort of thing for which AI might give an intelligent answer; here's what I found:
This does seem to ring a bell, but I think there's an important difference. In the drama of "slave morality," there are two players, the masters and the slaves.
By contrast, wokeness follows what Lawrence Auster used to call the "liberal script"
In other words, there is (in my opinion) a third and key set of players in the wokeness movement -- elites (or aspiring elites) who pursue self-aggrandizement by advocating on behalf of Nietzsche's "slaves."
So it might be better to call it "striver morality" as opposed to "slave morality."
It has been a long time since I read Nietzsche in length, but from what I recall, I think it's worth noting that Nietzsche's ideas about slave and master morality were complex. On one level he despised slave morality, yet he also clearly saw its strength, its success at shaping values. What he called slave morality is the actual master morality of our time, and he knew it. He admired the power of Christian priests to overthrow the ancient world's moral order, their tremendous ability to transmute values within themselves and dominate the world with their new values like some sort of superhumans from a Dune novel. This somewhat echoes what @functor said below about how slave morality is an elite phenomenon.
The so-called slave morality is completely dominant in our time. I do not know about other parts of the world, but in the West is difficult to find anyone who is not genuinely mentally deranged and/or deeply ostracized by mainstream society who truly believes that it is good for the strong to dominate the weak - truly believes, not just as an fun intellectual exercise, a vice-signalling online grift, or a fetish. So-called slave morality completely penetrates both the left and the right in the West. This is why outside of a few online ranters with Greek statue avatars, who I'm not sure even actually believe in what they say and in real life are probably mostly very nerdy people who are either grifting or desperately trying to compensate for their lack of power in the real world, almost everyone on both the left and the right believes in the vision of the plucky oppressed rebels overthrowing the evil empire. The left and the right just disagree on who the rebels are, and who the empire is.
And this is not surprising. The left and the right grew up on the same movies, and popular movies are about plucky underdogs fighting evil empires. This moral framework has almost completely won. It utterly dominates our civilization, it shapes most people's consciousness on a deep level. The so-called master morality has been driven from the field and only survives as the suppressed shadow of the "slave" morality. The so-called "master" morality survives in hiding in obscure crevices of consciousness and among freaks and obvious sociopaths. It persists psychologically in the great appeal that antihero narratives have for moderns, the sex-and-violence Game of Thrones depictions of lustfully and openly wicked people which serve to still satisfy some of that ancient craving for master morality, a craving that likely cannot go away as long as humans remain human. This is also the reason why sociopathic gangsters are so popular in our media - the mafioso, the inner-city gangbanger, and so on. We still have a need to psychologically engage with "master" morality, but almost none of us actually believe in it on a deep level.
No politician can expect to win more than a small fraction of the public's support by running on a ticket of "it is good and beautiful that the strong dominate the weak". Even Adolf Hitler did not campaign politically on master morality, he campaigned on the notion that Germans were plucky underdogs who should overthrow the supposed oppressive evil empire of the Jews, the French, the British, the Bolsheviks and so on. In other words, even the most prominent far-right politician of the last 100 years ran his politics based on slave morality, on the same script of plucky rebels going up against an evil empire, not based on some sort of "master morality" appeal to the beauty of the savage and dominant aristocrat.
Wokism is a "slave morality" phenomenon, but as Nietzsche would have understood, it is also a master morality: it insists on its values, it revels in dominating its enemies, it seeks to conquer, it seeks to stamp its values on the entire world, it believes utterly in its right to rule and to destroy its enemies. Today's right-wing populism is also almost entirely a "slave morality" phenomenon just as much as wokism is. Outside of some narrow highly online circles, the modern right-wing populist does not believe that he has an aristocratic right to rule through strength and beauty. He believes that evil aristocrats have taken over society and that the "good people" have to fight against the "evil people" to overthrow their domination. Ironically, right-wing populism has not so much that masterful steel in its backbone that wokism does, it is not as much of a master morality. But then, it is young in its current open form. Modern right-wing populism is ideologically almost exactly the same as it was in the 90s, the difference is that now it has breached the containment walls of polite conservatism and escaped the online forums and small clusters of paleoconservative fandom to which it was largely confined in the 90s. So it is possible that right-wing populism, too, will at some point become more psychologically confident in itself. I don't really see it moving in that direction right now, but much can change very rapidly in politics. One thing I'm fairly sure about, though, is that it will not take the form of actual ancient-style master morality. If Hitler's political movement didn't, then it is extremely unlikely that any of today's right-wingers will do it.
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