Woke phenomenology, ugliness in power

An old book on the working-class condition came into our hands. It was a memento from Dad, a printer trained at the Salesian school. Amidst yellowed photographs and a hint of tenderness for the world of yesterday, one thing jumped out at us in an excruciating way: the personal dignity, in clothing, posture, even the gaze, of our parents. Poor people, and yet proud, neat in dress, bearers of a decorum and order, exterior and interior, that we have lost. The comparison with the present is devastating and the writer, having reached the threshold of serious age, pities the younger ones, destined to live with decadence.

The filthy contemporary world is such in many respects and the downward motion becomes more rapid. In recent years, the woke radicalism of the “awakened” has deformed everything. Ugliness has imposed itself and become a life program. It is the obvious conclusion of a process of deconstruction of reality, negation and erasure that has deprived existence of meaning. No longer travelers, but nomads without destination, without center, without baggage. They call it - proudly - the autonomy of the subject. The result is a sloppiness visible right down to the gait and posture, in clothing made up of torn trousers, T-shirts with horrendous or frightening images, writing - strictly in English - vulgar or stupid.

The surroundings are perfectly suited to the disheveled humanity walking around: ugly buildings, parallelepipeds, cubes of various colours or no colour at all, walls and trains daubed with all kinds of squiggles, street art, street art, they say, as words and concepts have to be slurred in globish.  Natural that ideas and worldviews are what they are. There is a real phenomenology of the “fifth state”, the plebs (how else to call them?) as a unified, progressive, woke, individualistic, tattooed and turned vulgar model. The most foolish go so far as to lord over or destroy art for “environmental” reasons. The prevalence of the cretin becomes dictatorship and finally nihilism.

According to the current mentality, nothing grounds the order of things. In fact, there is no order of things. Nothing sustains the true, the beautiful, the good. This is not the place to outline its ideological origins, its “cultural” sources.  However, the anthropological reconfiguration has taken place with a precise direction, the outcome of which is anomie, the absence of norms, the danger that Emile Durkheim, the father of sociology, warned against. An anomie claimed, flaunted like a trophy, the victory of Nothingness. For Foucault, “the ultimate norm is the norm of the absence of norms, the norm of the abnormal”.

For the first time in history, abnormality founds normality. “The abnormal, the deviant are transformed into the cornerstone of the world. In all fields. Even in that of art converted into non-art, in which ugliness and insignificance are transformed into the cornerstone that, we do not know why, we continue to call beauty. Even in the field of sexuality (or gender), what they try to impose as the norm is the abnormality of transsexuality and homosexuality, which is not and cannot be the norm, the guideline”. ( J. Ruiz Portella).

This is why Frantz Fanon’s madman, the prisoner, the “damned of the earth” - the deviant who in gender ideology takes the form of the transsexual - constitute the inverted paradigm of the good and the beautiful, the just and the true. Contrary to appearances, despite what the nihilists who call everything into question and demolish everything make us believe, what they seek to impose on us is not the Nothingness of a liquid “freedom”, dissolved in the sand. The objective is the imposition of an order harsher than all the orders of the past. Despite appearances, the liberal-libertarian regime is fiercely despotic, founded on the pretence of founding the world on the absence of any principle other than “absolute” freedom, free of constraints and limits. The deceptive, false freedom that inevitably flows into the norm of the abnormal.

The phenomenology - even the physiognomy - of the Woke universe is the triumph of the ugly, the deformed, the bizarre, the absurd and the inverted. The moment the abnormal and the deviant are elevated to the norm, something never before seen in history takes place. When the delusional criterion is established whereby the basis of the normal is the abnormal, of wisdom is madness and of beauty ugliness, the most elementary foundations of existence collapse.

Ugliness, indeed. And ugliness. One has never seen people so ostentatiously and politically ugly. The reason? For them - for those who command and indoctrinate them - ugliness is a political project, displayed like the black flag of pirates. The symbol of those who have no flag and live to trample them all underfoot. François Bousquet writes that in the United States - crater and engine of the Reverse Empire - “ugliness has progressed spectacularly, especially since “wokism” became the religion of the state. “The woke, narcotized awakenings, junkies of Nothingness, want to erase everything, annul everything, abolish everything. For Bousquet, the woke ideology is the union “of Mr. Ugly and Miss Ugly; however, since the woke are very touchy with the history of non-binary, it is better to resort to inclusive writing, so we say that they constitute the marriage of* Mr* Ugly*.

They need not expose their agenda: they wear it on their faces as a provocation to Mother Nature. One only has to look at photographs, come across one of their demonstrations, be in a club they frequent to have before one’s eyes a museum of horrors. Ugly, generally dirty (washing very little is a new environmentalist commandment...) nasty or inarticulate, aggressive. Some resemble the Halloween pumpkins they get used to as children. Many exhibit androgynous traits combined with physical and behavioural neglect.

Hair dyed in unnatural colours triumphs: garish green, fluorescent pink, orange, the dark purple of the rancorous rage with which they are imbued. They bring to mind the mask of the Joker, the comic book character of Batman with his hysterical laughter and hideous grimaces, the grotesque protagonists of the travelling shows of yesteryear, the cannon woman, the bearded woman or Pinocchio’s Fire-Eater. Nothing to do with the savage dignity of Queequeg, the grappler from Moby Dick, a tattooed giant son of a tribal chieftain who has abandoned his people to visit the world, inseparable from Yojo, a small idol he worships as a deity.

In the new version of the Snow White fairy tale - hated by Paola Cortellesi [1], the latest progre-icon - the stepmother has taken over and no longer asks the mirror if she is the most beautiful. “Mirror, tell me, who is the ugliest in the kingdom?” Snow White herself will soon be banned. She is white, straight, the prince who kisses her does not ask her permission and both- brrr... - are beautiful. What the woke soul wants to destroy is the last dam of inequality: beauty. Therefore we witness the deconstruction of beauty, its delegitimization and desecration. They perceive beauty as aggression and offence. What the zero-point man has to esteem is the debasement of his nature to the point of degradation.

Perhaps the real class struggle is not between the rich and the poor, but the millenary war waged by the poetic, the refined, the aristocratic and chivalrous against the ruling class of the coarse and vulgar; the war of the knights against the swineherds; the struggle between those who hold up the pillars of the temple and those who profane and destroy them. Do we exaggerate? No, we merely observe a phenomenon of ugliness, decay, decomposition that unfolds before our eyes and changes the surrounding landscape.

The woke phenomenology, along with ugliness, has to do with aggressiveness and with a crude, trivial activism, an enemy of confrontation, which invests all social conduct, private and public. The physical features described seem to correspond to certain behavioural traits, a specific psychic type. Woke one becomes, prey to the mental virus of “awakening” that resets and reconfigures body and soul. The most common specificity is petulance, absolute, indestructible, snooty towards all contrary opinions. From petulance springs the absence of personal questioning, of inner dialogue. No hint that the woke person attempts to understand those who are not. This generates a perpetual anger that leads to quarrelling, to hostility manifested in any way on any occasion. Common is the attitude of cutting ties with friends and family members of a different opinion.

A contempt for any transcendent hypothesis reigns, accompanied by a crude nihilism, convinced that everything is useless, senseless, an attitude exhibited with a conceit cloaked in superiority. Woke people are inclined to deny or distort any truth; in the discussion - when they stoop to it - they easily switch to personal attack. Hatred of the past takes on pathological traits. It is shot through with the egocentricity typical of those who are convinced they possess the truth. In reality, it is often a symptom of anxiety and low self-esteem, the effect of nihilistic vertigo.

The degradation that leads first to direction lessness, then to generalized senselessness, needs to be bridged in some way so as not to sink completely. Hence the persistence of democratic appearances, the claim to abstract freedoms, an inverted will to power (will to impotence!) hinged on self-hatred, the erasure of any past, resentment towards excellence and beauty, untenable, hateful comparisons. In the welter of anomie, of fluidity turned gaseous, in the war of all against all, above the physical and inner ugliness of the woke universe, everything is overpowered by the law of the strongest. It is a jungle dominated by a single master, money.

That mindless, centreless world plays with rigged cards. It is the unseen, or worse, accepted deception that leads to plunging into the ravine built by those who direct the game on the heads of unwitting generations. Ideological masters and oligarchic masters. The program of ugliness, the paradigm of vulgarity, the tension towards erasure, the vertiginous fascination towards the abyss, make too many naive victims. Victims first and foremost of themselves, of course.

Indeterminacy, the world in reverse, cannot hold. The logic of things is not to liquefy, to erase themselves as one erases a drawing of sand on the seashore. Things are, they exist: full, radiant with meaning and shrouded in mystery: in that conjunction of light and darkness without which there would be no world, no being, no beauty, no art, no meaning.

To the horrible woke generation we ask not to submit to the deception that envelops them. To erase everything, to make a tabula rasa, to judge everything by the changing yardstick of today, makes you drifting objects. Negative thinking as a child of the great refusal prescribed by Herbert Marcuse (whom you may not even know because he too is a child of yesterday) leads you down a thousand blind alleys. You are going down them all: self-hatred, addictions, the inability to believe in anything, the aversion to those who have faith in a cause or a value system, the consumption of yourself that deforms, the anxiety that raises the bar of desires every day to conceal the emptiness that devours, occupies life and enslaves. The ugly is a cross, not an agenda.

[1] Italian female comedian and actress

Translation by Costantino Ceoldo