If you’re looking for an example of how wokeism has taken over academia, then consider the new book “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will,” by Stanford University neurology professor Robert Sapolsky.
The professor says flat-out that “We have no free will at all.” Hence, “holding people morally responsible for their actions is wrong.” In fact, he adds, “No one has earned or is entitled to being treated better or worse than anyone else.”
This sense of moral equivalency or ambiguity pervades everything I hate about wokeism. I’m not interested in philosophical, angels-dancing-on-pinheads debates about free will, which have been going on unresolved at least since Plato. That particular form of intellectual headbanging is best left in the classroom; it matters not to normal people, who know that, free will or not, people are responsible for their actions. And criminals, in particular, need to pay the price for their sociopathy. Yet Sapolsky—who won a MacArthur genius award, believe it or not—argues, in true Pamela Price modality, that “The current criminal justice system needs to be abolished and replaced…”.
How’s that again? “Sapolsky points out that the foundation of most criminal law is a simplistic and scientifically uninformed notion of free will,” according to one reviewer of “Determined.” The professor likens criminal behavior to “a car with bad brakes…we don’t think of a car with bad breaks as evil or having made bad choices, we just want it off the road until it’s fixed…”.
Well, tell that to Jasper Wu’s parents. “The men who shot and killed your little boy weren’t really responsible for his death, because they didn’t have free will.” That’s Sapolsky’s message, and it’s also the underlying assumption of every apologist for wokeism: people aren’t responsible for their behavior. Instead, it’s society, or institutional racism, or White supremacy, or capitalism, or some ill-defined “root cause” that makes them do what they do. Since they lack free will, we can’t blame them for their crimes. Instead, we must help them, as they themselves are the true victims.
If you ask me to boil down the essence of what Pamela Price or Cat Brooks thinks, that’s it: people are compelled into criminal behavior by a racist, vicious and violent society. These criminals, they allege, truly have no control over their behavior. In the minds of wokes, “equity” means the same thing Sapolsky meant when he said “No one has earned or is entitled to being treated better or worse than anyone else.” Price and Brooks say the same thing, and then they apply this appalling notion of “equity” across the board: everybody deserves to have everything they want. If you’re a shiftless drifter who wants a big house in Piedmont, then you should have that house, because “No one has earned or is entitled to being treated better or worse than anyone else.” If you’re Carroll Fife desiring a place to live, you can squat in someone else’s house because “No one has earned or is entitled to being treated better or worse than anyone else.” If you’re poor but want a big-screen TV, go ahead and steal it from Best Buy because “No one has earned or is entitled to being treated better or worse than anyone else.”
This is the pathological abortion that wokeism has brought into the world, a perversion of justice and common sense whose destructive force we witness all around us in Oakland. The place it festers most virulently is on college campuses, where super-liberals like Sapolsky publish their ridiculousness. We need to hold them to account. We need to speak truth to power and let these people know that they’re WRONG. Professor Sapolsky, cease your useless, pointless bullshit about “free will,” come down from your ivory tower, and get with the human program: we’re all responsible for our actions. Society has the right to hold everyone to account, unless they’re severely mentally ill (and that’s a whole other conversation). We’re losing our civilization because we’ve allowed the notion of personal responsibility—a vital underpinning of humanity since the beginning—to become cancelled out by the Sapolskys, Prices and Brookses of this world, who seem determined to wreck our society and replace it with their own nightmare woke vision of anarchy.
Steve Heimoff