The End of Trust

How aggressive wokeness is remaking society.

Bari Weiss's Substack feed (highly recommended) offered me a deep-dive into modern Hollywood culture. Hollywood-based writers Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik tell the tale of an industry and culture held hostage by wokeness, where skin color is a top hiring criterion, where people live in dread fear of having anything they say turned against them, where defensive posturing is a necessary survival tactic, and where no one trusts anyone else.

How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. “Best way to defend yourself against the woke is to out-woke everyone, including the woke,” one writer said.

"I get so paranoid about even phone calls. It’s so scary. My close friends and my family are just like, ‘Don’t say anything."

One showrunner [was] afraid to send his emails to us out of fear of them accidentally winding up on the wrong screen.

>"I’m sitting in a room trying to run a show with a collection of people I don’t totally trust.”

It's been obvious for a while that Hollywood is now shoehorning as much woke into its product as it can, without subtlety, and often in direct conflict with history and reality. In doing so, it has lost edginess, erected fences and barriers where it used to smash them, and stifled creativity of any but a narrow and approved sort.

Our cultural frontrunners used to be the vanguard that broadened horizons, shattered bigotries, and led us to a better society. 'See that interracial couple in "To Sir With Love?"' 'See that gay couple in Will and Grace?' 'See Kirk and Uhura kiss?' 'Hear the word "pregnant" uttered?' And on and on. All these were taboos that Hollywood challenged - not to coerce, but to liberate.

Today, instead, they are the Robespierres of a modern reign of terror, encouraging... nay, *demanding* that people narc each other out, that their rules of woke be used as tools of figurative execution, where one misconstrued word or phrase can destroy a career. That terror creates perverse incentives. If you are competing with someone for a job, finding a bit of "evidence" that he's not as woke as you gets you the job. In as cutthroat a world as Hollywood, who doubts this sort of thing happens? Twitter, of course, is the epicenter of scalp-taker's notoriety-seeking antics.

A survey by the Cato Institute found that nearly two-thirds of Americans self-censor out of fear of being cancelled. While this isn't exclusive to those who lean Right, it definitely leans that way (52% of liberals, 64% of moderates, and 77% of conservatives feel they have to).

Our culture has been remade around fear. Our individual circles of trust are shrinking. Many of us consider every interaction a potential landmine, every new acquaintance a potential snitch or traitor. Political like-mindedness is now a criterion for access, whereas in days past, people of differing viewpoints could have a conversation without someone worrying about career suicide. The end of trust is causing us to isolate more and more, to shun those who don't think as we do, and thus to reduce our exposure to new ideas and contrasting viewpoints.

A culture founded on fear cannot thrive. A culture without trust cannot survive. As has been the case throughout history, societal destruction is being precipitated by a small minority. The aggressively-woke are few in number that rely on fear and defensive behaviors to amplify their influence.

Middle America - big industry, the trades, the farmers, those who work with their hands, and so on, will survive this. So will Big Money - the banking and investment class. They always do. The segments of our society that attract the woke, however, will not. That's Hollywood. That's the creative sector. That's what passes for journalism today. That's Big Tech.

Society will be worse off for it. The "edge," the challenging of institutionalized norms or biases that move society forward, comes from those latter groups.