What hadn't occurred to me until now is that an old argument I've seen and used, that "green" people are actually watermelons (environmental veneer on communist center) is an insufficient explanation of the green movement.
The green movement is now circling in on a divine (unfalsifiable) locus (human driven climate change) that is reverse engineering Gaia worship. If you view "environmentalism" as an idea or ideology encompassing healthy stewardship of nature, you're going to be exasperated.
"Well, any decent environmental policy platform involves nuclear" misunderstands what environmentalism is about (worshiping mother earth).
Even when we talk about greens as a religion and we point out that they have priests and tithes, we're not really appreciating them *as a religion.* What did a priest do? What are tithes for? Etc.
What's amazing about op is that he's identifying three deterritorialized idols that are rapidly becoming territorialized. Environmentalism used to include conservation and stewardship and diverse local initiatives, medicine/science used to be an ugly mess of falsification...
...and CRT is closing in on the final form of...something
Trying to find a way to articulate the spectrum of cargo cult to idolatry that is useful. Many cargo cultists who realize that the divine exists within a thing, but aren't forced into faith.
Not sure I have the language and reading to articulate this, so I will try to work around my limitations.
If we look at an idol, we have a (relatively) well delineated idea, represented by a single figure, a mythos that articulates the boundaries of the idea or ideas through narrative.
Everyone is fired up over this, even typically even keeled mutuals. What's happening (ignore the specifics for a moment), is that this gentleman is insulted, but the insult is *imperceptible* to many (most?).
Her tone is flat to joking, and she's phrased her insult with sufficient plausible deniability that it's possible that she herself does not perceive the insult.
"I always found it funny when other people consider themselves members of a noble lineage, while I live in their ancestral seat and am therefore queen" is an insult. It's basically the straw man for "cultural appropriation" being bad.
One of the smartest leftists I've interacted with on here had a take that amounted to a restating of a right wing position while pointing and sputtering. We're approaching a leftist singularity.
The leftist response to this observation would very likely be a "no true Scotsman," which is what all their "I'm a leftist, not a liberal" pleading ultimately amounts to.
This is most stark when you look at an internally consistent "leftist" like Greenwald or Aimee. The distance between them and a Jim Lindsey is quite consistent, whereas the majority of the left is lately a scattered mess.
@shadowcat_mst@0x49fa98@arguablywrong@logicbot3000@hradzka The thing that is most difficult to understand and accept about wokeness is that it is only new in the aesthetic sense. It is an old instinct best articulated as "deterritorialized idolatry." It morphs and mutates and is difficult to slow and impossible to destroy.
@shadowcat_mst@0x49fa98@arguablywrong@logicbot3000@hradzka The two challenges it presents are 1) it is fluid, and ensnares those who try to fight it by bogging them in layers of specifics that ultimately don't matter but directionally, and 2) it is faith based, which triggers cognitive dissonance.
@shadowcat_mst@0x49fa98@arguablywrong@logicbot3000@hradzka When this iconoclastic impulse is in balance with the conservative instinct, you get relatively slow social change (not necessarily technological change, though). When there's too much of the iconoclastic urge, you get what we have now (defending arithmetic).