The oppressor/oppressed paradigm underpinning much of wokeness is two things: dumbassery and decades in the making.

We used to celebrate accomplishment. Now, not so much. These days, it's all about "identity." That's because "identity" is something that you don't have to do a lot of work to obtain.

Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash

I’ve struggled mightily in the past few years to understand what motivates well-educated individuals from wealthy, stable societies to advocate for things so foolish, so historically bereft of merit, and so ultimately self-destructive as supporting terrorism, pushing much of the green agenda, attacking accomplishment, advocating for the degradation of law and order, and promoting general chaos to further nebulous causes.

It seems to me that being a member of a wealthy, stable society, generally by mere accident of birth (a pretty good definition of “privilege,” IMO), without regard to identity, one would consider anything that might cause the wheels to fall off the low rider, anathema. Alas and alack, evidently, Voltaire was right; it is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. Even more so when they have an elite college education.

The oppressor/oppressed paradigm (I suggest the imprecise but memorable acronym, OOPS) is two things: dumbassery and decades in the making. It’s dumbassery because, where it’s not outright misapplied, it’s generally upside down. And it’s origins go back not just a few years—to the beginning of #woke—but decades.

The conflict between Hamas and Israel, which the young and feckless on college campuses across the nation would have us believe is a brutal assault by an oppressor, Israel, on a victim, Hamas, is perhaps the most egregious example of OOPS upside-downness at the moment. Nevermind what happened on October 7. Pay no attention to the terrorists behind the curtain.

Baffled? None of this makes any sense because it’s not supposed to. When you separate knowledge from facts and substitute identity for merit, you’ve started down a road where the appearance of success, based on the nebulous concepts of postmodernism: ways of knowing, intersectionality, relativism, and rejection of the Enlightenment, hovers like a tantalizing mirage on the distant horizon. It may be persistent, but it is an illusion nonetheless. Success has many antecedents. Disregard for merit, facts, and reason is not among them.

All of this has been several generations in the making. It started with the pervasive coddling of children, which came to prominence in the 1980s and grew with them as they matured into adults, where they passed the lessons they’d learned onto their children. The fuzzier ideas of identity, equality, and self-actualization supplanted the connection between the concrete principles of perseverance, work, courage, and reward.

This is the fault of my generation, the Boomers. As we waged just crusades against bullying, overly competitive youth activities, and disparities based on race, sex, or social class, we went much too far in attempting to level the playing field. Where a little would have done, we went overboard with a lot. We coddled little girls and minorities more than anyone else. We did this with the best of intentions and the worst of outcomes. We are now reaping what we sowed.

No one likes a bully, but there is something useful about confronting one. A coward dies a thousand times, the brave man, but once, sayeth the immortal bard. Most kids learn this when they take down their first bully or confront their first fear by themselves. After that, kids don’t need timeouts, safe spaces, or participation trophies. They are brave, confident, and free. You can’t keep people like that down for very long, and you certainly cannot intimidate them with lies, social coercion, or bullshit.

But having almost completely abandoned traditional notions regarding the benefits of struggle, courage, and accomplishment in growing up and having replaced them with the brain mush curated for young people in the media and on social media (where no one is accountable for anything), who should be surprised that we’ve created cadres of spoiled, entitled, clueless whiners who wouldn’t acknowledge genuine struggle and accomplishment if it whacked them in their bits?

None of this is to humanity’s benefit. Can you imagine the clueless, keffiyeh-wearing scholars at Columbia demanding humanitarian aid while camped out in a show of support for a terrorist group having the fortitude, wisdom, or courage to endure the hardships of the Oregon Trail? To explore spice routes to Asia? To look for dragons at the edge of a map? To endure imprisonment to stand up for reason. To ride a Mercury-Redstone booster into space? To storm a beach in Normandy? To refuse to give up a seat on a bus filled with people who hate them.

If you can, you have a better imagination than me.

I learned my lesson about merit versus diversity the hard way. My most profound woke moment occurred in the early 2000s, when a faculty member that we had hired specifically because they were a member of an underrepresented minority turned out to be a spectacular bust. As one of the people who strongly supported taking a chance on this individual, I felt particularly obliged to make amends with everyone (including them). I accepted responsibility for my misjudgement. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. It’s outcomes that matter.

At one point, we tasked this individual with a high-profile confidence and CV builder that we thought they could not possibly screw up: planning a conference that we were hosting. When it went badly wrong, our chair asked me to quietly clean up the mess without any credit or acknowledgment for the work. I agreed. The problem was that it was difficult to completely cover my footsteps, and when the word got out, all hell broke loose. Many attendees at the conference would not even shake my hand, much less look me in the eye, for usurping this person’s authority. I was slagged from one end of our particular field to the other for condescension.

A few years later, a student who was in this faculty member’s social cohort made an office appointment with me, their recruiter and advisor, to discuss a problem. They were massively unhappy with the dearth of knowledge obtained after a semester’s worth of work under this person’s tutelage. If faculty member X, they said, were an example of _______ in science, they wanted nothing to do with the field.

That was my woke epiphany. How, exactly, does one explain a bust in an unearned position of considerable privilege to a genuinely bright, hard-working, and deserving student of the same cohort? How does one explain Claudine Gay to the plethora of bright, talented, and deserving professional black women working as hard as they can toward success while playing by all of the rules and producing righteous results?

I don’t know how you do any of this. It’s a big part of why I’m no longer in higher education.

It gets worse. As it happens, the oppressor versus the oppressed paradigm, when there is an actual case for it, is quite often completely upside down. To wit, #metoo wokeness deemed Christine Blasey Ford, the college professor and research psychologist who attempted to derail the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018 over unsubstantiated allegations of sexual assault (allegations that, in some cases, her own witnesses contradicted), a victim of Kavanaugh. That’s completely backward.

If Kavanaugh actually did what CBF described, even if it occurred decades ago (as she alleges), it’s terrible, and he’s a loathsome individual. But that’s a big if. Anyone can make an allegation. Some proof is generally required for an allegation to matriculate in our system of law and justice. Show me some proof, and we’ll see what can be done. Until then, Kavanaugh is a judge in good standing and should be evaluated based on his jurisprudence.

In this case, there was no proof that Kavanaugh was even in the same time zone as Blasey Ford when the alleged assault may (or may not) have occurred—even the date of which could not be established. It was a hit job against a judge whom the woke despised. Merit had nothing to do with any of it.

I maintain that Kavanaugh, in the absence of evidence for his involvement in something terrible other than the unsubstantiated word of an accuser, is the victim of Blasey Ford, not the other way around. Numerous liberal sycophants portrayed Kavanaugh as being guilty of sexual assault based on twisted, woke tribalism, evidence be damned. And many of those same acolytes are still on the news every night, demagoguing about “dangers to democracy.”

Well, hear this. An unmistakable “danger to democracy,” at least in my opinion, occurs when facts, reason, evidence, and the rule of law take a back seat to social and political whims. See the Alvin Bragg prosecution of Donald Trump over stupors and vapors for more details.

A big part of the OOPS narrative is the attack on success and privilege. We used to celebrate achievement and accomplishment. Being privileged, at least in the traditional sense of having achieved success, was not generally a bad thing. You worked hard to become privileged. It was a feature of social order, not a bug.

That’s not to say that privilege was never looked at in an askance manner. The concept of having been lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth and then using that good fortune to bootstrap a career as a screw-up was never widely celebrated. No one likes “affluenza,” except for defense attorneys.

But where we are now is a far cry from bemoaning the excesses of a gilded class. The woke apparatchiks who rule much of academia would have us believe that successful people are directly responsible for the failures of everyone else. If you, me, or anyone else of the wrong identity succeeds at anything, we did it with our foot on someone’s throat of the right identity. This idea is popular among the woke because it’s as difficult to refute as ether, and it requires no effort to side with.

If Einstein is alleged to be the progenitor of relativity, you may be assured, according to the woke, that he stole the ideas from indigenous folk, perhaps the Korowai, to keep them down. Did Newton and Leibniz invent calculus? Nah, it was developed in Africa but ignored by Europeans who wanted to believe that slaves weren’t smart enough for math.

The United States of America is the greatest experiment in democracy in human history, bar none. What we’ve accomplished in less than 300 years in this country is astounding. Yet, to hear the woke, standing for freedom in two costly world wars, putting humans on the moon, and building a system of education and science that used to be the envy of the world is less germaine to our national identity than our allegedly exceptional history as colonizers and oppressors.

In the 11,000-year history of slavery, there has never been another country besides ours to sacrifice more than half a million of its citizens to free slaves. There has never been another country to sacrifice as much blood and treasure around the world to promote freedom. There has never been another country to open its doors explicitly to the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to be free.

But that’s not the way the Ibram X. Kendis, the Nikole Hannah-Joneses, and the Jamaal Bowmans of the world see it. According to them, everyone else in the country, including conservative blacks, are oppressors of their kind. Their prescriptions for righting past wrongs—more discrimination, reparations, and defunding the police—are fantasies available only to people who enjoy the privilege of not having to ever be right about or accountable for anything. The last thing that anyone who truly believes that black lives matter should want, based on all of the evidence, is to defund the police.

OOPS is, prima facie, absurd. But reason has nothing to do with any of it in the first place. If you are stuck looking for sense at the other end of this, good luck. It might take you just a bit.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.