Part Three
continued from Globalism Part Two
Let’s take a different view moving forward in the current century. We have been to the Moon, had the first Earth Day, seen the collapse of USSR, fall of the Berlin Wall, computers, China as an economic power, 9/11 terrorism, Arab Spring, Afghanistan, added 5 billion people, the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, global warming, Crimea, Gaza… With all of the progress also has come chaos. One of the outflows of the Covid Pandemic was that many nations were willing to do anything to minimize national chaos even to the extent of relinquishing sovereignty over some rights. Whether all the information was accurate as to source of pathogens and responses, the political climate was such that citizens in many countries were willing to forego liberties for the assurance of safety and security. Isolation, masking, inoculations, limiting rights of assembly, limiting of due process fell in the quest for the sense of safety.
Lessons learned by those who shape culture abound. As society moved out of the Pandemic, causes which were lingering in the background became prominent in the global theater, causes like Diversity, Equality, Inclusivity came to be global rather than personal rights. Each movement claimed the right to define their rights as protected and anyone who would interfere with them exercising their rights in the manner they identified as their “woke” would be subject to “canceling”. And does that movement have the right to redefine Equality to become Equity and its expectations as fundamental and appropriate?
Woke refers to awareness and being conscious of injustices particularly of racism or discrimination and prejudice. Purports to have higher understanding of inequalities which gives it higher rights impose resolution.
Cancel is the practice of withdrawing support from anyone or anything which is considered objectionable or offensive to the extent of treating like it doesn’t exist. Canceled.
The willingness for the majority to accept give away personal individualism and rights inherent as an individual promoted the global idea that some ideas were of enough importance to override lesser concepts. That philosophies of minority groups should be greater than, more noble than or of higher importance than individuals, cultures, beliefs or nations was expressed in a new application of globalism. While universal rights had previously been espoused as ensuring life, liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of belief and other inalienables that should not be taken away or surrendered now the minorities promoted super rights which gave them rights to suppress any opposition to expression of their rights and then not only to suppress but deny any other expression to be illegitimate and unlawful. Only they would have supreme freedom of expression and any opposition could not be expressed in any forum. Inalienable rights once established as both natural and universal for any human being and which must be perpetuated by any government were now subject to “woke” culture which in the early 2020s began to insist on applying “cancel culture” idioms to anything in disagreement with their positions.
In part this was a belief that some form of reparation was due to segments which felt they had been repressed by the masses, either by law or by attitude. While there was no legal basis in codified legislation, various groups contended that their singular “pursuit of life, liberty and happiness” should be superior to any constraint and therefore they were ‘owed’ both protection and enablement to achieve their objectives without the restraints of any other entities rights. This removes the “equal” implied in the application of “the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
One last thought (for the moment) on minority rights: “Global Majority” is described as the 85% of world population who are not of European descent which includes peoples of African, Asian, Indigenous, Latin American and mixed heritage. “Global Minority” tends to refer to groups identified as minorities in a locale either national, regional or continental such as in the U.S. for groups Black, Asian, Native, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, Muslim, Jewish, LGBTQ+ identifiers. Context is everything – white of European descent is a minority on the world stage, Jewish is a minority even in the Middle East, fundamental Protestant is a minority pretty much everywhere. In a February 2025 Gallup Poll, the percentage of U.S. residents identifying themselves as LGBTQ+ was 9.3% which was inclusive of all not identifying as only heterosexual.6
The question is: Does globalism require any perceived or self-identifying group or individual to have both “wokeness” and the ability to “cancel” any group anywhere which disagrees with the idea or expression of their identity? Does the claim or appearance of wokeness provide the right to cancel anyone else’s rights?
FOOTNOTE:
6 https://news.gallup.com/poll/656708/lgbtq-identification-rises.aspx
