We risk becoming slaves to a dystopian woke culture

The year is 2121 and Western civilisation has collapsed, sunk into a quagmire of extravagance from which it could not extricate itself. Humans are now slaves to wokeness, how did we get here asks Oni Oviri.

The collapse was deemed inevitable as society diminished rapidly through self-inflicted cultural revolution. Spoilt, pampered, no longer needing to consider the logistics of how to feed, clothe or house themselves, a new generation of 'conscious' Crusaders had swept through western civilisation more swiftly than the bubonic plague. These Crusaders minds had turned idle and dissatisfaction had set in. They brooded relentlessly, blaming their and societies maladies on ancient civilisations. The 18th to the 20th century particularly remained firmly on their radar, aggrieved at empire, imperialism, industrialisation, nationalism, globalism, slavery, digitisation, which became their shibboleth.

Imitating their ancestors of the 21st century, these 22nd century Crusaders rampaged across western society, setting out on punitive missions to tackle perceived injustices.

They loot and tear down landmarks and monuments erected 100 years prior. A statue memorialising Apple CEO Tim Cook in Times Square is yanked down by these furious Crusaders who protest the ecological devastation Apple caused in pursuit of Congo's rare-earth metals.

Facebook and Google's headquarters are ransacked. Western museums filled with pre-historic artefacts- smartphones, laptops, electric cars, are incinerated. The three big C's, Cocoa, Coffee and Cotton are prohibited for their historic exploitation of poor workers. Avocado's had long been banned, as a result of the ignorance surrounding the great 'Cartel Terror' in South America. The Crusaders despise all these items. Each harbour an untold, tragic story of supply chain abuse, of injustice and brutal treatment of the 21st century slaves who produced these commodities.

Having endured decades of climate emergencies, these Crusaders believed a new ice-age was long overdue. They mandated the reading of the early environmentalist James Lovelock's book 'The Revenge of Gaia', becoming to the 22nd Century what Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' had been to the 20th Century. Freethinking historians and writers are pilloried, apprehended and locked up as perverts or deviants if they do not follow the Crusaders cause. Books written by Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Dickens and JK Rowling had long been banned for their sexual stereotyping. Across all institutions the pronouns 'he' and 'she' and words like mother and breast-feeding are banned. The children's cartoon Dumbo and Tom and Jerry joined the Disney's Censored Eleven list, for its use of African-American vernacular English, although the same English was widely adopted by these Crusaders in the use of the term 'woke'.

Without books and historical context, confirmation bias became the norm, with the Crusaders orthodoxies authenticated by their Papacy from the founding conclave in San Francisco.  Reasoning was replaced by an expansionism doctrine to create a monastic, Western social idyll, where a critical commandment was a vow of silence if your opinion did not obey their own. The use of any wildly exaggerated 'ism' had become standard practice to shut down debate, from which there was no return. But not Stoicism, which was frowned upon. How dare people set themselves above others because they did not suffer? Victimhood, which had started to become fashionable a hundred years earlier, had become the default psychological setting, propagated by online reformatories delivering re-education training.

Bored of campaigns that had only brought diminishing returns to their 21st Century forbears – environmental degradation, technological advancement and such like, these Crusaders sought new issues to tackle in their battle to achieve this idealised hypersensitive utopia. Only one new right was allowed; not the far-right, as non-conformists were often dismissed as being, but the right not to be offended – not a right the US' founding fathers ever troubled themselves with.

Humour; a once historic ideology that used to be the soft power of 20th century Western civilisation, that was a major contributing element to winning the Second World War and remained a lethal weapon in disarming ideological earnest and deadly serious opponents, was banned. The whole point of humour then was to take things to extremes, create absurd situations which was instinctively recognised as untrue. But no longer. A joke used to be just a joke, until it became woke, when it became not funny at all.

In this collapsed quagmire of society, it was finally animals that reigned supreme, as foreseen by Orwell. First the use of the word 'pet' was banned, deemed as condescending to them, then a ban on animal names being used as insults, as it reinforced the myth that humans were superior. Finally, meat was forbidden for consumption – instead synthetic alternatives were imposed to tackle the scourge of the 21st century climate change.

But phew! That was only a dream! So glad we live in an age of reason and enlightenment…