Rivian: Woke Design of Levelling

by Friedrich Hansen (June 2025)

Since time immemorial, gender has been horizontal while sex was and will always be vertical in orientation. This is because it is God given and ensconced in auditive guilt culture. By contrast, same sex attraction descends into Gnostic shame culture caught in the visual paradigm. Now, the diminishing of the vertical dimension originates with Spinoza, the Renaissance edition of Gnosticism that underwrites “secularism sans restraint” and created the flat world of pantheist immanence where “all is being animated.”

This continues today with multiple horizontal sexual embodiment all of which are desperately attempting to acquire identity by cutting our Western umbilical cord reaching into divine transcendence. This is all about unnerving attempts at ending the world of divinely ordained complementarity which is intrinsic to human sexuality, while appeasing to the ultimately pagan philosophy of sameness which issues from the horizontal secular mindset that is mired in biologism. That race is being replaced by gender does not improve anything. By contrast, the divine vertical order is being maintained by what the late Jonathan Sacks called “the dignity of difference.” When biblical complementarity is turned inward as a consequence of the Protestant habit that reigned for 500 years since the Reformation, then love turns into pagan self love or Hellenistic Narcissism.

This seems to be reflected in the minimalist design of the new electric car with the name Rivian. It seems to appeal to the new green gospel of visual humility in the face of alleged scarce earthly resources, among them petrol, food and sex. Seen in this light, same sex is anticipatory as well as self defeating. For the frugal version of love comes by default with promiscuity. You can only get that much out of the other if your partner shares you with so many others. Gays in their lifetime usually have hundreds of partners in their preferred closet encounters and thus spoil love with inflationary emotional pressures which tend to revert into painful sadomasochism. This draws love into the downward spiral of the emotionally disinvested flat world of wokism.

The name Rivian—itself sounding like “river” —suggests that the haptic design of the vehicle can muster the virtual wetlands of lachrymose emotionalism which we associate with wokery. Also the name “Rivian” sounds like the epithet of an antique warrior or godhead immersed in fluidity and the change of appearance. In this sense of the postmodern “anything goes” has finally arrived in the automobile sector corresponding with gender fluidity. This might destine the E-vehicle as the first woke car. The mega-trend of horizontal DEI has seemingly reached the US car industry with a kind of postmodern design, incarnated and exemplified by the new all-electric car called Rivian. With its emphasis on the horizontal design it corresponds nicely with the cultural trend of levelling all hierarchies just as the previous horizontal flattening of the varieties of sexual desire followed by the rarefication of sublimatory energies. Thus the new Rivian appears to represent perfectly the aesthetic example for woke design. Since wokism, like racism, is about the naturalist or biologist misunderstanding of the biblical concept of marriage and sex, it also limits on biological grounds the competition for the best rewards in sports, culture and the sciences. Just like race, gender is a deterministic concept that disincentivizes competition through racial or gender quotas. Strictly horizontal design seems to indicate a rejection of any verticality or hierarchy inherent in religion or state relations involving authority. All this is being reversed by the equalizing zeal which underlies the horizontal terminology of race and gender. Needless to say that both attract people by diminishing the religious demands on sublimation and verticality.

The front lights of the Rivian are arranged almost under the symbolic waterline of suppressed upward aspirations. This impression is sustained by anodyne or gender neutral features such as “equity” between front and back design answering to aesthetic demands which are part and parcel for gender equity for hetero- and homosexuals alike. The car is supposed to master waterways too and is fit for the ultimate green catastrophe including a replay of the great deluge due to rising sea levels. Like wokism, electricity is binary, mechanistic and polar but not complementary and organic.

Now headlights in times of body politics and the gender craze do not look like natural eyes anymore but rather like mechanistic slots. Or do these imitate the more horizontal Asian type of eyes reflecting the shift of the industrial epicentre of car production to East Asia?

We also need to consider the consequences of binary gender seemingly on the way out and with the religious paradigm of difference being overshadowed by sameness. In this vain the gaze and hearing are being subordinated to the sense of touch and emotionalism thanks to woke identity routines. This is echoed in the design of the Rivian as mentioned above.

The de-emphasis of the spiritual sphere seems to have resulted not only in the emergence of the corporeal reductionist gender discourse but also in a return of the racial disputes. This happens despite the fact that racial features had been thoroughly dismantled as “biologistic” in the work done by Stephen Jay Gould, “The Mismeasure of Man” (1980). The same is true for the term of gender in distinction to the millennial old term of sex. Gender or DEI research gives us absolutely nothing of worth but is rather intoxicating academic discourse.

No longer can you recognize a female if you see one because there are trans people, i.e. men who first imitate and then pretend to be women—itself the result of more than a century into “sexual identity” politics. This is all about the Renaissance climb down from the auditive to the visual senses and then well over hundred years ago in the decadent period further descending to the haptic or sexual paradigm. Sex and gender sanctioned the turn from genuine human expressions starting with the Renaissance toward mimicry or mindless imitation which became a force with group think inimical to social or national identities. The primary identity of human personhood is religious and has been brought into the world by Jerusalem in late antiquity and it is tied to a combination of names for family and offspring. First names carry a likeness of the soul and the coherence of the family over the generations. As a gift for the future they are usually repeated across the generations ideally between grandparents and grandchildren in order to actualize memories. Family names are supposed to stay the same over many generations and used to create strong vertical identities throughout traditional families. They reflect the power of creation which is matched by the biblical right to give names not only to one’s offspring but to the divinely created worlds at large. All this does not hold for genuinely sterile same sex relations who for the most part remain childless. For only multi-millionaires can afford to adopt children these days.

But to be enchanted by the attraction of the opposite sex is no longer deemed a given as solipsism and same sex relations are embraced like ambrosia. That the same sex crowd was granted marriage is an affront to all which brought about the ascension of the monotheist culture of the West and surely it is about to ruin Western innovation the lead of which went already to East Asia. This is because the Western languages that supported culture and science is being ruined by political correctness and woke censorship. The use of pronouns has been turned into a complicated matter which lends itself to the pre-meditated sensibilities of gender politics. The religious enchantment of the soul in the presence of the other sex has been largely denounced as heterosexual chauvinism and love has come under constant attack of woke policing.

My explanation for this would be that gender like race is a miscarriage of divinely ordained humanity which is about to be destroyed by the reification of the human soul with sexual politics. The Phallic and more recently the gender discourse are certainly contributing to the decline of the West and sexual coming out is corrupting the decisive sublimity of Western global leadership. One example of the destructive power of race and gender discourse is, again, reification which then results in the substitution of religious jealousy with secular envy as for instance Freudian “penis-envy”. The important difference between both is that jealousy is a divinely maintained faculty of love. God’s biblical jealousy is the bedrock of love and family and it is inimical to reification yet famously the mother of wokism, the student uprising of the 60ies, dedicated itself to eradicate jealousy and embrace promiscuity. These indulgences of the sexual revolution can probably never be fully reversed.

Anglophone exceptionalism and pragmatism rested considerably on its firm resistance toward revolutionary politics and its insistence on sanitary empiricism as Edmund Burke has shown in his never ageing “Reflections on the French Revolution”. Burke’s elaborations on the “sublime” gives us unique insights into the robust resilience and tolerance of the Western mind that emerged primarily in the Anglosphere. According to 17^th century Hebraist John Selden and the cultural historians Milton and Gertrud Himmelfarb, English philosemitism played a formative role in the crafting of the unwritten and evolving constitutional process of the English speaking peoples. Among the philosemitic concepts were John Seldon’s many contributions on central issues of public life and English common sense.

This can be demonstrated with the religious differences between jealousy pertaining to humans and envy pertaining to things which have been almost lost in postmodernity thanks to visual-haptic or sexual identity politics that elevated emotions to the status of the arbiter of public life. Gone are the genuinely religious distinctions between the sublime and the profane and hetero- and homosexual relations. There is no more ugly bickering than between gay partners simply because they can rarely be abused from promiscuity. For same-sex love the old saying goes quantity serves as the surrogate for quality.

This is resulting in toilet quickies all of which are nothing but escape routes, fake excitement and instrumental short changes. The inevitable dissatisfaction of toilet encounters drives the inflationary pressure of love towards violence which is then covered up through speech codes. The latter serve no other purpose than bragging and at the same time hiding deep disappointment and lasting dissatisfaction. This then becomes the wellspring of endless talk about sexual diversity in the chattering class.  No doubt all that is meant to cater to non-denominational pagans including exhibitionist, sadists, nudists, but also addicts to sexually diversity all of whom form the street mob of postmodern sans-culottes better known as ridiculously ostentatious pride marches.

What are we to make of the gender revolution then? It is not a persuasion of hell-bound heathens and fanatics who tend to project their inner moral chaos onto the environment and keep feeding into miasmatic climate catastrophism? In this manner green politics is the perfect equivalent to the pagan gnostic cults of late antiquity. Then as now pagan gnosticism is aiming to destroy the Judaeo-Christian foothold onto divinely ordained reality. This persuasion surely depends on the confirmatory deed, the biblical concept of the Word or Promise becoming true which means acting on ones own word. This primacy of the word is being put to the point of absurdity by acting out ones same sex attraction.

The Rivian is streamlined to absorb visibly all emotional disturbances while projecting a bold face towards all that which feeds climate hysteria just as wokery hides trouble behind a perfectly visible facade. Above all else both intend to disown or incapacitate the religious auditive paradigm just as e-cars are sliding past the observer in unholy silence. Surely the vehicles horizontal design is loath of any divining as if it were the latest incarnation of the chariot myth. I have explained in earlier pieces that the chariot myth is the genuine vehicle of shame culture which predates Moses and Jesus and famously knows no redemptive deed and no guilt.

This is hinted at by a design that seems to be inspired by a principal denial of the vertical axis of guilt and monotheism and thus by default directs us toward a gnostic horizontal shame culture, a fact that is being corroborated by the perspicuous absence of straight forms and character in favour of hybrid solutions of all kinds, of mixed packages. This undoubtedly caters to gender neutrality giving the impression of pondering androgyne imagination or gender transition. It seems to be more attractive to women and clearly excels in the lack of muscularity and male attributes—sure this comes with the industrial transitioning from fast male roaring sport cars seemingly addicted to oil and heavy metal.  On top of that comes the managed decline in technological sophistication with electric vehicles which seems to have handed to developing countries like China the role of innovative leadership in EVs with price tags up to half of the Wests. Part of this tragedy is the fight against combustion cars by the environmental fundamentalists who these days come under the name of counter-enlightened emotionally driven, woke Greens.

What is woke? Its main agenda is about extending power not through intellectual refinement but via sex and corporeality driving the venerable evening lands into the fishy realms of toilet wars with fights over sexual expressionism and diversification. This is reflected in todays contentious gender politics which keep undermining family, congregation and nation. All of these are traditionally vertical in orientation, namely in search of divine inspiration.

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Dr. Friedrich Hansen is a physician and writer. He has researched Islamic Enlightenment in Jerusalem and has networked on behalf of the Maimonides Prize. Previous journalistic and academic historical work in Germany, Britain and Australia. He is currently working in Germany and Australia.

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