The piece
Diminishing
Returns of Woke highlighted the counter reactions emerging towards
imposition of wake culture. Political backlash is pretty visible, the backlash is
spreading down to lower echelons of the society. Yet instances are being reported
of woke liberals engaged in a witch hunt on the deviants from the alleged woke
line. The case of an Ola driver to doctor in Kerala to an earlier instance of
chef in the Gulf are pointers towards ‘micro-Dreyfuses’.
An unpopular
view of the same, however unfortunate it might be, is there will be victims of
this battle. Foot-soldiers often pay the price and perhaps of higher magnitude
in relative terms. Yet the cost of witch hunt would be significantly higher for
woke liberals. To a woke liberal, long run success would be of conversion of
ordinary human towards their side and if not at least not push him or her to
the other side. This collective interest is at odds with the individual self-interest
of woke liberal. He or she wants to climb the pyramid of the elite societal
strata and would prefer to engage in actions that propel them towards the top. In
the piece ‘
Why
Elitism Flourishes’ it was discussed the greasy nature of the pole that one
uses to traverse the journey toward elitism. For all said and done, the person
who builds the story of cab driver would in all probability planned the fiction
to score brownie points, get more followers on Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook etc.
get a contract or two from the liberal
mouthpieces and in a short while emerge as some spokesman of the same. Further
any individual on this path will look to convey the signal of their credibility
and willingness to traverse the path of woke liberalism. They thrive in seeking
low hanging fruits and what better than cab=driver story with more than its
share of its masala added.
On the contrary,
this individual self-centred action creates a ripple effect on the opposite side.
It it not just the driver who is the victim. His victimization is bound to echo
through his network of family and friend, both professional and social. Their anger would intensify and drive them
away from the liberal camp permanently. Even though there might be a critic or
two of the establishment, sympathetic to ‘liberal’ causes, that would be set
aside and create a switch to nationalist camp. So the collective objective of
the liberal would be defeated by individual actions or aggregate of these independent
individual actions. This does not have to happen overnight, but a process that
will gather critical mass with passage of time. The diffusion of messengers
like Whatsapp will amplify the tone against liberals further even though the
driver and his network would perhaps have hardly about this term. These cases
in the presence of social media would diffuse fast across the country and
kindle an antagonism to anything woke. So the net outcome would be the
individual self-centred act towards creating a path of personal progress will
conflict with the collective interest of mobilization against their opponents.
Firms might take
some time readapting to new order. They might relish woke on a simple assumption
of many customers are sympathetic to woke and they would lose brand image for
acting anything against woke. The moment
they realise the anti-woke is elastic with respect to brand catering to woke
will change the dynamics. To a firm, the costs of being anti-woke or
politically incorrect is higher than the relative benefits. The shift will have
a time lag.
Meanwhile, for every
scalp of an ordinary human in catering to an individual fetish of elite
pretensions, the costs for liberals are bound to manifest geometric multiplier
effect in socio-political spheres going forward.
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