Something I'm learning through all of this is that if you just proceed through the tumults of life with clear and principled integrity, people without as much principle and integrity shatter themselves to pieces against you. It's really fascinating to behold.

I've tweeted before about the terrifying importance of authenticity and how postmodernism is, at its roots, a crisis of the authentic. You really have to be brave. You have to be yourself. You have to learn who you are (which is hard) and stay true to it (which is harder).

The current movement looks like rebellion, but it's the opposite. It's absolute conformity, and in its own utter lack of authenticity, it seeks to induce more conformity. Your conformity. My conformity. Everybody's conformity. Authenticity is its mortal enemy.

Critical Social Justice (Wokeness) is so horrified of authenticity that it has reinvented the term to its own advantage. That which is authentic is that which accords with its Theory. You have to have a conformist "critical consciousness" to be authentic. https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-authentic/ 

How can you be authentic? It's simultaneously extremely easy and extremely hard. All it takes is being yourself. That's it. Just be yourself. But you can't BE yourself until you know yourself. That lack of certainty in identity is one of the key areas in which Wokeness works.

Knowing yourself means knowing who you are, how you act and react in various situations, how you fit into and stand within your community and what it means if they reject you. It requires a lot, and it's hard. Being yourself starts there and then bravely living it.

To be yourself, you have to understand that people will reject you, and when they reject you, it's YOU, not some image of you that you manufactured, that they reject. Being yourself requires the courage and strength of character to understand that this is okay. It's totally fine.

You aren't going to be everybody's cup of tea, and authenticity requires knowing yourself well enough to know and accept that. It's bloody hard, but once you know yourself and have a bit of courage, you can BE you, you can BE authentic. And that's the opposite of conformist.

By way of example, I recently responded to a tweet by someone recognizing that accepting her authentic identity, rather than putting on (Wokish) airs about one, made her feel plain & invisible. This is correct and incorrect. It's hard to be yourself, but it's real to be yourself.

For me, I thought: this is great. I can finally see this person for who she is, not for who she wants to portray herself as being. This is wonderful. Getting to know real people for who they are is worth infinitely more than knowing only a proxy, an image, a simulacrum.

The Woke ideology trades heavily in this domain, preying upon people's instability in their own identities. It has no power over the genuinely authentic, who it therefore hates, because it cannot manipulate them into believing who they happen to be matters more than who they are.