WOKE 101 - What is it and why are people against it

I’ve heard people talk about “woke” for years, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently saying “woke 1 was crazy”. Can you explain what woke is to me?

Let’s start with a simple explanation. Woke describes how the left has changed in the last 15 years or so, much as how the right has taken on entirely new form in that time. As the changes have been a complex mix of ideology and psychological behaviour, a catch-all name stuck more than describing one or the other.

Where did the term come from? Originally “stay woke” was meant to denote social consciousness, as if seeing through the oppressive forces and propaganda while others were “sleeping”. This was especially relevant in hip hop for example since “social conscious” rap was a genre speaking to more serious issues like poverty than rappers making songs about girls and money. Therefore they could be described as more “woke” rappers. Since then the concept eventually made its way to describe the left’s type of behaviour this era.

Ok, so I gather woke people are more socially conscious, but is that a bad thing? What do they believe?

The woke see Western society as fundamentally and systemically racist, homophobic/transphobic, and patriarchal. They see the wealth gap between white and black people, arrest rates in black community, wage gap between men and women as examples of the one side “rigging the game” in their favor. Thus the rise of wokeism coincided with Black Lives Matter protests as they saw the relationship between police and black people as systemically oppressive. Likewise with MeToo movement, they looked to out people in Hollywood exploiting power differences, such as offering actresses roles for sex or having sexual harassment covered up.

A key to their beliefs is they are against political neutrality, as they believe this is letting the powerful side win. They see it as the equivalent of having cancer and not treating it and that a more aggressive, active movement putting pressure on not just conservatives but the apolitical neutral people is the chemo of this analogy. In the case of race, this means they actually don’t believe in “colorblind”, as they think that is not enough to upset the current power sysmte. As a result they favor returning to treating people differently by race, but now favouring minorities more as a way of balancing out the effects the previous eras like Jim Crow and slavery.

You still haven’t convinced me how this is bad yet

Here are common criticisms of woke -

- The woke have increased illiberalism. In the 1900s liberalism only went in one direction as religion’s hold decreased, eventually leading to relatively free speech laissez-faire 90s and 00s. The woke want to increase social rules and punishment for those who break them. With freshly constructed mazes in people’s heads about what they’re supposed to believe or say to appease the new age moralists, we have already seen damage in people freely expressing themselves and communicating with each other. Our entire usage of language is being shifted because the woke are so committed to pushing their beliefs that instead of using words to communicate, it becomes their form social engineering and pressure disguised as communicating.

- The woke may support racial diversity, but they terrible for ideological and intellectual diversity. The truth is, if they did it the right way they could actually win some of these arguments like how we need to restructure the police system or the trans debate, but they are not interested in arguing them, they believe it’s a matter of fact their side is good and opponents it are evil.

- The woke do not respect boundaries or disagreement. Their mission is to agitate and put pressure on everyone at all times to push them in left wing direction, even the people that want to be left alone and simply focus on their interest and bills. They believe their ideology cannot work without everyone collectively being a part of it. The woke could very well win the argument in the end on issues like trans people or restructuring the policing system, the problem is they don’t want want to have the debate and expect it to be treated as matter of fact that their side is right and any opposition is evil.

- The woke reduce and label people according to their race, gender and sexuality groups. After great progress was made by end of 1900s to judge people by their character and actions instead of those things, the woke’s ideology believe merely treating people equally is not enough compared to actively favouring the side that was oppressed in previous centuries, thus this leads to treating people by race more again. For many of us anti woke people, it makes more sense to claim judging people by their race which is immutable characteristic shared by millions of different people, is wrong in either direction.

- The woke have largely adopted utilitarianism. It’s why they have no qualms about using censorship or public social punishment, why they often chose sheer emotional force as their primary tool, like shaming a public company or figure until they agree with the lefts views. All of it in the end, can be justified as “it helps the our side win and end the systemically racist and oppressive system we feel is there”.

But radical levels of utilitarianism is a dangerous concept to mess with. Predicting the future is hard so mixing up the greater good and bad is a serious risk, and at some point you can come up with justification for anything. The evil things in history were never done by people who thought they were evil, they alway thought it was for the greater good.

Hold on, this is getting pretty complex. I thought anti woke people just didn’t like Helen of Troy being black?

A good way to see the arguments about racial swap casting as it’s kind of the “casual” anti woke criticism, and the tip of the iceberg. While concerns about the woke having a boundaries problem and trying to push politics in everything are real, it’s true that sometimes the anti woke complaints can be more annoying than the wokeness was in the first place. The real problem isn’t so much the race swapping, that’s just small, mostly meaningless symptom of the the ideological belief system behind it.

And thus one of the reasons wokeness has affected our culture so much. The amount of true blue believers in woke do not have to be that big, before it triggers corporations trying to make money appealing to them, politicians trying to get votes from them, social media accounts trying to increase their followers, clickbait journalists trying desperately to get a woke follower to read their article. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “woke 1 was crazy”, this was part of why it was crazy, because all these extra signalling elements were mixed in with the true believers, or people who recognized there was a fresh ideological energy behind wokeness and simply wanted to get on that feeling. Around the late 2010s, this mania snowballed and took a life of its own. We don’t want people to be caught in a online French Revolution-esque mania (with the cancelled people at end of 2010s being like social media beheadings). We just want our more left wing friends to come back and be normal people we can talk to again.

So is wokeness, or at least woke 1 "over"?

No, the only thing that’s changed about woke is the dominant subject online is no longer 2010s centric ones like BLM or cancelling celebrities, and instead has spent much of this decade on international wars. But largely they have used the exact same tactics, favouring emotional pressure over intellectual debate and labelling and ostracizing opponents as evil, with utilitarianism once again the backing that they think it’s the best way to help the side they feel is oppressed win.

Here’s the thing. Even if what you say is true and their tactics can be a bit misguided, I still think the woke are better than the Republicans right now

That makes it even more important to stand up against wokeness! Not only does wokeness have these flaws, but it’s not successful politically. Before what we can call the woke era, the Democrats won 4 of 6 presidential elections from the 90s to 10s and a center left type of view seemed ascendent going forward. Since then, Republicans have won 2 of 3 with an aggressively right wing candidate. Wokeness has been the best thing to happen to the far right and causes many people to turn to them after being alienated by their views, and being censored is often seen as the more transgressive and "cooler" side. Not only has it thrown gas on their fire, but the religious right are biding their time waiting to make their big comeback too now that wokeism has pushed people away from the left. To some conservative influencers their dream of defeating the woke would not mean going back to 90s and 00s laissez-faire, instead they argue that era was the firstmistake and only way to stop the left is to turn away from that liberalism and towards religion.

Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?

In short, a lot of this is about Western civilization. The woke has evidently decided it is poisoned and corrupted and be must be torn down and replaced. Supporting anti wokeism means being a defender of Western civilization. There is much more that could be said about the positives Western civilization have had for people and that not every unsuccessful or unhappy person is a reflection of the system’s failure, but on the whole the woke have adopted a new ideological alternative to Western culture. Thus the tension between those two sides is creating a cultural warfare much greater than previous eras where both sides agreed on Western culture but split into more left wing and right wing leaning ones in that context.