Would the bad guys fund this?

Fair warning: The following might be more half-baked than usual. Quarter baked, even.

My naivety, it occurred to me recently, is my superpower. (Optimistically, it’s one among many.) Probably much like most superpowers, it’s often annoying to the people around me.

Naivety is a superpower in that it enables effort. People who understand how hard things are never try to do them. San Francisco really demonstrated how necessary delusion is to greatness.

I thought about my naivety while thinking about how the CIA funds leftist artists, writers, intellectuals, and other influencers. And how it’s probably part of how wokeness goes awry.

I don’t want to think too conspiratorially. At best, it’s intellectual masturbation. But, like, if I wanted to divide the left from everyone else it would be hard to do much better than elevating someone who wrote "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination" to a position of such prominence that he effectively becomes the very alienating and discrediting to normal people face of anti-racism.

Unjust social hierarchies necessitate wokeness. Unfortunately, wokeness is easier to do poorly than well. First and foremost, making social hierarchies more just is simply a really difficult task.

It’s hard to even see the social hierarchies that run our lives, as default and well-defended as they are. Then it’s hard to describe them accurately, with all the requisite nuance. Lastly, it’s hard to move individuals or groups up and down these hierarchies without accidentally creating new injustices.

Then, there are the defenders.