Graham McFarlane

Disciple of Jesus, husband to Hilary, father of Flora, theologian, abstract expressionist enthusiast, author, speaker.

[Graham McFarlane @gwpm]

Marcuse, Critical Theory, and the Death of Charlie Kirk https://t.co/mosdBcKWTc

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

At the end of the day, as I discussed with Jordan Peterson, there are just two games to be played, one real, one Woke. The real game is called civilization. The false game is called power. A long post/🧵:

The real divide between Woke and not Woke is in power. The Woke game is the power game, and it is a parasite on the real game, which is civilization.

Here's roughly how Jordan described the foundation of this idea.

There are various rules, norms, etc., in the game society ultimately plays, and these create a hierarchy that is based upon competence, mostly organically, obviously imperfectly. If the rules of the game are good enough, the imperfections (natural corruptions) are minor and society thrives. If they are not, you'll have problems.

This is the real game of building society, and it ultimately has to favor competence. This game must be called "civilization" because that's not just its goal but it is also what it does. It civilizes us beyond our base instincts and impulses so we can work together productively in a healthy manner that generates prosperity.

As Jordan put it, this game is also a reservoir of value, and reservoirs of value create parasites. What are these civilizational parasites? They’re parallel games organized by and around malignant psychopathological modes like Dark Tetrad traits, psychopathy, and Cluster-B disorders: histrionic, borderline, antisocial, and narcissistic. These malignant pathologies render people incompetent except at manipulation, so they cannot rise far in a healthy civilizational hierarchy.

What do they do, then, to gain power and status in life in a game they cannot actually play? They define a parasitic parallel game and rope people into playing it. It is parasitic in that it draws off the real game (civilization) and mimics its form so that the hosts (people in society) are less likely to realize it’s there, but it doesn’t build or create of its own. It siphons and tears down.

What drives this game is failing to see what makes the civilizational game and the hierarchy it produces legitimate in the first place. This is characteristic of the psychopathologies at its heart. The narcissist imagines the world should be serving himself at the top, but it isn’t. The problem can’t be himself, so it must be that the game is illegitimate. Otherwise, he’d be at the top, but he isn’t. Therefore, the game is corrupt. His histrionic nature makes him a victim of the real game, preying upon emotions like empathy and righteous indignation to recruit followers.

Because of his Dark Tetrad alignment, his game is not only illegitimate but toxic. It’s inherently sadistic, cruel to its recruits in the way typical of all cults—alternating punishment and leniency or even love-bombing. It’s dishonest. It’s psychologically broken from reality. It’s also a Machiavellian game, which means it has no interest in moral or ethical behavior but only in power. Thus, this rival game to the game of civilization is the game of power.

The parasitic game—that is, the power game—is based on a fundamental failure to understand the legitimacy of the civilizational game or the approximately legitimate hierarchy it produces. This is a result of its narcissism, mostly. The game cannot be legitimate because the psychopath isn’t on top of it, where he sees himself constantly as a projection from his frail ego. It sees power in the real hierarchy, though, which it can perceive and understand, and for which it blames most of its troubles.

What this means is that the (Woke) power game develops a critical theory of the existing legitimate civilization game. That’s why Woke means “using critical theory (and activism).” A critical theory exists not to articulate a vision—at least not beyond a Utopia after the cult power game holds power to enforce its power game long enough—but to “criticize those aspects of the existing society we wish to change,” as Max Horkheimer, creator of the Critical Theory, put it.

The critical theory of the power game exists to recruit by delegitimizing the civilization game in the minds of some of its players, usually ones who aren’t succeeding as well. It picks at “contradictions,” failures, and imperfections while casting the whole civilization game as corrupt and unjust. It offers itself as the only alternative to civilization game while pulling at the threads of the civilization game that allow people to believe in it. It all proceeds from the Woke failure to understand the legitimacy of the hierarchy of the civilization game as it proceeds from its set of rules.

Misunderstanding legitimacy leads it to conclude that all hierarchies are actually based in power, and all power is fundamentally arbitrary. That is, they do not believe all power is illegitimate. They believe power is the only legitimate thing in any hierarchy, but they also believe that power is located in persons like themselves through their narcissism and projection. Think of Voldemort as an icon of this mode of thinking: “there is no good or evil, only power and those too weak to seek it.” Of course, that quintessential Dark Tetrad perspective is what ensures the psychopathological power game will be rigged to make sure the psychopaths are attracted to it and rise to its top.

This belief is what we call Woke. The Woke game is the power game, and it is a parasitic competitor to the civilization game. There is no overlap between these two games. To adopt the power game is to abandon the civilization game entirely and, in fact, to become its enemy.

But James, you might ask, isn’t there power in civilization? Yes, there is, and necessarily, but it isn’t what defines the civilization game. It’s a byproduct of the game, not the game itself. The civilization game is fundamentally the building out of an organic and dynamic hierarchy based on a set of rules, or what some people call “muh principles,” that will succeed or fail for that civilization in direct proportion to three things.

1) How aligned with the truth are the rules of the civilization game?
2) How aligned with justice are the rules of the civilization game?
3) How willing are the participants of the civilization game to defend their principles and their game, including against socio-parasitical perversion?

The more aligned with truth and justice a civilization game is, the more successful it will be, and the more legitimate its hierarchy. The power that results as a byproduct is extremely legitimate in a highly aligned civilization where people haven’t forgotten their charge to defend the game itself, which is what we call responsibility. A civilization game strongly aligned with truth and justice filled with a preponderance of responsible people will produce a thriving, prosperous society.

It only works this way every time.

Not everyone is responsible, though. Some are also incompetent because of various pathologies (not talking about for other reasons). Those pathological players may, under certain circumstances, create a parasitic side game with themselves on top through a variety of strategies that mimic the values and principles of the real game while distorting them into power plays because their game is power, as discussed above. They will recruit into that game primarily from those who are resentful of the real game for any variety of reasons, and getting recruited into the power game from the civilization game is called “going Woke.”

[Graham McFarlane @gwpm]

“It Goes On”: Robert Frost and the Lessons of Suffering - Word on Fire https://t.co/EpWkCfJZoo

[GB News @GBNEWS]

Safety fears as woke church welcomes biological men into women's toilets

https://t.co/hoRbO96sWw

[Creative Deduction @CreativeDeduct]

By the 1930s many Western intellectuals reluctantly realised that classical Marxism had failed and the proletariat wasn’t revolting. But then a group of exiled German Marxists led by Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse decided to change the battlefield.
Instead of economics, they targeted the “cultural superstructure”: family, religion, tradition, sexual norms and the very idea of objective truth. Their weapon was Critical Theory - a relentless campaign of negative criticism designed to portray every Western institution as inherently oppressive and capitalism as not just economically flawed, but psychologically and morally corrupt.
Marcuse gave the strategy its most powerful tactical manual in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”: true liberation, he argued, required “liberating tolerance” - tolerance only for progressive ideas and outright intolerance for conservative or “regressive” ones. Free speech, in other words, was only legitimate when it served the revolution.
The intellectual poison of the Frankfurt School was extraordinarily influential and as its graduates and intellectual heirs colonised universities, media, NGOs and corporate HR departments, Critical Theory evolved into today’s identity politics, DEI mandates and cancel culture - a cultural Marxism that attacks the individual in the name of group grievance. What began with a small circle of German émigrés in the 1930s now shapes the moral vocabulary of much of the Western elite. The result has been a softer, more pervasive authoritarianism: the dictatorship of the politically correct.

[Graham McFarlane @gwpm]

'When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth.' Not by the means of scientific discovery, biological argument, or some masterpiece of intellect, but by evoking the me I've always refused to meet and
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[Graham McFarlane @gwpm]

and enabling me to take this despised and rejected person fully to myself, breaking down the middle wall of partition. And the Holy Spirit does this within the, by means of my own character and my own experience, by means of what I am.'
HA Williams
The True Wilderness, 17-18
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[Graham McFarlane @gwpm]

Human life is very largely a wilderness, a dry land where no water is. Riches are the artificial grass and plastic flowers with which we try to enter to cover up the stony
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[Graham McFarlane @gwpm]

ground and persuade ourselves that we live in a water garden. Death is the realistic acceptance of our wilderness for what it is, a refusal to cover it up with simulated appearances of life. Once we thus
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[Graham McFarlane @gwpm]

accept our wilderness and no longer try to hide it from ourselves, there follows the miracle of resurrection. The desert becomes verdant. The stony ground itself brings forth rich pastures. It is, for instance, the man who
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[Graham McFarlane @gwpm]

faces and accepts his inability to love who discovers within himself a power of loving which nothing external can destroy or damage. And this is life through death.
H.A. Williams
The True Wilderness, 12
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[Graham McFarlane @gwpm]

Suffering

(O)nly insofar as we are free to suffer are we free to love those who do not, one way or another, meet our own needs.
Marguerite Shuster
“The Use and Abuse of the Idea of the Imitation of Christ,” Ex Auditu, volume 14, 1998, pp70-81, 77.

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave the most controversial speech *against* Western Civilization at Harvard in 1978.

As a survivor of the Russian Gulags, they expected him to praise the West. Instead, he made a jarring accusation:

The West is a dying civilization. If it doesn't change its ways, it is doomed to collapse.

In fact, he said this has been the case for 500 years, when the West made a crucial mistake:

"How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present debility?

...the mistake must be at the root, at the very foundation of thought in modern times. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was born in the Renaissance…

I refer to humanism — the proclaimed autonomy of man from any higher force above him."

Solzhenitsyn said humanism made man autonomous from God, Truth, and objective morality.

If all morality is subjective, then man has nothing to live nor die for. Naturally, he loses his courage, embraces materialism, and grows effeminate to modern evils.

So, what is the solution?

A return to belief in a transcendental morality under God:

"If, as claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth evidently must be more spiritual…

The fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become above all an experience of moral growth: to leave life a better human being than one started it."

All cultures live, or die, based on their respect of the True, Good, and Beautiful.

To save the West, Solzhenitsyn says start with beautifying your soul, for that is both how you live well, and begin to make civilization itself beautiful again.

[Peter Hitchens @ClarkeMicah]

In 1931 the future Archbishop William Temple told worshippers to read the words of the last verse of this hymn, silently and then ‘if you mean the words even a little,and want to mean them more, sing them very softly’ . The whole congregation of 2,000 whispered that last verse.

[Darshak Rana ⚡️ @thedarshakrana]

https://t.co/MR6xBJJ9BB

[Graham McFarlane @gwpm]

Rich insights for extended reflection from Jason S Clark.

You're Not Just Traumatised, You're Also a Sinner https://t.co/M2DplrosCH

[Graham McFarlane @gwpm]

Experimental Theology: The Beatitudes and Human Flourishing: Part 1, "Flourishing Are the...": https://t.co/Vt7BwjpQ7I

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

Did you know C.S. Lewis predicted the modern obsession with “being nice” would destroy the soul?

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis argues that when a society stops believing in objective virtue, it doesn’t become tolerant… it becomes manipulable.

He calls the result “men without chests.”

People with appetites and intellects, but no courage, no honor, no trained moral instincts. They can calculate everything and defend nothing.

Lewis saw that once we reject inherited moral law, we don’t become free. We become raw material… easily shaped by propaganda, pleasure, and fear.

Modern man prides himself on compassion while quietly surrendering every standard that once gave compassion meaning.

Lewis’s insight is brutal: a civilization that educates clever cowards will eventually be ruled by tyrants or technicians.

Because when nothing is worth dying for, everything becomes negotiable… including human dignity.

[Graham McFarlane @gwpm]

Advent, Day 25 (Christmas Eve): Begotten https://t.co/507PSxw22a

[Graham McFarlane @gwpm]

Another superb example from @psephizo of academic scholarship informing deeply held popular misunderstandings about the Christmas story.
Was Jesus raised in a 'poor' family? https://t.co/q8HyV6JYhL via @psephizo