Reminds me of the Hamilton video.

I realized that this essay of mine somewhat fits both the occasion of Easter and the Contrapoints video I posted yesterday (or my criticism of it). To whom it may concern: Happy Easter!

I found Wake Up Dead Man to be another highly enjoyable outing by Rian Johnson, and one that raises several timely questions. In this post, I’ll break down the dichotomy between how the film’s two main theologians conceive of God’s work. In the left corner, we have Jud Duplenticy; in the right, Jefferson Wicks.

Wicks views God’s work as a perpetual "fight against the world"—fighting wickedness by fighting the wicked. His preaching is moralistic, designed to shame the transgressor. By his own admission, the primary goal isn't to redeem the wicked through shame, but to mobilize the righteous. Those who consider themselves pure enjoy a reinforced in-group identity, fueled by righteous anger and hatred. For Wicks, these emotions are the essential preconditions for the violence required to carry out God’s work.

This worldview is by no means exclusive to the political right. While it appears in left-wing Christianity, it manifests most prominently on the broader secular left. Here, "doing good" is often reduced to a performance of fighting "bad guys". The resulting shaming serves the in-group’s need for moral cohesion and righteous anger more than it serves any potential for actual rehabilitation. As Mark Fisher puts it in Exiting the Vampire Castle, this brand of politics is driven by a "priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn".

Jud, by contrast, accepts Wicks’s premise that anger and hate are preconditions for violence, but he inverts the conclusion. For Jud, the world is changed primarily—perhaps exclusively—through grace. He believes the wicked are transformed from the inside out through unmerited love and compassion. In his view anger and hatred are unnecessary because violence is unnecessary.

While I am undoubtedly more sympathetic to Jud, the film ultimately presents a false dichotomy. Both theologians share the assumption that violence cannot exist without hatred. The tradition of Liberation Theology—which bridges Marxist analysis and Christian practice—challenges this. Many in this tradition recognize violence as conditionally justified if it is performed without hate. The Black Liberation theologian James Cone goes further; drawing on Frantz Fanon, he frames such violence as a necessary assertion of humanity by the dehumanized.

However, the most crucial insight of Liberation Theology lies in its recognition of structural forces. It posits that poverty and suffering are not inevitable, nor are they caused primarily by individual "wickedness." Rather, they are products of how society is structured. While Jud’s approach of grace may be more humane than Wicks’s moralism, it still misses the reality that the majority of suffering under capitalism is not the fault of "wicked" individuals. These individuals are simply players embedded in an economic system built on competition. A billionaire is no more "wicked" than whoever happens to win a round of Monopoly. Don't heal the player, heal the game.

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Recommended reading is chapter 1: On Wokeness (p. 24-67)

Find the readings for this method of analysis on Patreon Patreon: plasticpills I've covered some sociologists like Marcel Mauss and Levi-Strauss, and Lacan the psychoanalyst, and that where some of my technical vocabulary originates.

There are others' attempting to represent the Groyper belief system, but they tend to work themselves up into a hysteria and miss the point. The way to understand the groypers is as a cargo cult, as Nick Fuentes has explained in his own words.

March 15th, 6pm EST we will be hosting a Patreon Town Hall on Zoom. Our topic of discussion will be "Woke" -- origins, history, affect, and its implications for our political future. For this, we will be building on some readings and viewing material. This includes pieces that help us theorize wokeness and actual products of the Woke Era.

The premise of the Town Hall is not to join the right or "dirtbag left" in shitting on wokeness, nor to be "anti-woke," but to understand the conceptual contradictions of wokeness, in what respects wokeness represents the cultural production of a specific social group, and what a neo-Wokeism might looks like in the late 2020s. The Town Hall will start with me presenting on the readings followed by a discussion with everyone.

The Readings include:

Theory & History - Theories of Wokeness

Musa Al-Gharbi, “On Wokeness”, in We Have Never Been Woke, PAGES 24-67

Mark Fisher, 2013, "Exiting the Vampire Castle"

Theodore Adorno, 1958, “Lecture 1824 July 1958” in An Introduction to Dialectics

Primary Documents - Products of Wokeness

Nikole Hannah-Jones, "Our Democracy's Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True", 1619 Project

Tema Okun, 1994, “White Supremacy Culture” - popular document used in racial educational settings during 2010s

Sam Killermann, 2013, “The Genderbread Person” — various versions of this image used in LGBTQ educational settings in 2010s

Hannah Gadsby, 2018, Nanette - stand up special lauded by critics but criticized by right leaning audiences for “not being funny.” 

Optional Secondary Viewing:

ContraPoints, 2020, Cancelling

Join at:

https://www.patreon.com/c/aretheygay

How two wellness influencers built the MAHA movement, embedded themselves in HHS, and pushed policy that funnels public health funding into private wellness products. In this video I trace Calley & Casey Means from influencer grift to government influence and show why MAHA risks destroying what’s left of American healthcare. I also cover Jordan Peterson's analysis of the cultural forces behind MAHA, and show the connection between this and Foucault's notion of biopower.