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Woke Culture, Predatory Capitalism, and the Theology of Autocratic Power

• GRIVAS KOSTAS

A few days ago , in an article in SLpress, I referred to the views of Professor Patricia MacCormack and in particular to the Ahuman Manifesto, in which humanity is treated as a kind of oppressive presence on the planet and the prospect of its gradual extinction through the cessation of reproduction is projected.

I argued then that such perceptions should not be treated simply as the eccentric views of an extreme academic, but as the tip of a much larger iceberg. It is therefore worth examining what may lie beneath the surface of this iceberg. The reports made against the so-called Woke Culture are often dismissed as “far-right,” “conservative,” or as attempts to distract from much more serious problems, such as widening social inequalities, the deconstruction of work, and the prevalence of an extreme, predatory capitalism.

However, perhaps this very distinction is misleading. Because Woke culture and extreme capitalism , although appearing as opponents, can be examined as expressions of a common deeper anthropological perception. And this is the perception of man primarily as a self-sufficient, autonomous and volitional individual.

As I mentioned in my previous article, a key element of Woke culture is the deconstruction of collective identities. Nation, people, society, family, gender, even the very concept of a common human nature are treated as constructions that must be deconstructed. Let us not forget, by the way, that collective identities also include social classes. And here a paradoxical affinity with extreme liberal capitalism appears.

The famous phrase associated with Margaret Thatcher, that “there is no society but only individuals”, encapsulates a specific perception: Social reality is primarily constituted by individuals and their choices. A similar anthropological background can also be found in extreme versions of modern rightism. Only now, to “there is no society”, it has been added that “there is no nature”.

Woke culture: The individual at the center

At the center of both worldviews is the “naked,” almost infinite individual. An individual who considers himself to be prior to his relationships, his collective affiliations, his history, and, in the extreme version of this logic, even to certain givens of his nature. He is not constituted through his relationships, but is considered to exist fully before them and then chooses which ones to accept.

Thus, two political worlds that appear as mortal enemies may meet on a much deeper level. One creates the ultimate consumer and the other the ultimate entitled subject. But both may have as their ultimate point of reference the sovereign individual.

The Theology of Power

If we want to find some of the deeper cultural roots of this anthropology, we must go far back. At the cultural core of the West is Western Christianity and the conceptions of God and man that developed within it. An important clarification is required here. It is not, of course, claimed that there is some straight line that runs from Augustine to Woke culture, or to modern capitalism. Such a position would be historically naive. Civilizations operate through long-term transformations, reversals, and secularizations of initial forms, which may result in outcomes that their creators would never have recognized.

However, as Father Nicholas Loudovikos has argued , in the Western theological tradition what he calls “Theology of Power” is developing. In Augustine, under the influence of the Neoplatonic world, the spiritual dimension of man acquires a relationship of hierarchical superiority over the body and matter. The higher is called to dominate the lower. Thus, a cultural pattern can gradually be formed in which hierarchy and dominance acquire particular importance.

When this is combined with a perception of the human being as an ontologically independent subject, then the relationships cease to be those that constitute the person and risk being transformed into relationships between already integrated, autonomous units. The difference is fundamental. It is one thing to consider that I exist and then relate, and another that I exist because I relate. In the second case lies the relational ontology of the person. In the first lies the possibility of the ontology of the sovereign individual.

From God to the anthropo-god

With the Enlightenment, many of the theological schemes of Western Civilization did not disappear, but were secularized and became all-powerful, freed from their metaphysical framework. God gradually moved away from the center of the cosmos, but the position he occupied did not necessarily remain empty. The self-deified man rushed to take his place. Here appears what – to use a Dostoevskyian term – we could call the anthropo-god.

The subject is no longer content with being free in the world, but seeks to become the world’s master. And the will acquires a central role in its self-understanding. In modern and especially in postmodern man, it is no longer enough to “be what I am”, but to “be what I want to be”. From cogito ergo sum, we can thus, schematically, move to a volo ergo sum: I want, therefore I am. The will, in other words, becomes the creator of reality.

And here lies the deepest kinship worth examining between phenomena, which politically and historically may be completely different. This is not about equating Woke culture with totalitarian regimes or, of course, with Nazism. Such an equation would be historically and morally unacceptable. There is, however, a question worth asking: Can different phenomena of Western modernity contain a common voluntarist core?

In Nazism, the will appeared in its most violently extroverted form. The very title of Leni Riefenstahl’s film “Triumph of the Will” is revealing of an entire worldview: Through will and power, man attempts to dominate the world. In extreme versions of postmodern individualism, the movement can be reversed inward. The dominant subject does not necessarily claim to conquer the external world.

But he claims absolute sovereignty over his own little universe, choosing his gender for example. Any limit that he has not chosen himself can be seen as oppressive. Domination is thus transformed into self-dominance and self-dominance into a demand for liberation even from the given. The last limit is existence. And it must cease to exist!

A scary philosophical question

But here a terrifying philosophical question arises: If absolute freedom means that nothing can bind the sovereign subject without his consent, what is the last remaining limit? The answer is existence itself. Dostoevsky had perceived this possibility with almost prophetic acuity. In “The Possessed,” Kirillov takes the logic of absolute human autonomy to its extreme.

If God does not exist and man must become God himself, then he must prove his absolute freedom, even overcoming the fear of death. Suicide is thus transformed, in Kirillov's delusional but philosophically consistent logic, into proof of divinity. Here volo ergo sum reaches its final inversion. That is, I can choose not to exist. Therefore I am absolutely free.

And this is exactly what Patricia MacCormack expresses . And that is why her views are not something picturesque and marginal, but part of a complex historical-cultural architecture. The interest in her views is not simply anti-natalism. Nor does one need to argue that her views necessarily lead to some violent policy of extermination of humanity. The deeper philosophical issue is different. For perhaps the first time, the logic of self-abolition does not concern simply the individual, but the human species as a collective subject.

In other words, humanity is called upon to decide that it has no right to exist. And this cry of self-annihilation has at its core the intense element of domination, on which the totalitarian ideologies of the West were based. Humanity affirms its absolute domination over the world, deciding to withdraw itself from it. Self-annihilation can thus be read as the ultimate and most paradoxical form of domination over the world and over the self.

Woke culture: For a different understanding

I can destroy the world, therefore I am God! But I can also abolish myself. Therefore, there is nothing above my will. Here perhaps a strange circle is completed. The Theology of Power begins with sovereignty. The higher over the lower, spirit over matter, man over nature, the subject over the world. But when the subject no longer recognizes anything – outside of it – that can set limits for it, the sovereign will necessarily returns to itself.

And then the Theology of Power can turn into a Theology of Automanipulating Power. Perhaps the MacCormack case is not important because it reveals any specific political threat, but because it functions as a mirror of a much deeper cultural crisis. It allows us to see where an anthropology in which freedom is identified with the absence of any given limit and human fulfillment with the absolute sovereignty of the will can lead.

The answer to this crisis may not lie in a return to new compulsions, nor in the denial of freedom and rights. It is probably to be found in a different understanding of freedom itself. In man not as an isolated individual, but as a person, as the Greek Orthodox Tradition emphasizes, which could offer a new ontological model for the West but also for the world. This model is based on the ontology of man, who is not oppressed because he relates, but exists fully precisely because he relates.

The man who does not perceive nature, the body, the other person and the world as hostile boundaries, which he must crush in order to become free, who does not need to become a human god in order to acquire value. Because perhaps the great paradox of modern Western Civilization is precisely this.

That is, in its attempt to completely liberate man, it risks leaving him so alone, so disconnected, and so dominant that the final proof of his dominance is to turn against himself. Self-annihilation, then, is the ultimate act of self-realization of a subject who believes he must fully control his destiny. And perhaps this is precisely the deeper problem that lies beneath the tip of the iceberg.

Woke Culture, Predatory Capitalism, and the Theology of Autocratic Power