The Woke Wrecking Machine
New woke protocols mandate race as essential rather than incidental to the human experience. Supposedly such fixations will heal racial wounds. Under the new reparatory and compensatory diversity, equity, and inclusion rules, those deemed non-white were to be hired and admitted to colleges in greater numbers than their demographics. Even the old mandated proportional representation quotas were no longer enough.
Almost everything that has followed from the woke mass hysteria gripping the nation since 2020 has proved disastrous.
Wokeism destroys meritocracy in favor of forced equality of result—history’s prescription for civilizational decline.
If we continue with the woke hiring of administrators, air traffic controllers, ground crews, pilots, and rail workers, there will be even more news of disasters and near-miss airline crashes.
Wokeness demands a McCarthyite suppression of free expression. No wonder a woke FBI recently hired out social media censors to suppress stories it deemed unhelpful.
Soviet-style, wokeism mandates strict ideological party-line narratives under the cover of “science.” No wonder a woke government lied that requiring vaccines would prevent both infection and infectiousness.
Woke substitutes race for class in its eternal neo-Marxist quest to divide permanently the nation along racial lines, between victims and victimizers.
Yet wokeism recently has embarrassed itself as never before.
Take the COVID pandemic.
The Department of Energy has joined the FBI and is now attributing the origins of the pandemic to a leak of a likely engineered virus from the top-security virology lab in Wuhan, China.
Wokesters had long suppressed that reality, demonizing any who rejected its orthodox lies and spoke a larger truth: A dystopic China is not our global partner in greening the planet. Criticizing Stalinist China is not “racist.” China is not building a progressive society that is a model for others.
The ongoing environmental catastrophe in East Palestine, Ohio, following the train derailment revealed more woke moral bankruptcy.
Ostensibly the ensuing toxic spill and noxious plume have poisoned a poor and working-class small town. It should have galvanized the old Democratic Party that once voiced loud support for all green causes and championed the lower American classes.
But woke ended all that—substituting racial chauvinism for class concerns and ideology for genuine worry over the environment.
Woke dogma mandates that pollution and poverty are no longer concerns—if they affect the white poor who are stereotyped collectively as privileged victimizers.
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What’s a Sermon?: A Perspective for People in the Pews (Part III of III)
We should not be passive participants in the work of the church as members, even when it comes to the sermon or the life of our pastor. He is meant to serve you, and you him. He is meant to teach you, but you are not therefore absolved from the commandment to make disciples.
“Five-billion people.” I answered, “There are five-billion people online right now, according to the latest data.”
I had been asked to come on the radio to talk about three news stories that stood out to me from the previous week. Two had come to mind easily, but for the third I decided to look for something encouraging; I wanted to find a story about a local pastor doing the work of the gospel or who was being celebrated for ministry faithfulness.
I searched everywhere.
I found nothing.
The “five-billion people online” statistic jumped out to me on my search, and so I decided I would use it to make a point. If there are that many people online, then a good deal of them must be Christian. So where are all the stories about tremendous pastors? I know they’re out there ready to be told! Yet, it doesn’t seem like anyone is telling them.
I finished the interview by saying something to the effect of, “I’d just love to use my time here to say how thankful I am for my pastor. He loves our church and loves God, and that might sound boring, but I think that is awesome.”
It wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t controversial, it was just true.
As much as I would love to see more people publicly praising their pastors, the work starts closer to home. In the first two installments of this series, I’ve talked about what a sermon is and how to get the most out of a sermon each Sunday, but in this article, I want to look at how and why we should encourage the man standing in the pulpit. How do we love our pastors well, submit to them, and encourage them? To be clear, this is an area we all need to grow in—myself included.
Be most known for encouragement. “We ask you, brothers, to respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord and admonish you, and to esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves” (1 Thess. 5:12–13).
I make it a point to ensure everyone whom I love, knows that I love them. The words “I love you” hold a specific weight when spoken to my wife, but they aren’t reserved merely for her. Jesus taught us that people would know who we belong to and whose disciples we are if we “have love for one another” (John 13:35). It is, therefore, no surprise that this extends to our leaders. Pastor Jared C. Wilson has mentioned on several occasions that he never leaves the pulpit without expressing his love for the congregation.
If your pastor did this, would that expression of love be reciprocated?
My guess is that if you’re plugged into a local church, whatever differences you might have with your pastor, you do love him. Like a cheesy 90s rom-com, however, this love might go days, weeks, or years without being revealed, leading both parties to question its existence.
This commandment to love is accompanied by another that seems to be intrinsically linked to the first. “Esteem them very highly in love because of their work. Be at peace among yourselves.”
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Is Christianity Sexist?
For the writers of Scripture to specifically name and honor women like Rahab, Ruth, Naomi, and Deborah, as well as the women who served alongside Jesus and the apostles in the Gospel accounts, was to make a radically bold statement in an era of human history that more often erased women than included them. Scripture records their bravery, honor, intellect, and service, not to mention first arriving at the empty tomb.
February 6 marked the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation. The World Health Organization estimates more than 200 million women and girls across the globe have been subjected to this violent practice, which forcibly cuts or mutilates a woman’s sexual organs as a so-called “rite of passage.” Not only is FGM a gross violation of the human rights and dignity of these girls, most of whom either do not consent to it or are not old enough to understand what’s being done to them, but it’s also incredibly dangerous.
Diverse people groups practice FGM, including unfortunately, a few remote tribes who identify as Christian. However, far more Christians have fought the practice than committed it, including missionaries, Christian aid organizations, and many local African Christian communities. These Christians are motivated by a biblical view of humanity, that includes the inherent dignity of women and children.
Nevertheless, a common accusation is that Christianity is an oppressively patriarchal religion that either subjugates women or, at least, devalues them. This accusation is almost exclusively Western and modern. The first Christians were actually criticized for teaching that women were equal in value to men, and accused of being “incestuous” for referring to fellow believers as “brothers and sisters.”
It was when Christians distorted the Scriptures and used them as justification to devalue women that real harm was done. Cases of sexual abuse in the Church, of domestic violence, of charges of abuse going unheard or dismissed, of keeping women from learning theology, and of otherwise cruel and demeaning treatment of women by some Christian men are a horrible stain on Church history. Church history has always been marked by human sin.
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The Tyranny of Seeing Only Power
The book makes little pretense of being even-handed, offering instead a series of exposés of the various tricks of the trade that managers use to exploit workers and oppress consumers. There simply are no “good bosses” that populate this narrative. Nor, strikingly, are there any bad workers. It may well be true, as Ahmari charges, that many facets of American contract law are systematically rigged in favor of employers. But that is no justification for rigging the moral argument against them; “You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great,” warns Leviticus 19:15.
In my earliest political consciousness, I imbibed a framework that may be familiar to many American conservatives. There were two basic spheres of life: the public sector, run by the government, and the private sector: the zone of free enterprise, the market economy, and private property. Needless to say, the former was labeled Bad and the latter Good; the goal of any good politics was to shrink the former and expand the latter as much as possible. Why? Well because the government acted (indeed, only could act) by coercion, by compulsory action, while the private sector acted by free exchange, by voluntary action. Of course, sometimes coercion was necessary—we weren’t anarchists—but it was always regrettable.
Thankfully, I spent most of my youth fairly apathetic about politics, and so these assumptions functioned as little more than a vague default background framework. No sooner did I bring them to explicit consciousness and expression, during my brief fling as a Ron Paul devotee in 2007-08, than I began to find the framework full of gaping holes. For one thing, a simple binary was obviously not enough: at the very least there was a third sphere, governed neither by the logic of state or market, the family. The family seemed to belong to the private sphere, and yet it more closely resembled the unequal “coercive” logic of civil government than the free and equal exchange of the market. And where did the church fit into this equation? Both family and church, in fact, seemed to defy both state and market by modeling a kind of harmony or symbiosis even amidst inequality, rather than presupposing competition and constraint.
The more I looked, the more the anomalies multiplied. After all, was it really true that I only obeyed the law because I was coerced to? That didn’t really match my experience—in fact, increasingly it seemed to me a circular dictum: only if I thought of government action as coercive did I feel coerced; if I thought of it as rational or defensible, or of obedience as a duty of Christian charity, then law-observance turned out to be every bit as voluntary as any form of market exchange. And after all, what was law-making but a great corporate act of decision-making, a corporate exercise of freedom? I soon learned from Richard Hooker and the Christian tradition that most of what I had been taught to think about the “coercive” public sector was wrong.
And as I read economics and, more importantly, started paying attention to the world around me, it became equally obvious that the private sector could not possibly be the paradise of free exchange that Ron Paul said it was. Collusive monopolies used their market power to constrain and oppress consumers, while leaning heavily on the levers of government to tilt the playing field in their favor. Libertarians charged that such “crony capitalism” was a perversion of the true order of things, was proof that everything goes wrong when government gets involved, but what if this was instead an almost lawlike feature of society: businesses will always lobby for laws that favor them, and very powerful businesses will do so with greater success?
On a more basic level, the compulsory/voluntary binary just didn’t seem to fit the realities of experience. Did I buy the cup of coffee before my job interview because I wanted to or because I needed to? Did I ride the bus to my job interview because I wanted to or because I needed to? Did I take the job on the terms offered—the only job offer I could get—because I wanted to or because I needed to? Clearly the answer in each case was somewhere in between: in theory I could turn down the job and take my chances, but I had to get some income somewhere fast, and beggars can’t be choosers. I could have woken hours earlier and walked to the interview, but “drenched with sweat” doesn’t usually make a good first impression. And I could have foregone the cup of coffee, to be sure, but as an addict, I wouldn’t have found it easy and might’ve been lethargic at the interview. Most of my “market” transactions, it turned out, just as most of my interactions with the law, turned out to lie somewhere on a spectrum between 100% voluntary and 100% involuntary, rather than at the poles.
This basic insight, blindingly obvious once you wake up to it, but seemingly ignored by much popular political discourse for the past two generations, is the central contention of Sohrab Ahmari’s blockbuster new book, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—And What to Do About It. Of course, it’s not the only contention; as a title that spicy suggests, Ahmari is engaged in a bit more than merely an exercise in conceptual clarification. And rightly so, for conceptual confusion at this crucial point has profound consequences. “What you see is all there is,” as psychologist Daniel Kahneman likes to say, and if you operate with a political-economic framework in which private sector coercion is simply a contradiction in terms, then you will simply never see it—and thus never do anything about it, however abusive. Ahmari’s goal in this important work is to open our eyes to the real power imbalances that characterize the modern marketplace (or indeed any marketplace) and the ways in which the powerful use these asymmetries to coerce and exploit the weak.
Of course, as soon as you put it like this, suspicions are likely to be raised: doesn’t this all sound a little bit Marxist? It is, after all, a basic feature of Marxism in all its permutations to read the world through the sole lens of power, and to see every imbalance of power as a structure of oppression to be dismantled. The old Marxism focused on economic power, preeminently the power of the “boss” over the “worker,” while the new cultural Marxism has widened its remit in a self-contradictory quest to interrogate and dismantle power of any kind (except, of course, the power of the victims to exact revenge on their oppressors). Within the toxic discourse of wokeism, a return to the old-fashioned Marxism of labor activists and class consciousness may feel almost like a breath of fresh air. But it’s hardly where we should want to end up.
Ahmari’s work, then, is shot through with ambiguities. On the one hand, it represents a much-needed clarion call to discard the blinders of ideology, with its convenient binaries of bad “coercion” and good “freedom,” and wake up to economic and political reality, so we can make responsible political choices within the options actually available to us. On the other hand, it can’t seem to help indulging in a different ideological binary, one between bad bosses and good workers, oppressors and victims, that ignores the fine-grained realities of experience. By trading the false alternatives of neoliberalism for the false alternatives of old-school Marxism (or at least dallying with the latter), Ahmari misses a fantastic opportunity to transcend this zero-sum discourse and highlight the fundamental mistakes that both have in common: namely, an obsession with power to the exclusion of authority. For cultural conservatives tired of the stale categories of Friedman-style economic conservatism, it is high time to connect the dots between our economic and social maladies, between our alienation from our work and our alienation from ourselves.
Without authority, every constraint is felt to be oppressive, from gun licensing laws to my work schedule to the biological sex of my own body. Within a healthy understanding of authority, any number of constraints may be experienced as liberating.
By saying this, I do not mean that all the downtrodden worker in a dead-end job needs is a change of perspective (although as Paul’s advice to Roman slaves highlights, a change of perspective can change quite a lot). Ahmari is not wrong to draw attention to concrete evils and abuses of the contemporary market economy that conservatives have long turned a blind eye to. Many of the stories he chronicles should lead any sober reader to burn with indignation and demand immediate political changes to reduce the chances of such abuses. But this side of the eschaton, the poor we have always with us, and the powerful. Inequalities of wealth, wits, and strength will persist, and with every such inequality, an asymmetrical relationship between governors and governed, managers and managed. A just regime is one that accepts such imbalances, vigilantly watches for and seeks to mitigate abuses, and above all seeks to instill a healthy sense of solidarity and civic friendship between all orders of society based on the conviction that there really is a “common good” that is common to all of them.
At its best, Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc. points us in this direction. But ultimately, I fear, he cannot resist the temptation to stoke ressentiment that seems to have seduced nearly everyone wanting to write a best-seller in modern-day America.
Let’s begin though with the crucial lessons that Tyranny, Inc. can teach us.
The Ubiquity of Coercion and the Need for Countervailing Power
Ahmari begins his book with a clever rhetorical ploy: he narrates three stories of worker oppression ostensibly drawn from China, Russia, and Iran, before revealing that all three injustices actually took place within the United States—not at the behest of totalitarian governments, but of private corporations. The lesson is clear: “tyranny” is not just something that happens over there, and more importantly, it is not something that must be exercised by “the government.” We have been indoctrinated to forget, he says, “that private actors can imperil freedom just as much as overweening governments; that unchallenged market power can impair our rights and liberties; that there are finally such things as private tyrannies and private tyrants.”
In chapter 1 he examines the false dichotomy that has perpetuated our blindness to private tyranny: the facile opposition between “liberty” and “power,” between “consent” and “coercion.” In fact, liberty depends on power. It would be a cruel mockery for a doctor to tell a quadriplegic lying on the examining table, “Ok, you’re free to go now.” Freedom to act without any corresponding power to act is an empty name. Just so, notes Ahmari, “You, as an employee, might be free to tell me, your oppressive employer, to ‘take this job and shove it.’ But your ability to make good on this threat—and survive physically afterward—depends on the relative power of employers and employees in a given labor market.” When the weak go head to head with the strong, the poor with the wealthy, the jobless with the business owner, the isolated with the well-connected, the two parties are simply not equally free because they do not have equal power.
Far from being some radical Marxist notion, this point was recognized as a truism by no less a liberal than Adam Smith. Later on in the book, Ahmari quotes a famous passage from the Wealth of Nations that when employers and employees go head-to-head, it is not hard to “foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into compliance with their terms.” Even in a worst-case scenario, the employer will generally have enough money to sustain himself for a year or two, while “many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment.” While the economist may be right that “in the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him,” still, Smith observes, “the necessity is not so immediate,” and this difference gives a strong edge to the employer in any negotiations.
Because of these differences in negotiating power that are simply a feature of almost any human relationship (economic or otherwise), the binary of “consent” and “coercion” also blinds us to reality. It imagines two worlds: one of slaves who live under the thumb of cruel masters armed with whips, coerced at every moment, and another of two perfectly free and equal individuals coming to barter with one another—the classic parable from the Intro to Econ textbook of the farmer who could use a new horseshoe and the blacksmith who could use a gallon of milk. In reality, most of us consent to various agreements under some kind of duress. When the harried mother of four hungry children stops at the grocery store for a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread, she probably does not have the luxury of shopping around for the best price. And she certainly doesn’t negotiate for a better deal. She pays what she has to and gets her screaming kids out of the store as quickly as possible.
This is a simple and relatively minor example, but it highlights a reality that again should be familiar to everyone’s experience: real market interactions have little in common with the Intro to Econ barter story. Companies set prices, consumers pay them; consumers might, to be sure, be able to exert indirect bargaining power by shopping around, but in the near-term, the sellers tend to have more leverage, especially in highly consolidated industries (which is most industries nowadays). More importantly for Ahmari’s purposes, employers set contracts, and employees sign them. Nowhere is the myth of free consent more obvious than when it comes to modern contracts, drawn up by teams of highly-paid lawyers in opaque fine print, and then put before employees on a “take it or leave it” basis. Free-market apologists insist that workers enjoy “liberty of contract.” Really? Ahmari acidly observes, “Newly hired workers, in this telling, carefully review each paragraph and voice their objections before coming to a mutual understanding with their employer over disputed provisions. As your own experience likely tells you, that is almost never how this process takes place.”
In various chapters, Ahmari drills down on some of the particularly egregious abuses that hide in these contracts: non-compete clauses, non-disclosure clauses, arbitration agreements, one-sided intellectual property policies, etc. In each case, it is difficult to imagine an employee who actually possessed equal bargaining power being willing to sign such a contract. In most cases, employees don’t really understand what they are signing, and figure there’s no point in understanding, because they don’t have a choice anyway: they need a job, and another employer in the same industry is likely to have a very similar-looking contract. The same, of course, applies to many contracts that consumers sign nowadays as well, such as the “End User License Agreements” by which we regularly sign away our rights to technology companies.
The problem with the free market envisioned by capitalist theorists like Milton Friedman is not that it’s a bad idea or describes a bad world; it’s just that the world it describes is science fiction, like a world in which the force of gravity still regulated motion but in which friction and inertia did not exist. The happy results predicted by the free-marketeer would in fact result if—if the marketplace was characterized by perfect competition of equally powerful and wealthy actors. It isn’t. If every participant to an economic exchange had perfect information (or at least, equally imperfect information) about the product, service, and economic conditions. They don’t. If the future prospects of each participant were the same. They aren’t.
Ahmari then invites us to be coercion realists: to recognize that almost every social interaction or market exchange, if you look closely enough, happens under conditions of at least some coercion: that is, conditions in which one party has somewhat more leverage over the other, and the weaker party feels some constraint to give up what he really wants to avoid worse consequences. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and certainly not a wicked thing—we need to remove the stigma from the word “coercion,” Ahmari seems to imply at key points in the argument, and simply recognize it as a reality of the social world, just as gravity is a reality of the physical world.
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