He was an ambitious young man. He’d grown up with few creature comforts. Not because his parents couldn’t afford them, but because they didn’t think it was good to spoil children. Since he was 8, his job was to help the dairymaid milk the goats every morning. His parents were both busy professionals, so they often left him on the farm in the care of the dairy maid all day.
Their tasks were to milk the goats, turn the milk into cheese, package the cheese and sell it at farmer’s markets and to anyone who ordered online. So he did have internet access, but he lost one smart phone when it got doused with his sweat when he was milking. That loss took a week’s profits in goat cheese to replace. The he dropped the replacement phone into a vat of whey and lost another week’s profit. So he limited himself to perusing the internet only when all the work was done for the day.
He was homeschooled with a group of kids who lived near enough that they could all get together two to three times a week. Most of the work was online, though. His parents supplemented his online studies with stories from their fascinating travels when they were home.
He also learned a lot from the milk maid about practical aspects of life. Not just cheese and milking, but how to make the best Ethiopian coffee and composting and how to understand goats so they didn’t destroy the trees which provided their most valuable forage.
When he turned 18, he had accumulated quite a few skills, but not among them was how to deal with city people. He trusted everyone since everyone he had ever interacted with deserved his trust. He left the mountain farm and enrolled in the same state university that his father had matriculated at. He joined a special program which matched American students with students from overseas. His roommate was a white South African. They got along fine, but seldom ate together in the cafeteria of the dorm.
The boy was having trouble paying for everything since his parents had decided he needed to cover all the costs of his education himself. He found out he could get out of his meals contract with the university by pleading health reasons. After that, he cooked his meals in his room. Mostly canned soup heated up in a cheap little pot with a heating element in the bottom and day old bread.
As part of his financial aid package, he was in a work/study program working for a history professor entering data on immigration to St. Louis by Germans in the late 1800s. That job and some grants and scholarships enabled him to stay afloat. He hitchhiked home every other weekend to get some meat, fresh vegetables and see the dairy maid and his parents.
His father had taken the very first women’s studies class when he was at the same university back in the early 1970s. The women in the class took a vote and let him stay if he behaved. He got an A. In his father’s time taking a women’s studies course was on the breaking edge of what became wokedom later on. But things had moved a lot more woke since then.
Now it was all about pronouns and transphobia and what Indian tribe had occupied the land before the evil white colonizers came and the privilege of people with skin the shade of the boy’s. He learned to be obsequious when forced to speak and quiet most of the time. He did speak out once about the American Indians because he had been collecting Indian artifacts since he was a small boy. He knew that several different tribes and three entirely different ethnic groups had occupied the land where he grew up since successive waves of Asians colonized America..
When his freshman history professor insisted that the land of the University should be given back to the tribe which inhabited it when the Europeans came, the boy spoke up about how those Osage Indians had taken the land from the peaceful, agricultural tribe, the Caddo, who had lived there for a thousand years before the Osage adopted horseback riding on wild horses escaped from early Spanish explorers. With the horses, they could conduct lightning raids against which the Caddo had no defense.
Many villages were totally ransacked by the Osage, who collected Caddo children’s fingers as mementos of every battle. After a few years, the countryside was littered with destroyed villages, some with a few survivors trying to plant crops to survive. If a village revived itself, the Osage rode back to pillage and rape again.
The professor was shocked at the effrontery of the country boy and questioned his research qualifications. The rest of the class joined in in shouting down the boy. The boy learned to be quiet from then on. He learned that the route to success was to figure out the beliefs of the most woke and then echo them but never try to take the lead in anything since that was just not permitted for a white boy. He was ambitious and he wanted success. And the only way to success in the social sciences is to be woke.
He had an amazing memory. By taking copious notes and then rewriting and adding to the notes each evening, he had a complete transcript of each class. Before each test he then memorized everything each professor had spake and then regurgitated it at exam time. The procedure worked and he took more and more courses every semester. After two years he had already completed all the sociology course requirements. He switched his major to psychology and completed all that major’s requirements in a third year and also the University’s 120 total credit hours. So he graduated in three years.
The psychology department desperately needed a few extra graduate students in the spring of his third year in order to retain a grant. One professor realized that the boy could easily meet the graduate school entrance requirements, even though he hurt their diversity, inclusion and equity goals. Since he was well-known as the uncrowned Champion of Woke in the psychology department, had grown his hair down the middle of his back and often went barefoot, the selection committee decided to overlook his skin color. Also, the need for warm bodies and quick helped overcome the diversity issues and in a couple of weeks he had a research fellowship which came with a stipend to live on and began in the fall of the fourth year since he had left the mountain farm.
His plan before the fellowship was offered had been to get a job mowing lawns and doing maintenance while taking courses outside psych and soc, but the offer of the fellowship and a nice office were too good to pass up. So, he became a psychology graduate student.
As a graduate student on fellowship he was only required to take about half the number of classes he had taken most semesters as an undergraduate. And he didn’t need to work at all. So he had lots of time on his hands. Time to study topics woke social science considered verboten.
Over his years in the social sciences, he had internalized all the woke beliefs including a deep mistrust of all genetics. He had gradually come to an unexpressed belief that apes and humans only differed in upbringing. If you raised an ape like a human, he would become a human. Environment was everything. This seemed to be the logical conclusion of the woke psychologists.
Then the boy stumbled upon studies which did try to raise apes as humans and just got apes who were misfits. It was the beginning of the end for the Woke Champion. The hard data just directly contradicted the assumptions of woke social sciences.
He’d also accumulated a set of unexamined assumptions which everyone in his classes believed and would never question. The United States is a horrible country and always has been. White people can’t dance. Blacks have more fun. If a black committed a crime, it was because he’d been mistreated as a child. The boy didn’t recognize that many of these assumptions required that genetics have value.
Then the boy discovered some forbidden literature knows as sociobiology. And sociobiology put out the flame of wokedom forever for the Champion of Woke. The woke hate the author Edmund Wilson, because he was a prominent biologist with unassailable credentials who showed the power of genetics in shaping all species behavior. The woke called him racist because if genetics is powerful, then that might open up the possibility of racial differences in intelligence and aggressiveness/crime. It might mean that more blacks are in jail because they are innately more aggressive and commit more crimes.
Two biologists taught the Sociobiology course for a couple of semesters until it was cancelled by an outraged faculty. The young boy was lucky enough to catch it.
The young boy was born again. His ambition now was not to memorize his professors’ every utterance and regurgitate each of them at test time. Now he was focused on learning everything he could about Nature and genetics. He began enrolling in all biology classes. The psychology faculty was aghast and tried to reel him back in, but one prof who knew him best defended him as exploring a diversity of ideas. So he was permitted to keep his fellowship, and not take any courses in psychology.
The time came for the boy to schedule his comprehensive exam to prove he had knowledge sufficient in psychology to enable him to be granted a Ph. D. He decided to have it in the early fall so that he could spend all summer studying for it.
Walking to the library on the first day of summer to begin his months of study, he noticed how beautiful the trees were and how lush was the foliage and he began thinking about his bucolic summers back on the farm far from any town, much less any dusty library. An epiphany spread through him and the final nail was hammered into the coffin of the Champion of Woke.
He passed by the steps to the library and continued to the other side of campus where he discovered the department which dealt with growing crops: Agronomy. He entered the department office and asked if they needed any help working in the field that summer. He filed out an application and left. When he came home, his roommate told him Agronomy had called and he has a job.
So he reported for work the next morning as a field hand. He found out hardly anyone was woke in the Agriculture College. The administrators gave lip service to the concepts, but no one really believed in all the woke nonsense. His years a prisoner of the woke ideology were over.
The foremost proponent of the kingdom of Woke is becoming apostate.
Unlearning all his silly assumptions.
You can do the same.
Become a fool that you may become wise.
Resilience 