Wokeism: the madness spreads

The latest outrage, fully justified, is at the editing or Bowdlerising of Roald Dahl's children's stories to suit current prejudices. Terms that appeal to young people's ruthless, nasty natures will be taken out and sometimes modifying phrases and sentences will be added.

Netflix bought the rights to these tales from the owners, the Roald Dahl Story Company (RDSC), in September 2021. The 'streaming platform' will use the butchered material to produce anodyne drivel similar to Disney's modern animations.

There is a wider tendency to promote the idea that reality will conform to how you wish it to be, and part of that is to falsify the past to make it look as if it was always that way. 

Human maturation involves finding out that things aren't always how you like, or think. Wokeism is a block to growing up and that is why its followers have a hysterical infantile reaction to facts, ideas, principles and people that confront them.

It also means the loss of irony and humour, which are ways of recognising that life has contradictions and surprises.

About ten years ago I was working with special needs children in a unit for primary age pupils who hade been excluded from mainstream school because of their extreme behaviour. A pair of trainee social workers came to work and observe for a while, and to one of them I told a joke about ADHD (a common problem with our kids):

Q: How many kids with ADHD does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Hey, let's go out and ride our bikes!

The girl's mouth twitched at the corners, and then she said, 'That shouldn't be funny.'

That's what our education system has done: instead of a knowledge-based curriculum there has been a long program of cultural indoctrination and turning young people into supersensitive over-reacters, mealy-mouthed prigs and lazy condemners.

We are becoming so detached from reality that we are ripe for conquest.