Woke Ideology
Contextual Quote
"When feminists or adjacent social justice types talk about being woke, they often refer to a moment of realization that shifts their entire world view. They stop seeing the world in the way they used to see it, and instead they see every interaction between every individual as a nested system of power play, with each group attempting to dominate other groups, and each individual acting out these tendencies to dominate. Every individual becomes classified inside an “intersectional matrix of privilege and marginalization” based on group identities and the relative amounts of “power” each of these groups is perceived to have. When they hear words, they apply this cognitive filter to the words they hear, and then derive different meanings from the words than someone who isn’t “woke” would derive. Their ability to interact with non-woke others sometimes suffers, because people outside this woke sphere of influence aren’t speaking the same language. People talk past each other. No argument can be resolved, no agreement can be made, across this linguistic boundary while one interlocutor is wearing these sunglasses, and the other one isn’t. Just like the movie. There’s a scene in They Live where Nada gets into a protracted fist fight with one of the other characters who refuses to wear the sunglasses. Only after they beat the tar out of each other does the other character put them on, see Nada’s world view, and then off they go to kill aliens. We now have entire fields of academia dedicated to installing these magic sunglasses onto college students. But in the end, donning these sunglasses remains a choice that people either make, or don’t make."
- Handwaving Freakoutery [1]
Description
Noah Carl:
"I’ve previously defined it as a belief system “which sees identity groups like sex and race as the primary units of society; which attributes to some groups the status of victims and to others the status of oppressors; and which posits that various ‘structural’ and ‘systemic’ forces stymie members of the former groups while conferring ‘privilege’ on members of the latter”.
Of course, these aren’t the only tenets of woke ideology, but I’d say they’re the most important ones. Another element of woke ideology, which follows logically from the propositions above, is a fierce hostility to any claims about biological differences between groups. Sexes and races are held to be “social constructs” that society has made and can remake. Hence woke ideology is to some extent a culmination of the centuries-old leftist project of breaking down “arbitrary” social barriers in the name of equality. (First it was nobility; then class; now it’s gender and race.)
However, there are some complications. For example, although sex and race are both “social constructs”, transgenderism (going from one sex to another) is considered good, whereas transracialism (going from one race to another) is very bad. Note that even going from the “oppressor” gender (male) to the “victim” gender (female) is permissible within woke ideology. But woe betide anyone going from an “oppressor” race (white) to a “victim” race (black)."
(https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/indicators-of-the-great-awokening)
Detailed Analysis
Augmented version of a progressive, emancipatory critique of the woke ideology.
Introduction
= this is best seen as a behavioral grammar or the patterns that explain judgments and behaviours based on the 24 episodes of the Benjamin Boyce documentary series at Evergreen State College in 2017
“Based on an extensive study of nearly two years of the original expressions of woke sentiments, I think we can distill the following principles that lay behind most of the communication and behavior we can witness by the adherents of this movement. I have preferred highlighting the inner consistency of the ideology rather than the inner contradictions.
“Every statement on my part is based on multiple elements of evidence, and is not just anecdotal, but crucially, it is not based on the theorization of Critical Race Theory, but on the actual practice on a day to day basis, as evidenced by incidents and recorded public discourse.”
The first source for confirming evidence are the events documented at Evergreen State College in 2017, documented in 24 episodes by Benjamin Boyce; For a quick summary, we recommend the 3-part documentary by Mike Nayna which focuses on the persecution of Brett Weinstein.
For the theoretical concepts, see our critical review of CRT theory by mostly progressive authors, via our Category: Identity Politics
— Michel Bauwens
The Oppressiveness of Choice and Freedom of Intersectionality
Non-Agentive Personal Identity: People are largely determined by their membership in human groups. These are characterized by biological markers that have social consequences, i.e. race, gender, etc ... Individuals may possess different markers that should be seen in addition to each other.
Non-Agentive Interpersonal Identity: How we are treated by life and society is largely a function of these markers. The ‘intersectional’ addition of these markers create a hierarchy between human beings in social settings, which consists of levels of power, and levels of oppression. In any human relation, there is one that oppresses and one that is oppressed. This is an inescapable human condition.
Group-Belonging Determined Historical Identity: People with less negative markers or more positive markers are privileged, not only in the present time but as a result of past privilege and oppression by people with the same characteristics. Thus, in the present, these groups must atone for the sins of their group in the past, and their future descendants will have to atone for the present generation. There is no end to this process. These processes should be institutionalized in the public and private sphere. Any dissent is illegitimate, and should be considered hate speech, even when it is expressed in the privacy of the home. Hatred of the oppressor by the oppressed can never be considered hate speech and should on the contrary be encouraged.
The Determinism of Power Imbalances
Personal Determinism: There can be no expression of individuality that is not determined by these markers, hence every expression by any person is exclusively an expression of power. Life and communication are power plays that can only be won or lost. Always look for inequality, there can be no equality between persons. Such oppressive power must continuously be met by a greater counter-power, and there is strength in number. Such behaviour should be publicly called out whenever and wherever possible.
Interpersonal Determinism: For an individual characterized by more of these ‘negative markers’, means to be oppressed and discriminated against, but also to have more experience and knowledge about the nature of human society. The true knowledge is always on the side of the oppressed individual, and having more markers of oppression means knowing more. This is not subject to discussion, and the expression of any feeling by the oppressed is the equivalent of unchallengeable truth.
Group-Based Historical Determinism: There can be no human relation that is not determined by these markers, hence every relation is always one of relative oppression. In any unequal relation, there is an oppressor that must atone and listen, and an oppressed that needs to be listened to in service of liberation. Neutrality is not an option. For example, if one is not constantly engaged in antiracist activity, one is effectively a racist. This can be applied to all markers. A ‘oppressor’ person must atone for the oppression by his group, and can do this through confession and admission of guilt, in a public setting, in which that person will be shamed; but can atone by becoming an ally of the oppressed. This engagement does not mean the oppressor can be liberated from his status, not now and not in the future. This is emphatically NOT a path of redemption, only of atonement, an equivalent to paying back an eternal debt.
Denial of the incommensurability of Individual Human Experience
Intersectional markers determine membership of groups that are hierarchically ranked according to their level of presumed oppression. Though determined by biological markers, these identities are political; A person that is part of such a group but does not express the presumed ideology of the group, is considered to be in betrayal of that group membership. For those that belong to a privileged group, when they express their sentiments, they express the power of the group, and the desire and need to maintain that power. They are not expressing anything that should be considered a authentically personal expression, unique to their person, that would express a complex personal history and agency.
From this follows that, people with privilege must know when to listen, and when to show their appreciation for the expression of oppression. At no time must they expect to be peers with active expressions of their sentiments, as these can only be sentiments of privilege.
Priority of the Periphery
Epistemic Priority of the Periphery: In all circumstances, people with more negative markers should be listened to, they have a gnosis, a knowledge, that is unattainable by people with less negative markers.
Moral Priority of the Periphery: Allyship actively excludes equality between privileged and underprivileged. Allyship is service to the underprivileged and their leaders. Failure to exhibit such obedience is a proof of oppressive behaviour.
Scientific Priority of the Periphery: Any research or research findings that question the truth of these premises must be suppressed, as they are expressions of privilege and hatred. Funding must be withheld, the data must not be available to the wider public and the research findings must be retracted. Scientists are responsible not just for their own findings of facts, but for the potential misinterpretations that they can generate. If some oppressed people misinterpret the findings, it is the researchers that should apologize and retract. Failure to do so should result in the loss of employment.
Perpetual Vulnerability And Its Solutions
Purity of the Oppressed: People who are oppressed cannot express phobia or hatred. This claim should not be interpreted as infalitizing people without privilege, nor as claiming that they are less fully human than people who can express phobia and hatred. Any claim that persons who are oppressed have expressed phobia or hatred is a misinterpretation of liberatory speech.
Inculpability of the Oppressed: Victims are allowed to use repressive and oppressive acts as they are in the service of liberation. Any expectation that victims not yell, swear, or berate others is “tone policing” and must be rejected as an imposition of norms that victims can never fully learn and, moreover, should never be expected to learn. This is not condescending or paternalistic, nor a way for those in power to keep victims from realizing their power in spaces to which access is contingent on conformity with conventions of decorum and respect. This is liberative. Because Western conventions of decorum and respect have perpetuated patriarchy and white hegemony, the standards themselves must be rejected and new standards put in their place.
Fragility of Called-Out Oppressors: Any person of privilege who disagrees with the above premises is expressing the emotional distress of being called out for his/her privileges. This distress can be expressed by critique and dissent, which should be seen as a manipulative expression of the desire to remain privileged; or by flight or silence. These persons should be convinced or forced to admit to their privilege and sanctioned if necessary.
The Call to Cancel: In order to obtain diversity and inclusion of the oppressed, we must exclude dissent, which is an expression of oppression. Words can hurt, words can kill, the experienced feelings of the victims are the unchallengeable standard of truth in these matters. The expression of disagreement by persons of privilege is an act of aggression against people without privilege. This includes asking for evidence or logical reasoning to substantiate any accusation. Requests for evidence are themselves an expression of privilege and oppression and should be vigorously suppressed. Disagreement with these premises is an expression of phobia or hatred and must be suppressed. Therefore, dissent should be policed and sanctioned.
The Uniqueness of Today’s Systemic Oppression
The Virtue of Historical Naïveté: The oppression of humanity started mostly 400 years ago, by the people of a particular race, except for gender oppression which precedes it and is the ultimate cause of all other forms of oppression. Previous oppressions, which were done by people who are oppressed, are largely immaterial to an understanding of reality today; these earlier forms only look repressive and are used to justify privilege today. Knowledge about these forms should not be encouraged.
The Primacy of the Present: Today, the system of oppression has reached its apex: there has never been a moment of greater oppression than today. Proofs to the contrary are merely a means to deny that reality and are themselves part of the oppression.
The Redefinition of Equity: The remedy against privilege and oppression is the implementation of equity, beginning now. Equity entails the elimination of any disparities between race-based or gender-based distributions in positions of power, in comparison to the general populace, if and only if those disparities favor people with privilege. Any disparities that do not favor people with privilege should be celebrated as the unique accomplishments of an historically oppressed people. Every institution should hire experts to initiative the overhaul of their programs in ways consistent with goals of equity, beginning immediately.
The Reallocation of Resources: To achieve equity, all resources, including speech rights, must be allocated according to the markers of group membership. Full equality of outcome should be the goal. Any meritocratic requirement is by definition oppressive. Math is oppressive and should be culturalized. Testing and exams are oppressive. Working and studying hard are markers of a culture of privilege and should be avoided. Degrees in any domain should reflect the relative weight of any population with markers of oppression.
Proportional Rights Can Solve Systemic Oppression
Re-Allocation of Rights: In any group meeting, anti-oppression processes should hold sway. This means that the people with the least privilege should at all times have priorities in terms of speech rights and allocation of other resources. People of privilege should always be humble and listen to people with less privilege. In group settings of people without privilege, they should only speak if asked so. Since they are the oppressors, they should never see themselves as equals in such group settings, but as people that must atone. Silence is advised, unless one is asked to express agreement. Under no circumstances should oppressive disagreements be expressed, except as confessions of guilt.
Pre-Justification of the Oppressed: People without privilege have the right to express their lived experiences in any form, including expressions of rage, destruction of property (that this is actual violence is merely a matter of perception, violence originating from victims is not true violence), and the occasional expression of personal violence (systemic causality should not be understood as the structures being bad and needing to change, but it should be understood that every single participant is subjectively evil and responsible for all past, present and future crimes of their oppressive group, that is exclusively what ‘systemic’ means). Any attempt to constrain property destruction or other expressions of rage is “peace policing” and should be rejected. All expressions of rage should be treated as cathartic and part of the process of emancipation.
Woke Re-Education: People of privilege are socialized in a culture of privilege, and their expressions should be maximally interpreted as statements of power and contempt. They should be educated into the details of potential microaggressions and practice internal policing of the tone and expression of their speech and thinking. Microaggressions are defined by the people who declare to be victims of it. Intention is immaterial. It is paramount to interpret every potential microaggression in the most negative possible way, and argue without hesitation that it results from bad intentions. There are no innocent micro-aggressions, they are tactics of oppression.
Preventative Woke Education: To reduce the degree to which privilege is inculcated from a young age, people with privilege markers must have reduced access to resources and speech rights in daycare and education facilitates. They should nevertheless be reminded that people of privilege, no matter their age or personal experience, are oppressors by virtue of the privileges of their ancestors. Our educational institutions must reflect this reality and must actively educate people about liberation, by suppressing privilege and people with privilege. There can not be an equality of speech rights for the privileged.
Sex and Gender Idealism
Sexual differentiation and determinism does not exist; men exist and they are oppressors, women do not really exist, or if they exist, they exist through mere declaration of chosen identity. Gender identity is the choice of any individual, based on a simple statement that can change at any moment. This is expressed by a choice of pronouns that is obligatory speech for all other people. People who refuse intimate relations with such self-identified are expressing their hatred of difference. Gender transitions must be encouraged without any interference.
Separate is More Equal
Racial Segregation, Yes: Race is the primary expression of differentiation. The mixing of race in interpersonal relationships should be avoided, especially between oppressors and oppressed. Adoption of children of another race should be interpreted as an expression of oppression.
Intersectional Segregation, Yes: To avoid oppression, inter-group relations should be segregated. Meetings should be held between people of the same group characteristics to prevent privilege from intimidating the free expression of feelings of oppression. The ideal society without privilege should be organized as a system where every individual belongs to the proper intersectional group and receives societal resources according to their membership in these groups. These groups should maximally organize themselves without interference and contact with other groups, especially groups with privilege.
No Cultural Appropriation: Oppressed groups create cultures and cultural expressions that are their group property. Emulating these cultural expressions is an act of theft and cultural appropriation by privileged groups and should be discouraged and sanctioned. Practicing yoga is an act of active colonialism, dressing inappropriately should be called out; hairstyles should be racially and culturally determined.
Emancipatory Uniformity: Individuals within these groups should express the culture of their group and not express the cultural and political ideas expressed by people and cultures of privilege. Identity is above all determined by the group and is political. If you have biological markers consistent with a historically oppressed group but disagree with these premises, then your biological markers do not qualify you for membership of the group. In that case, your obvious biological identity is fake and your behaviour is tantamount to treason. Identity is not really biological; it is political, in the sense that carrying biological markers carries with it political obligations of group agreement.
Moving Forward
Perpetual Revolution: Given the length of the period of oppression in the past, it is not realistic to determine the end of this type of societal organization in any foreseeable future. It is for all practical purposes, meant to be the final societal form.
Systematic Denial of Class Aspects: Always ask for racial (‘white’) privilege, never ask for class or money privilege. Any recognition that racial outcomes are influenced by class determinants, which would suggest commonality of struggle between the workers and the oppressed regardless of specific biological markers, should be minimized. Whenever possible, all data should be interpreted as reinforcing the narrative of racial and gender and other forms of intersectional oppression and exploitation.
No Holds Barred Engagement: Any critique of the above premises, in part or in total, should be actively fought. If possible, these deviant people should be called in, and have a chance to confess. If not, they should be actively cancelled and lose their right to employment and expression. These people cannot be allowed to oppress by their dissent.
Exclusive Lens of Power and Privilege: When you encounter critique, never forget it is exclusively a matter of power and privilege, that comes from an ill intention. Do not look for any other form of intention as privilege excludes good intentions.
The Woke Duty to Denounce: Actively seek out potential hidden expressions of these ill intentions and call them out when you find them. If they are not readily available, seek them out in the online archives of social media, no matter how singular or old they are. Do not let these targets defend themselves under any circumstances and the defenses itself are expressions of oppression. Under no circumstances can these sins of expression or omission be forgiven. Lack of denunciation of privilege and oppression is a sure sign of ill intent. Never choose any charitable interpretation, as their true intention is hidden, and as a person without privilege, your interpretation will be the right one. People of privilege do not suffer, and cannot really be harmed, so do not hesitate.
No Right to Comfort: If people with privilege seem to suffer during this social transformation, you should see it as a rebalancing of the scales, for the sins of their forefathers and their own in their earlier life." Given all the pain they have inflicted — intentionally and accidentally — oppressors have no right to comfort. Do not let them weaponize their tears to expropriate emotional labor from you or, especially, from any oppressed peoples. Do not empathize, as their ancestors did not empathize with you. That was their time; this is yours.
Characteristics
1. By the Red Goat Collective, published in Counterpunch:
21 Fallacies that Fuel Cancel Culture.
1) Optics are more important than Substance.
Worry more about how things look from the outside, and less about what’s happening on the inside—be it a meeting, an organization, an event, a relationship, or an artwork. External appearances are not even ‘external’ anymore, since such optics, with the help of social media, quickly become internal factors as well. A tweet from a private meeting can start a public firestorm that will consume an organization even before said meeting is completed. Whereas it might have once been possible to explore the nuances of complex matters internally, admitting rough edges and testing unorthodox interpretations in private before deciding on public positions or precise language for broader consumption, this line between ‘public’ and ‘private’ has collapsed. Anyone attending a meeting might shave a sharp splinter from the draft party platform and send it flying as a deadly public blow dart in an instant. Therefore, we must now hold every ‘private’ gathering—every meeting or seminar, every moment, each sentence—to the same public optical standard we would use for an official press conference. No word, phrase, or idea that can be decontextualized or excerpted—tik tok-ed or tweeted—to imply something ‘offensive’ or ‘problematic’ should be allowed, even in private. The enforced loss of spontaneity (and honesty) is a small price to play for making sure we aren’t made to look like fools or bigots. Better to strangle internal discussion than to take a public dart in the neck.
2) Engagement equals endorsement; Association is complicity.
To engage someone in public conversation means you are endorsing all their (potentially problematic) ideas or associations, or at least making light of them—even those ideas that are not part of whatever conversation occurs. Thus, an interlocutor must be deemed ‘safe’ of compromising statements or associations prior to such engagement. If you or your organization don’t have the time or resources to research all the ideas and statements of a potentially ‘controversial’ person ahead of time, well, then maybe you should just not bother engaging them at all. After all, merely being associated (even privately) with a person deemed problematic is enough to compromise you. It is thus better to cut ties with problem people than to sustain contact with them, since the influence of association can only pull in one direction: the ‘bad’ one. The idea that your engagement might encourage positive change in the person deemed problematic, or at least help keep that person from further sliding in the problematic direction, is naïve, at best. Worse, the idea that such association might help the rest of us better understand the context or incorrect ideas that gave rise to the problem in the first place insultingly implies we don’t already know enough to pass judgment. In short: it’s just not possible to do something good with someone bad. Cut ‘em loose.
3) Conversations can’t change problematic people; Political opponents can’t be won over.
If a person opposes us now, they’ll most likely oppose us forever. It’s not possible that discussion with ‘problematic’ figures might give the person in question a chance to clarify, correct, contextualize, qualify, or walk back troubling ideas. Bad ideas can’t be deflated or improved through engagement or ideological struggle; they must be de-platformed. It’s not possible—or not worth taking seriously as possibility—that such people could have, even at one and the same time, multiple views, values, interests, priorities, associations, or commitments that conflict with one another, with some pointing towards a better way forward, others holding such progress back, or with some ideas being residual remnants reflecting that person’s history, but not necessarily their future. People don’t change. They are static and self-identical. Disregard that dialectical bullshit about people as constantly BECOMING relative to what they HAVE BEEN and what they MIGHT BE. People just are what they ARE. Those the enemy has persuaded are lost to us forevermore. Say goodbye to your Trumpy uncle.
4) Problematic views and acts flow from malice or monstrosity, not mere error.
Why give a person the benefit of the doubt when you can cast them as your conscious and mortal enemy, a living embodiment of all you seek to oppose and destroy? Forget that quaint notion that we should “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance.” It’s best to assume that the do-er of a problematic thing was, at the time of said offense, in possession of all relevant information, the full range of opinion, and had their senses about them, and yet still—even after all of that—pursued this bad idea or act as the one that they still wanted or needed to take. Circumstances don’t mitigate wrongdoing. In the off chance that an offending person was not in sound mind or body at the time of an act in question, well, that’s tough shit: they should have known better than to put themselves in a position where they would be likely to fuck up. If their sources of information, opinion, or logic are flawed, well, that’s their fault too. There is no need to factor where someone has come from into our judgment of them today. Good People don’t make Bad Mistakes, therefore, making an error deemed Bad is proof of being a Bad Person. Talk of mitigation is liberal bullshit that upholds an oppressive order of privilege.
5) People can be reduced to their worst action or idea, without doing them an injustice.
Why assume that something bad someone has said or done was an outlying mistake when it can be seen instead as the expression of their essential being? People’s worst moments express their truest selves. (Indeed, for every shitty thing they’ve done that we’re aware of, there are probably a dozen shittier things still unknown to us—we need to factor in these ‘unknown knowns’ as well.) Further, to call attention to the good work that people have done (or might do in the future) as a matter of contextualizing a misstep is to make light of their shittiness. The aftermath of harm is not a time for ‘balance’ or ‘perspective’—and, let’s face it, these days we are always in the aftermath of harm. The only thing that ought to be discussed once a wrong is reported is that wrong; any other element of a person’s work, character, or history is at best irrelevant. Worse, mentioning the ‘other side’ is insulting and insensitive to those who feel they have been harmed and understandably want ‘justice’. It is fine and just to essentialize those you oppose.
6) The passage of time is irrelevant.
A wrong committed decades ago is just as relevant as one that happened last week. There is no reason to assume that someone who did something shitty years back (be it donning an insensitive Halloween costume or acting like an asshole at a party) has taken time to think about it, or to improve their conduct or philosophy in the interim. Certainly, there is no obligation to investigate whether someone has made steps to improve since those events years ago; it’s perfectly ok to treat them now as if they are the person they were then—or that someone told you they were then, since maybe you weren’t around when whatever went down went down. Since our movement seldom seeks to put people in actual prison—that would mean cooperating with the police state—formal sentencing never occurs…but also must never end. People can and should be banished and branded for life, regardless of what they have done to improve themselves or address the relevant issues. We must assume the worst if we are to keep our spaces safe. People don’t change, so there’s no need to give them a chance to. Debts to victims or to society can never be repaid. But a culture of permanent excommunication will prevent harmful future behavior and help past victims heal.
7) A threat to ideological comfort is a threat to safety.
Being subjected to challenging, provocative, offensive, or incorrect ideas puts the person hearing them in jeopardy. Intellectual discomfort causes harm. Therefore, it is ok—even imperative—to exert prior restraint, up to and including prohibition and exclusion of discomfiting ideas or words (or the people seen as likely to express them). People have a right not to be offended—not just a right to respond reasonably to what offends. Moments of intellectual provocation are not ‘teachable moments’; they are triggers for trauma. Making people think too hard about difficult subjects becomes a kind of violence. In particular, people’s ideas about their own perceived identity or oppression must not be challenged. People from historically oppressed groups especially cannot and ought not be subjected to arguments or debates about such topics, in print or in-person, regardless of the merit or content of the criticism expressed. Ideas that people have grown attached to should be viewed as parts of their physical or spiritual being. For someone to abstract and criticize said ideas—even for purposes of temporary analysis—amounts to a kind of ‘attack.’ Therefore, it is the job of good ‘allies’ to protect oppressed or traumatized people, not only from clear and present physical or institutional attacks, but from intellectual or ‘existential’ ones as well, like, say, someone asking a critical question about a concept or term with which they presently identify. Most certainly, it’s not possible for someone outside of this social group to offer helpful insight on matters pertaining to that group’s current situation, no matter how much genuine study or listening on the topic they’ve done. Immediate experience trumps outside knowledge, period. (Never mind that what counts as ‘experience’ may be at least in part the product of the ideological lenses through which a person has been taught to look.) A corollary: oppressed groups are monolithic, without significant ideological, intellectual, political, or methodological conflicts within their own ranks. So, it’s ok for one spokesperson of said group to give voice to the entire group’s will or interest. Anyone who contradicts such a spokesperson—especially if they do not personally belong to the category in question—is disrespecting or harming the group and needs to shut the fuck up.
8) Complicated things (and people) are compromised and not worth engaging.
How can we learn from people or things (including artworks) that are themselves ‘problematic’? Why not just move on and replace the shitty with something safer? Sure, there may be artworks (or people) that now stand for something offensive but have been deemed ‘brilliant’ in the past. But what does it say about you if you overlook the offensiveness in favor of the brilliance by promoting such content? Are you saying that aesthetic beauty or intellectual rigor or historical influence is more important than keeping our spaces safe and inclusive? How can we reduce the influence of problematic works or people if we keep giving them airtime? If someone is seen to be seriously wrong on 1 out of 10 issues, then their insight on the other 9 things is compromised, if not altogether invalidated by their hypocrisy. Hearing them out on those other 9 issues would only be providing cover for the problematic 10th. You can’t just bracket off the bad parts; they bleed into everything. The bad gobbles up the good. It’s thus not conceivable that a person or group with 9 incorrect ideas might nonetheless have something crucial to teach us regarding the 10th. Wokeness comes in batches—no sense distinguishing all these different aspects. As a corollary, wherever possible, people should declare themselves with clear and easy-to-read labels and signs. If the expressions of such a person appears to be complicated, or not immediately ‘clear’ and on the ‘correct’ side in a way that can fit into, say, a series of rapid-fire tweets, then that person bears the responsibility for any confusion that results. The responsibility certainly does not fall on the viewer or reader to investigate such complexities. Who has time to do close readings these days?
9) To entertain a ‘problematic’ joke or cultural product is never innocent.
Laugh at impure humor and you open your belly to the abyss. To listen to a comedian or other cultural content creator who is pushing values deemed bad is to risk being influenced by that content—how can one be exposed to bad content and not be marked? Even worse, it is to give the impression to those who have already made up their mind about the comedian or cultural producer that you have not made up your mind. Such indecisiveness on your part throws the settled judgements of the offended into doubt—an existential insult. After all, if you trusted and believed in them properly then why couldn’t you take their word for it? Why did you need to go and explore it for yourself? What, do you think that you’re smarter than the rest of us? That your curiosity or ‘complicated’ enjoyment is more important than other people’s right to have their grief-laden verdicts accepted without question? The death of comedy and entertainment is a small price to pay to make sure nobody gets their feelings hurt.
10) Every “micro”-aggression is just the toxic tip of a macro-iceberg.
There are no innocent errors, just instances that have yet to be analyzed and traced down to the deeper danger beneath. The difference between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ aggressions is a microscope; little annoyances or snubs are made of the same stuff as life-threatening mortal violations. It is thus correct to react to a minor offense as if it were a major one—especially if a pattern of minor problems has been alleged. In the latter case, one need not give the offender a chance to correct their behavior before bringing out the big guns: they already have a ‘history of misbehavior,’ after all, and must be condemned for it. Their chance for rectification and improvement has passed (even if this is the first time we’ve communicated our concerns to them). The fact that existing law makes qualitative distinctions between different categories of acts—and that the alleged behavior may not have crossed any legal line—is yet more proof that the Law is a relic of an oppressive order that doesn’t take oppressed people’s wounds seriously. By amplifying and harshly punishing examples of even low-level alleged misbehavior, we amplify the safety of our special spaces (at least for all who have not been flayed alive for past missteps). Fuck fine distinctions and fuck due process.
11) The moral imperative is to eliminate (what might be) evil, even if it means wrecking good work.
Political progress is to be understood not as a complex positive project of building something Good from the mixed materials that now exist, but rather, negatively, as the elimination or exposure of those elements deemed Evil. Better a pure Nothing than a compromised Something. Radical political intervention is best understood as a solvent to burn away the bad rather than as an adhesive or mixing agent that holds things together so that the better can be built. Isn’t it best to purify oneself and others of sympathy for the devil rather than to burden one’s brain or one’s organization with the messiness of sifting through more mixed elements? Tear that shit down. We’ll worry about building things later (maybe).
12) If we deprive badness of a platform, it will lose its platform elsewhere, too.
If we can prevent bad or backward ideas from getting a hearing in ‘progressive’ or ‘left’ platforms, this will prevent their circulation elsewhere. We can meaningfully reduce the circulation and impact of ideas in the ‘mainstream’ by denying them the ‘legitimacy’ provided by left spaces and engagement, however small and isolated the Left may be at present. The possibility that such an approach might rather enable the Left’s own blindness and disconnection from the actual state of ‘controversial’ debates, and thus perpetuate or expand our isolation from people who are already influenced by that ‘mainstream,’ is a secondary or tertiary concern. The further possibility that spending time with someone or something deemed objectionable might actually help us better relate to our neighbor or coworker or family member who has also been exposed to that person or thing, is swallowed up by the danger that such exposure will merely drag us into being ‘like them,’ or else give comfort to the enemy. The related likelihood, that I can only criticize something accurately if I know the object of critique intimately, is eclipsed by the danger that, in giving stuff deemed bad such close attention, you impart the impression that you secretly or not-so-secretly actually like that garbage. Can’t have that. Sure, right now the millions of people watching so-and-so’s podcast or cable show may not be waiting for our permission to do so—or even know that we exist!—but unless we model what a principled refusal to look or listen looks like, how will said millions ever learn to do likewise? If enough of us just close our eyes and block our ears really tight then it will almost be like the big bad wolf outside the door isn’t there anymore.
13) We can win social change without winning over the millions who currently disagree with us.
After all, isn’t righteousness on our side? Aren’t we fighting for the good of the entire planet? Who needs to win over the conservative hicks (or centrist fence-sitters) in a backward country like this one? Or heck, even in our own households, communities, or classrooms? It’s not like revolutions require super-majorities, do they? Can’t a militant minority do the job? It’s not like radical change means you need to win masses of people over. Those who disagree with us are probably stupid and hopeless. (The masses, alas, turned out to be asses.) Best to protect our spaces from such “deplorables.” Wouldn’t building an expanded base end up watering down the purity of our correct politics anyway? Why take the risk that our ever-so-precious conversation or community could be mired with their mess?
14) ‘Digging in’ in the face of CC critique is proof of privileged arrogance and domination.
If someone refuses to give in to criticism and public pressure to retract or apologize, no matter how small the issue was to begin with, their resistance to recanting itself reveals a bigger issue, which may require more extreme response. In particular, for a person associated with a historically dominant group to refuse to admit the validity of criticisms coming from someone associated with a historically dominated group is to engage in an arrogant abuse of privilege, regardless of the merits of the criticism expressed. Such resistance suggests that the refuser disrespects not just their immediate critic, but the group that critic is speaking for and the entire historical experience of collective oppression that has led up to this point. Someone who refuses to give in to group pressure could not possibly be a person committed to the facts as they understand them, nor could they be expressing honest concerns out of their love for the cause; they are merely providing new evidence of how insensitive and domineering they are, a fact which then in turn pretty much settles the question of whether or not they were actually guilty of the precipitating offense in the first place (as if it were in doubt!). Although there may not have been clear evidence for that first catalyzing event (ok, now we’ll admit it!), the evidence we gather from the accused’s resistance itself is retroactive, since resistance to the group itself proves that the person is the type to commit those other egregious errors as well. (Never mind that the extreme group response itself may be what pushed the targeted person to double-down in self-defense in the first place.) Corollary: Even a false accusation can be of use; it helps us see who is willing to go along with the group, and who is not. If someone ‘digs in’ and disputes the nature a ‘minor’ offense, they are merely revealing that the problem goes deeper, as we predicted. A micro-violator who is stubborn about their problematic millimeter might as well be demanding our most precious mile.
15) The open exchange of ideas is not to be trusted.
“Free speech” is an oppressive concept, a chimera that elides the actual-existing power dynamics that rule our world. Face it: beneath every invocation of “freedom” is the reality of power. Considering the compromised nature of discourse, then, it’s preferable to use force to shut down purveyors of bad ideas, if we can, rather than to use reason, argument, or evidence to refute the ideas themselves. Why debate when you can de-platform! The fewer people are exposed to those bad ideas, the better. Let’s be honest: We don’t trust people to sort truth from lies, even with our help. And if we’re really being honest, we’re not sure we can unpack and criticize the specific ideas of our enemies effectively anymore, anyway, since we’ve pretty much limited our intake of them to second-hand snippets and soundbites for years. (Not everyone has the luxury of spending endless hours in the library, dude.) Therefore, we’re justified shutting down misleaders in advance to protect the herd. Why initiate or allow complex debate and discussion that is just likely to confuse people? Or even worse, to lead our group to lose its clarity, unity, and focus? If our organization admitted that it didn’t yet have a clear, single, united view on something important, well, wouldn’t that make us seem indecisive and weak? How can we be the vanguard of the revolution if we admit we’re still thinking things through? Airing important differences aloud impairs our movement.
16) Opinion and rumor about certain things must be accepted as fact.
The statement of a strongly held feeling about another’s wretchedness, even if lacking substantiation, can be enough to decide the truth of a matter—at least for now. And since there is no obligation on the rest of us to investigate said ‘truth of the matter’ –since we’re all busy and life is hard, and investigations are difficult, and our activist organizations don’t have the resources of the state to call upon—it’s fine to let such strongly stated assertions stand as accepted truth…pretty much indefinitely. Furthermore, it’s improper to point out that a second-hand (or third- or fourth-hand) account is not a first-hand one. This is not the time to distinguish between hearsay and solid evidence! Similarly, it’s not ok to ask for evidence or substantiation in the wake of an unproven claim on a sensitive topic. What’s wrong with you, do you not believe INSERT SPECIAL CATEGORY OF PERSON HERE? It’s better to uncritically accept and quickly act upon serious but unsubstantiated rumor than to subject oneself or one’s organization to the messiness, discomfort, uncertainty, or complexity of pursuing an actual investigation.
17) Accusers (even third-party ones) are always reliable—so due process need not apply.
It’s not necessary to hear ‘both sides;’ when we’re dealing with an iteration of systemic oppression, one side is more than enough. Aggrieved people don’t lie, dissemble, or exaggerate. In fact, the experience of being aggrieved necessarily improves moral character. All that violence and systemic injustice and desperation a person may have been exposed to doesn’t leave any compromising psychic wounds. Aggrievement and oppression, however, do make people more vulnerable to harm, especially when others doubt or question their honesty or reliability. Thus, denying aggrieved people the fullness of human complexity, including the potential to be dishonest or just confused, is less bad than making it seem like you don’t take their every word for gospel. It follows that accusers or allegers need not—indeed, should not—be made to go on the record in detail. (We must ‘believe survivors,’ yes, but without requiring them to be specific about what exactly we’re being asked to believe.) It goes without saying that the accused need not have the right to confront their accusers, or even to know the specifics of what they are being accused of. (Habeas corpus is so 20th century and so ‘bourgeois state-y’—forget that liberal crap about it being a product of historical struggles against state repression.) It’s more important to protect the anonymity of accusers, and even 3rd or 4th hand rumor-ists and gossips, than it is to provide the accused a fair chance to address what’s been said about them. Transparency just doesn’t apply to those who circulate charges—that would put them at risk, since, after all, we must assume that all who have been alleged to have caused harm in the past are out to perpetrate even greater harm in the future. The sheer possibility of retaliation, which can never be fully ruled out, means that we must not demand accountability from accusers, or from those who speak in their name. Thus, it’s perfectly ok to weaponize defamatory gossip behind the back of the accused, to work to exclude them from spaces (including online ones), or even to go after their livelihoods, rather than to try and clear things up through more direct two-way communication. Further, since we cannot expect the actual victim to take on the burden of speaking up, anyone speaking in their name or on their unconfirmed behalf must be treated with all the deference owed to the actual alleged victim. The fact that some who speak in the victim’s name may not be authorized to do so and may even be weaponizing the situation for their own ends is outweighed by our belief that Excommunicating Perpetrators objectively helps Victims In General to heal and feel safe. Forget the lessons of the ‘telephone game’ we learned in kindergarten; second- or third- or fourth-hand allegers should be treated as if they are giving reliable first-hand accounts. There are no misunderstandings, only survivors and perpetrators: Which side are you on?
18) Exaggeration in the cause of social justice is necessary.
Emotional amplification, public dramatization, or even deliberate exaggeration is justified in cases where someone is speaking out against injustice or alleged wrongdoing. Feelings of aggrievement are to be validated, not questioned or fact checked. The more passionate someone is in denunciation, the more trustworthy they become. No Investigation? No Problem! Amplifying what might have occurred is more important than figuring out what actually did. (Never mind that mounting evidence shows that mental health problems in this country are at an all-time high. And never mind that COINTELPRO in the 60s and 70s routinely organized campaigns of false accusation to wreck radical organizations and defame left leaders.) Let’s face it: in these crazy media days, one needs a bullhorn to break through the noise, a sledgehammer to knock down the wall of indifference. Nuanced accounts of complex interactions won’t cut it. We need to Go Big to grab people’s attention and make things stick. Therefore, rounding up the rhetoric regarding particulars is not only permissible; it is necessary. We must cherry-pick the statistics and images that best fit our worldview, even if they bestow a misleading picture of the whole: how else to dramatize the essence of evil and get people caring about a system of oppression whose effects are often diffuse, subtle, and uneven? Sure, our exaggerations may lead to the proliferation of factual inaccuracies in the short term—maybe even a simplistic sense of the overall situation—but, in the long term, the heat and attention created by our maximalist presentation will lead to more people getting involved, therefore illuminating other abuses elsewhere. (Those who burn out on the melodramatic framing weren’t really committed to the cause in the first place.) Whatever harm is done to people who are tarnished, indeed slandered and defamed, by broadcast falsehoods in the process, is not our concern. It will be worth it in the long run. Can the harm done to an accused wrong-doer ever really be compared to that of the harm-sufferer, even if the harm in question remains unsubstantiated? In contrast to the longstanding judicial principle that “Better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent be convicted,” we affirm that “Better 10 men ruined by false accusations than one victim be doubted.” (No men in this society are “innocent,” anyway.)
19) Vengeance arcs toward justice.
Sure, we might be a little rough or excessive sometimes, but the arc of retaliation bends towards righteousness. (Or at least towards what feels righteous.) When in history have regular people’s urge to vengeance led them astray? It’s wrong to tell those who are feeling the need to strike back or destroy that they should channel that rage in a more constructive, reasonable, strategic, or fair manner. That’s tone-policing. Better to encourage righteous rage and fan the flames, wherever they lead. Tailing spontaneity and immediate emotion is the way of the future: as evidenced by what goes viral on our corporate-owned social media feeds. In times of big changes and sweeping historical crisis, it’s bourgeois and oppressive to be worried about the fate of just one individual (or other individuals who happen to be connected personally to that one individual). If we need to go a bit overboard in punishing a particular person in order to send a message to others and make our group’s militant morality absolutely clear, so be it. We were never going to win over everyone anyways. And you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Individuals are disposable.
20) Hyper-sensitizing individuals will lead to collective liberation.
In the struggle to radically uproot vast systems of oppression, we prioritize tenderizing individuals, one by one. If some people must be broken like eggs, others must be taught to think of themselves as fragile eggshells. Our goal is to make as many people as we can as sensitive as possible to the myriad offenses that exist in the world today—especially those ‘small’ offenses they experience directly, at the hands of other regular individuals on a day-to-day basis or on social media. As ‘micro’ offenses rather than macro- ones—papercuts not limb loss, bad word choices more than cluster bombs—such offenses may not be immediately obvious. Training people to see how small affronts and slights are actually BIG ones is thus crucial work, much more important than training people to work through the smaller stuff charitably, in light of the truly humongous threats all poor and working people now face. Similarly, training people to focus primarily on the offenses that affect them personally is more important than encouraging them to struggle in solidarity against the oppression of others, let alone spending time studying more abstract things like History or Social Theory that may take them away from their immediate self-interests. Focusing on other people’s oppression leads to ‘savior’ complexes, but teaching people to amplify all the many small slights they themselves experience personally: that’s the road to liberation. Each molehill, when inspected properly, reveals a mountain. Who is to say that the Big Crises we all share are more important than the millions of tiny ones that divide us and make us unique?
21) Fuck it, let’s be honest: Radical change ain’t happening in the USA (unless built upon its smoldering ashes).
Contrary to our at times ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric, we don’t really feel it is possible to change this country in a deep or transformative way. So, let’s just enjoy our moral superiority, our exclusive ‘movement’ spaces, and our curated media feed until the ship goes down or the smoke of the last forest fire consumes us. In the meantime, the best we can probably do is kneecap every ‘privileged’ or ‘problematic’ person, project, or institution we can reach. Sadly, the real big oppressors—the Dick Cheneys of the world—are generally protected behind bunkers of money and armed security: the best we can do is to take aim at whatever dick we can reach. All we’re really good for, here and now, is to fuck this bad shit up, while keeping enclaves of righteousness alive—maybe for after the fires burn out and we re-emerge from this cave. Most Americans are so complicit (settler colonialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, etc.) that they can’t really be part of any positive solution, anyways. So, if we end up tearing down our former comrades and driving away potential recruits or allies…No. Big. Deal. (Never mind the fact that capitalism is increasingly wrecking their lives and futures, too.) Let’s be clear: We didn’t start this fire. So, is it really fair to expect us to take responsibility for putting it out? Such a responsibility is a burden that oppressed and aggrieved people especially should not have to bear (even if there is no one else to bear it). Who the fuck are you to suggest otherwise?"
The Core Beliefs of Woke Ideology
Rhyd Wildermuth:
"We can now look at the general beliefs of Woke Ideology, the universal and primary features of Woke Ideology that distinguish it from other ideologies.
Identity
Identity is the primary site and mechanism of all unequal social, economic, and power relationships. Therefore, all oppressions and injustices within society can only be understood accurately through the lens of identity.
Identities are divided into two categories: dominant (or hegemonic) and non-dominant (or oppressed). Each identity therefore has a dominant and non-dominant form. For example, racial identity has a dominant (white) form which dominates and oppresses all other identities (non-white, that is, black, asian, indigenous, etc).
Identities can “intersect” so that a person can have non-dominant and dominant identities, or have only dominant or non-dominant identities. These intersecting identities compound to create highly oppressed groups (for instance, black disabled asexual trans women), highly oppressive groups (white able-bodied heterosexual cis men), or groups that are both oppressed and oppressive (white disabled lesbian women, Black gay men).
Most identities, which the specific exception of gender identity, are intransitory. That is, an identity is not something you can change, but is rather a core and perpetual aspect of you.
Race
Race is the primary site of identity oppression in all multi-racial societies, and racial oppression is both systemic and structural.
Racism is present and intrinsic to all interactions between white and non-white people, with white people wielding both systemic and structural power over non-whites in all such interactions, intentionally or unintentionally.⁷
Race is not an identity that can altered or changed, and racism cannot be abolished or eradicated merely by denying it exists.
Gender
Gender identity is a secondary but otherwise core site of identity oppression. Male (or cis-male, or cis-man) identity is the dominant category, with women, trans woman, trans men, non-binary, and other configurations of gender identity are part of the non-dominant category. All such identities are oppressed because of their identity, both structurally and systematically, but not all are oppressed to the same degree.
Unlike race, gender is an identity that can be altered, changed, and can be declared. That is, it is not necessarily linked to physical characteristics (such as biological sex), and though a person may appear to fully belong to the dominant identity (male or man), they can declare themselves to be otherwise.
Sexuality
Non-dominant (gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, asexual, and so on) sexual identities are oppressed structurally and systematically by heterosexuals.
Sexuality and sexual preference both can and cannot be changed. For instance, homosexual desire is seen as immutable, but homosexual desire that doesn’t include trans people within its conception of “same sex” is seen as oppressive and changeable.
Ability
Able-bodied people comprise a dominant identity who structurally and systematically oppress disabled people.
Disability, as with gender, is not necessarily tied to socially-identifiable physical characteristics but rather to a person’s inner experience of themselves. As a person can know they are “really a woman” despite appearing physically fully male, a person may be truly disabled despite appearing physically (and medically) able.
Privilege and Social Hierarchy
Privilege describes both an individual’s or group’s dominant position over others, as well as a kind of inherent or intrinsic trait that person carries into all interactions with people of non-dominant identities. There is thus white privilege, male privilege, straight or heterosexual privilege, and able-bodied privilege, as well as other tertiary forms, each of which derive from the dominant or hegemonic identity categories to which a person belongs.
Privilege functions very similar to the Christian concept of Original Sin insofar that it is a kind of indelible and essential trait to a person. A person with white privilege cannot undo their white privilege, even if they do not wish to be privileged.⁸ Also, a person always benefits from their privilege, even if they do not appear to be benefiting. Thus, a homeless white man benefits from his white privilege and male privilege, despite being homeless and destitute."
(https://rhyd.substack.com/p/what-do-the-woke-believe?)
Three Woke Hypocrisies
Heather Heying:
1.You are not allowed to play a character if you don’t belong to the demographic group that the character belongs to, e.g. gay, trans, or Native American.
You are allowed, however, to demand that the world recognizes you as the very thing that you are not, if you so choose (e.g., a man dressed as a woman must be recognized as a woman1).
Conclusion: Theatre has become reality. Reality has become theatre.
2. You may not pretend to be a race that you are not (by, for instance, putting on blackface). If you encourage such behavior, you are racist.
You must celebrate those who pretend to be the sex that they are not (by, for instance, wearing (non-blackface) makeup and heels and adopting crass stereotypes of femininity). If you discourage such behavior, you are a TERF3.
Conclusion: Sex, which is real and binary, is no longer considered so. Race, on the other hand, is real to the extent that it accurately reflects ancestry4, but is inherently a much fuzzier concept, because…well, because of sex. Every successful human mating produces a child whose genome is comprised of half of his mother’s genes, and half his father’s. Because there is no asexual reproduction in humans, there is no “purity” of race or lineage. Everyone is an admixture. And yet despite the obviously far more fuzzy nature of race than sex, race is treated as if the borders around it are clear and unchanging, while the borders around sex are treated as if they don’t exist. We are being told, effectively, that reality is in the eye of the beholder.
3. You may not adopt the foods, hairstyles, language, or other cultural artifacts of any culture that is not your own.
We, the woke, get to define what our culture is, what your culture is, when we are measuring from, and what does and doesn’t count. Eating a burrito is okay no matter who you are, but having a business that makes burritos is not, unless you are demonstrably Latino. English speakers can use words like alcohol and chocolate no matter who they are (despite those words coming originally from the Arabic and Nahuatl, respectively), but homie and bodega are apparently off the table if you’re white5.
Conclusion: While there are certainly ways to use the cultures of others in disrespectful or damaging ways, claiming that cultural exchange is inherently appropriative is to fundamentally misunderstand what it is to be human. So much of our modern diet, language, sport, music, clothing, ritual (on and on and on and on) exist because of borrowing from the traditions and wisdom of our ancestors."
(https://naturalselections.substack.com/p/wokehypocrisies)
Typology
Explanations for the Spread of Woke Ideology
Theodore Kupfer:
Idealist Accounts
"Ideas have consequences. The idealist account sees wokeness as the offspring of long-gestating intellectual trends. The specifics might vary, but the broad story tends to be the same: influential thinkers developed a critique of reason, objectivity, and neutrality that conquered the ivory tower before infecting everyone from Democratic Party politicians to the editors of Teen Vogue. Whether it was Immanuel Kant, Theodor Adorno, or Jacques Derrida, some philosopher started the process by arguing that humans had insufficient grounds to believe things they once took for granted, since those beliefs were filtered—and distorted—by limited individual faculties, cultural biases, or “systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how.” That critical posture toward established truths challenged the foundations of Enlightenment civilization and encouraged a vision of the world as divided among “oppressed classes” and an “oppressor class.” In an American context, the critique took various forms, with radical feminists arguing that the legal system was “a medium for making male dominance both invisible and legitimate” and critical race theorists maintaining that racism represents “the usual way [American] society does business, the common, everyday experience of most people of color in this country.” These kinds of arguments eventually entered public debate as default explanations for inequalities in American society; American institutions came to be seen solely as vectors of subjugation.
Idealist accounts leave something important unexplained, however: How did these ideas spread? In a review of James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose’s Cynical Theories, a representative idealist account, critic Park MacDougald notes that the book never explains how people came to be persuaded by fundamentally unpersuasive arguments. “At times, Pluckrose and Lindsay write as if these theories are free-floating ideas developing according to their own internal logic. At times, they are analogized to a virus jumping the ‘species gap’ from academia to activism. And at times, there’s no clear agent at all, as when they write that Evergreen State ‘got overtaken by the ideas of critical race theory,’” MacDougald writes. “But how does a college get overtaken by ideas? And why one set of ideas instead of another?” The idealist account, on its own, seems unable to answer these questions."
Psychological accounts.
"Two explanations argue that wokeness has gained traction in response to specific changes in Americans’ psychology. One posits that wokeness resembles a religion, filling a spiritual vacuum in American life. Author John McWhorter argues that “third-wave antiracism . . . has actually become a religion,” complete with a clergy in the form of writers such as Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates, a creed holding that “racism is baked into the structure of society,” and a creation myth involving the African slave trade. Another sees it as a byproduct of the infantilization of young Americans by well-meaning but overprotective parents. In the best-selling The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt blame “safetyism”—which puts a premium on protection of feelings and punishes severely actions or words that inflict emotional harm—as a proximate cause of political strife on college campuses. Lukianoff and Haidt weren’t offering a catch-all theory of wokeness, but their story—that an overprotective mode of parenting that took hold in the late twentieth century produced a generation of hypersensitive kids, who then entered a bureaucratized college system willing to meet their demands for “safe spaces”—is a reasonable stand-in for those who view wokeness as a form of political activism common to millennials and zoomers.
Still, neither theory seems dispositive. First, pathologizing particular ideas or beliefs as the product of a specific psychological makeup is a reductive and unfalsifiable move (as with the notion, dating back to Adorno in the 1950s, that the political views of American conservatives are merely symptoms of an “authoritarian” personality type). Neither the religious nor the victimhood argument quite succeeds on its own terms: wokeness tends to go awry not by making unverifiable supernatural claims but by making false empirical ones; and psychological changes seem insufficient to explain why woke students came to adopt an identity-based obsession with statistical disparities as opposed to, say, a militant socialist politics. And woke beliefs aren’t held only by true believers or college students. Since Haidt and Lukianoff’s book appeared in 2015, wokeness has expanded its domain: older book-publishing executives turn down stories from authors of the wrong race, executives at white-shoe law firms create DEI training programs, and the country’s leading corporate brands create affinity groups and endorse claims about race and gender that the vast majority of their customers would reject."
Materialist explanation 1: Incentives.
"Into this breach step two materialist explanations, alleging that woke politics in the corporate environment serves the incentives of economic actors. First is the “woke capital” thesis, which maintains that executives adopt a woke posture—moving operations out of red states, endorsing the outlandish rhetoric of diversity trainers—to make money. Maybe a company’s endorsement of the idea that the United States is founded on the plunder of black bodies enables it to attract more talent, as it’s hiring from a small pool of young people with top-notch educational credentials, whose worldview tends to be similarly woke. Maybe a company’s declaration of a solemn commitment to social responsibility allows it to exploit a growth field, as in the creation of ESG funds by financial firms. Or maybe executives are preempting a potential anti-capitalist upsurge from the political Left. Ross Douthat argued in the New York Times that “corporate activism on social issues” serves to “justify the ways of C.E.O.s to cultural power brokers, so that those same power brokers will leave them alone . . . in realms that matter more to the corporate bottom line.” Former biotech CEO Vivek Ramaswamy develops the argument in Woke, Inc., offering a potted history in which corporations nervous about growing redistributionist sentiment on the left following the 2008 financial crisis struck a bargain with identity-obsessed activists, taking up their cherished claims in exchange for being left alone.
This, too, seems insufficient. As Josh Barro notes, corporate employees aren’t motivated by profit alone: they might introduce politics to the workplace because of their own political views. Indeed, many high-profile instances of corporations groveling to activists and stifling internal dissent from the company line were driven from below, not above. The ouster of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for his opposition to gay marriage, Google firing James Damore for his memo on innate gender differences, the New York Times buckling to a staff revolt over a Republican politician’s op-ed, Bon Appetit disbanding its video department over staff allegations of unequal pay, and the CEO of Disney attacking a Florida law on sex education in elementary schools only after a staff revolt: in all these cases, the pressure seemed to come from within the organization.
Materialist account 2: The Woke Labor Thesis
Theodore Kupfer:
Another materialist account, the “woke labor” thesis, promises to explain such cases. In short, a glut of well-educated but insecure white-collar workers use their control over corporate resources to push a political agenda that they not only agree with but also depend upon for job security. In City Journal, Malcom Kyeyune writes that America’s culture wars can be understood by examining the class interests of mid-level managers who don’t own capital but retain control over how it is deployed. What seem like earnest arguments for a company allegedly dogged by a toxic culture to submit to an audit or scale up its diversity-training initiatives actually constitute calls for a “massive expansion of managerial intermediation in previously independent social and economic processes.” These managers simply want to create more work for themselves (and other members of their guild). Cancellations of dissenters therefore function as labor market discipline, forcing the unwoke to exit the sector.
But how can economic incentives explain the great many cancellations that have little to do with material gain, as in hobbyist communities like knitting? These cases suggest an ideological dimension to wokeness that the materialist explanations cannot capture. Explicit instances of coordination between corporations and activists also tend to be lacking. And, after all, woke boilerplate tends to identify capitalism as one of many interlocking systems of oppression that keep minorities down."
(https://www.city-journal.org/a-taxonomy-of-anti-wokeness?)
Institutional accounts.
"The legalist account ties wokeness to various American civil rights laws whose vagueness, and selective enforcement, cowed organizations into compliance with an ever-expanding array of prohibitions on free speech and political disagreement in order to avoid the prospect of litigation.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 marks the beginning of this history. Its bans on discrimination according to race and gender were soon expanded by the Supreme Court to include anything that had a disparate impact on protected groups. Meantime, affirmative-action programs expanded across government and higher education, on the assumption that disparities among groups wouldn’t exist absent discrimination—a central claim today. What we think of as “political correctness” is really “a name for the cultural effect of the basic enforcement powers of civil rights law,” argues Christopher Caldwell, which enabled “government censorship . . . through a civil court system that had seen its scope and punitive capacities enhanced by civil rights law” and threatened litigation that terrified employers into “privatizing the suppression of disagreement.” In Inventing Equal Opportunity, Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin writes that the “continuing ambiguity of compliance standards led management writers to advocate permanent antidiscrimination offices to track legal shifts.” This legal enforcement mechanism explains a great deal of corporate behavior, as political scientist Richard Hanania observes: from human-resources departments that police uncouth opinions at the office to corporations suddenly declaring their support for trendy causes when the prospect of government intervention is raised.
A rigorous thesis with much explanatory power, the legalist account nevertheless seems to leave a few things unexplained. First, one might expect people and organizations hounded by an intrusive government apparatus to get with the program only begrudgingly, doing the bare minimum to remain in compliance. But countless instances show woke organizations zealously going above and beyond what’s compulsory, saying and doing things that even the vague and expanding civil rights regime doesn’t require. Second, the legal structures alleged to be the culprit for organizational wokeness have been around for decades—yet the intensity of the culture war has ramped up considerably only in the last few years."
Institutional Isomorphism
"To the rescue comes a sociological modification of the legalist account. The concept of institutional isomorphism explains the maddening tendency of organizations to update their operations for the newest woke dictates, whether it’s a sudden expansion of the LGBTQ+ acronym or the need to release increasingly shrill statements about racism being endemic to American life. The sociologist Gabriel Rossman describes in City Journal how “organizations go beyond their core competencies to imitate market leaders and to meet the demands of their trading partners, the regulatory state, and key employees.” Institutions go woke not just because they’re coerced to do so but also because peer institutions are doing it. Meantime, as Charles Fain Lehman explains, late-twentieth-century efforts to remain in compliance with civil rights laws soon gave way to a “business case” that diversity would itself bring benefits to the corporate bottom line. “The transition from compliance to diversity marks the moment at which race-conscious corporate policy became unmoored from rational purpose and mutated into a myth,” Lehman writes, noting that the evidence underlying the business case was never strong. And once such race-conscious policies became a myth, they were free to accumulate new tenets as myths do."
Towards an integrative, multi-factor account
"Each explanation for wokeness’s rise has gaps that invite corrections or modifications. Left with a set of theories that don’t seem to work on their own but complement each other well, one could embrace a synthesis: a perfect-storm view, in which all these different phenomena happen at once. Thus, a certain brand of overprotective parent raised a generation of kids susceptible, in an era of declining religiosity, to morally urgent ideologies. The theory-suffused academy was happy to supply such an ideology, which these kids took up with gusto upon arriving on campus, despite its evident shortcomings. When they graduated and started entering the white-collar work force, litigation-averse corporations—already seasoned in adjusting their behavior to comply with civil rights laws—happily indulged the political demands of this socially engaged class of workers. And, thanks to the immense cultural power of well-educated Americans and the economic power of large companies, that ideology became increasingly visible, and eventually all but inescapable.
This multifactor explanation may strike some as overthought and extravagant, but a complex account, involving many different proximate causes, somehow fits such a nebulous, yet expansive, phenomenon as wokeness. Skeptics of wokeness tend to point to the difficulty of defining it and explaining its causes, but such imprecision would be expected if it was really a number of different but interrelated and overlapping phenomena, each with its own set of causes."
(https://www.city-journal.org/a-taxonomy-of-anti-wokeness?)
History
How did the woke ideology become hegemonic so fast ?
A credible combination of hypotheses, presented by Noah Carl:
"The basic idea is that – with the launch of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram between 2005 and 2010, and the invention of the smartphone in 2007 – it became much easier for left-wing activists to mobilise politically. Where before, they would have had to meet in physical locations (or private chat rooms), they were now able to meet, chat and exchange ideas in the digital public square – affording them untold new opportunities for activism. Only a few humanities graduates had heard terms like “person of colour” and “decolonisation” in 2010. Yet by the late 2010s, these terms were appearing regularly in the New York Times. And indeed, this isn’t only a story about social media; some trendsetters went to work for major newspapers and TV channels, thereby helping the newfound concepts to diffuse across the internet, and across society.
But the theory, as I’ve stated it so far, is incomplete. That’s because the rise of social media and smartphones can’t by itself explain why it was left-wing activists who managed to radically change the culture. After all, the networking benefits of social media were also afforded to conservatives, libertarians and non-woke left-wing activists – at least initially. How did the woke gain total internet supremacy?
One reason is simply that young people with left-wing views are more likely to be active on social medias (the young, note, are woker than the old – even among Democrats). This is partly because libertarians and conservatives are more interested in other things, such as making money, starting a family and going to church.
Another reason is that woke ideology has certain features that help it to survive in the ideological struggle for existence (so it tends to be favoured by memetic selection). The most notable such feature is an extreme intolerance of opposing views, up to and including the ostracism of friends and relatives, and the cancellation of persons deemed “problematic”.
As several commentators have noted, wokeness exploits an inherent vulnerability in liberalism – the latter’s tolerance of dissenting views – and then goes about making society less liberal. Woke is “defect” to liberalism’s “cooperate”. On social media, this manifests in mobs, pile-ons and calls for banning. Since many liberals and conservatives still believe in quaint notions like the marketplace of ideas (where the argument, not the epithet, wins the day) they are often defenceless against this tactic. As a consequence, they begin to self-censor, which helps wokeness to gain more power via the spiral of silence.
Even if woke people are initially the minority on some social media platform, as long as they are more willing to deploy tactics like going after people’s jobs, or getting them banned from the platform, it will soon feel like they’re in the majority. Some non-woke people may then keep their mouths shut for fear of inciting woke retribution; some may pay lip-service to wokeness in order to preempt attacks; and others may leave the platform altogether. Over time, large swathes of the platform may fall under woke occupation, even though out-and-out wokeists are a small share of the total population (albeit one that is overrepresented on social media). For example, the Hidden Tribes project found that “progressive activists”, who tend to be “highly engaged on social media”, comprise just 8% of US adults.
A third reason the woke gained total internet supremacy is that people who work for social media giants are overwhelmingly left-wing; in 2020, more than 90% of political donations from employees of Facebook and Twitter went to Democrats. Now I suspect this 90% is a fairly broad church: some woke, certainly, but also some libertarian-ish tech bros who just don’t like Trump and the Republicans very much. But if only one third of the 90% are truly woke, that’s still a lot of internal clout that can be put to use getting people banned, or making terms of service less favourable to dissidents.
What’s more, I suspect that – within tech companies – those with a predilection for speech-policing (i.e., the woke) select into roles like “content moderation” that afford them disproportionate influence over what’s gets read online. In contrast, I’d bet that people on the technical side of things – the ones who’ve “learned to code” – tend to be more libertarian or at least traditionally left-liberal."
(https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-a-bootlegger-baptist)
The Origins of Woke Capitalism in a Baptist-Bootlegger Coalition Dynamic
Noah Carl:
" This alternative theory says that corporate entities coopted what was initially a fringe left-wing movement to further their own interests. Unlike the first theory, it posits a largely top-down process. In particular, some shrewd actors inside large corporations – you know, the ones that put LGBT flags in their logos during pride month – realised that woke pandering was an excellent way to earn brownie points with the Democrats, shift the conversation away from tax-and-regulate, and undermine working-class solidarity (by pitting white deplorables against oppressed “people of colour”). It was, in order words, a flanking manoeuvre – one designed to keep the left myopically focussed on identity issues.
As the conservative writer Steve Sailer has noted, banks and other large corporations may have “cynically conspired to divide and conquer economic leftism” as a direct response to the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Note that Occupy protests were not confined exclusively to Wall Street; they eventually spread to college campuses, where they disrupted recruiting events for firms like Morgan Stanley. (Today, your typical recruiting event is probably a woke extravaganza, complete with LGBT lanyards and diversity pep talks). This version of the theory has the virtue of explaining why the antics of woke capitalism have become so much more conspicuous over just the last ten years.
We know that corporations’ support for left-wing causes is not sincerely motivated because of their inconsistency with respect to foreign versus domestic opponents of those causes. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, went out of his way to criticise an Indiana law that allows businesses to refuse certain kinds of services on religious grounds (e.g., cakes for gay weddings). However, he hasn’t bothered to criticise far more draconian laws in other countries where Apple does business (e.g., laws punishing homosexuality with death). Similarly, the NBA has done a great deal to promote Black Lives Matter (even arranging for the slogan to be stencilled on the court alongside its own logo). Yet when fans wanted to express support for the Hong Kong protests in 2019, they had their signs confiscated on the grounds that the such signs were “political” and therefore prohibited.
What’s more, the investigative journalist Lee Fang has uncovered cases in which large companies effectively bribed woke activists to portray their desired policies as beneficial to “communities of colour”. For example, Uber and Lyft paid nearly $100K to the firm of an NAACP leader, who campaigned in support of a controversial ballot measure that prevented delivery drivers from being classified as “employees” (thereby exempting them from most employee benefits). “Capital does not care about culture”, Fang argues. “When an oil company operates in Malaysia, it donates to Muslim groups; when the same firm needs to win a ballot measure in SF, they sponsor LGBT rallies and BLM orgs”.
Note: woke capital is not a conspiracy theory in the sense of positing clandestine meetings where CEOs sit around smoking cigars, and discussing how to bolster their market power using the theory of intersectionality (though this may not be too far from how things play out at Davos). What probably happened is that one or two firms independently discovered that woke pandering could be used to their advantage (Starbucks may have been an early innovator with its 2015 “Race Together” campaign, which suspiciously coincided with an EU tax scandal). Then, once a few others caught on, the practice spread through the sector via imitation."
(https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-a-bootlegger-baptist)
The Transformation of Activism in the Early 2000s
A very readable testimony on the 'pre-history' of the current model of identity politics, as told by an anarchist activist.
Joseph Keegin with Wesley Yang:
"Turn-of-the-century anarchism was less a set of political beliefs than a world unto itself: a person could live nearly their entire life patronizing anarchist institutions, participating in anarchist activities, interacting primarily—if not only—with anarchists speaking the language of anarchism. A traveler to an unknown city could plug into the local anarchist network and expect food, fellowship, and a place to stay; if the scene was particularly vibrant, there may even be a coffee shop or bookstore to read in during the day and a punk show to dance and flirt at by night. Anarchism was a “thick community,” in that common bastardization of Geertz’s phrasing, with all the benefits and disadvantages that attend such an arrangement. But that it was something living and thriving was undeniable. But then something changed. Anarchism had always been an agonistic enterprise, marked by an atmosphere of discussion and debate, but under the influence of the new doctrines that began impinging on anarchist life, it gradually took on the air of denunciation and schism. And the principle at the bottom of this change was “oppression.” The volunteers at an anarchist bookshop or at an environmental activist retreat might articulate their goals as opposing war, protecting wilderness, human liberation. They might help with a Books to Prisoners project, sending reading material to people languishing behind bars, or cook vegan meals for their friends and the homeless with their local Food Not Bombs. But suddenly, as if overnight, the emphasis changed, and the grand political ambitions at the scale of the world dissolved into talk about dismantling structures of oppression at home. Articles about race, sexuality, gender, and the urgency of “anti-oppression” theory began appearing in the Earth First! Journal in 2006. Before that point, the Journal had served primarily as a vehicle for calls to action, agitprop, updates about various regional campaigns, and other internal banter for militants engaged in illegal political activities. Then in 2007, it published a full-page “Anti-Oppression Policy,” perhaps the first of its kind from an anarchist organization. (Similar documents published by university social work programs, government welfare agencies, feminist nonprofits, and Unitarian Universalists can be found from as early as 2000.)"
https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/present-at-the-creation?
Discussion
Towards a Class Analysis of the Woke Movement
Michel Bauwens:
Here are some preliminary notes about the meaning of the emergence of the woke movement in the US and elsewhere.
I define the woke movement as a social movement that:
- Claims to want to end unequal power dynamics and the end of oppression and privilege by majority groups towards minority groups, with the main privileged groups believed to be white males, who prop the unjust domination of the West
- Claims that to obtain this equality, we must practice equity, i.e. a form of systematic reverse discrimination of resources so that the oppressed groups can appropriate their right share of resources, principally through antiracist activity. Resources must be unequally divided with a preference for the oppressed groups.
- Claims that the primary determinant of human life and one’s position in the social order, depends on group membership, which largely determine individual identity and the course of life.
- Claims the moral high ground and practices moral outrage as one of its principal activist tactics; calls for censorship and denunciations/cancellations are the most common tactic to obtain ideological hegemony.
The movement originated as one of the outcomes of postmodern teachings in academia, through the mediation of Critical Race Theory, and its social origination is in the youth strata of the elite universities, i.e. the children of the most privileged strata of the population, allied with the professional strata of minority groups. It is also supported by the cognitive urban strata of the population, especially the post-millennial generational cohort.
The aims of the movement are massively supported by the 1) ‘diversity and inclusion’ bureaucracy’ and administrations of US universities, corporations and federal institutions (particularly HR sectors but extended to all forms of administrative leadership); 2) massive funding by philanthro-capitalism and corporate leaderships (‘woke capitalism’); 3) the political leadership of ‘progressive neoliberalism’; 4) the mainstream mass media.
The above sociological orientation does not suggest that it has any characteristic of traditional emancipatory movements, which are generally supported by working class populations. Moreover, its political demands have immediate and obvious effects that are hugely detrimental to the poorer populations of all genders and races. Their demands favour the elite and upwardly mobile sections of minority populations. Many of its tactics are hugely reminiscent of the reactionary social movements of the 1930s (deplatforming and cancellation of political dissent, desire for caste-based allocation and organization of society, racial scapegoating), although there are obvious differences in its sociological basis. What is common is a conjucture of societal 'descent', creating populations that fear social regress, which generally does not create 'progressive' aims and outcomes.
So here is my attempt to explain its emergence at this particular historical conjuncture.
Global capitalism has entered a downward spiral of systemic crises that has hampered its ability to satisfy the desire of populations for material betterment; this is especially so in the Western countries, which have since the 1980s sacrificed their own working classes to enable globalization.
Originally, the neoliberal compact of the 80s, which replaced the social welfare compact after WWII, was based on an alliance of the ruling classes with the new identity politics, i.e the cultural changes demanded by the youth cohorts that fought the 1968 revolutions, and the subsequent demands for egalitarian civil rights by racial minorities, women, sexual practice minorities, etc …, while simultaneous de-industrialising the West to eliminate working class power and demands. This led to huge advances in civil rights, to systemic anti-discrimination practices in institutions, and to the growth of a upwardly mobile middle class emerging from these minorities, though at the detriment of the stagnation or decline of working class wages.
But as of 2003, resource prices stopped their downward trend and started augmenting, and in 2008, the global financial crisis occured, seriously affecting the redistributional capacity of the state. Neoliberal leaderships such as those of Obama, resulted in choices in favour of the saving the financial elite, at the cost of minorities and working classes (see the housing policies of Obama, which particularly affected the housing stock of the African-American population).
In particular, upward educational mobility was seriously affected, creating a generation riddled with student debt, and with very precarious prospects. This is particularly the case for minority students which saw their upward mobility endangered.
In such a conjuncture, social and economic prospects become not only negative, but can be seen as a zero sum game; psychological and sociological uncertainty leads to identity issues and a search for protective communities that can take various forms:
1) traditional left-wing urban populism, as represented by Sanders
2) ethno-nationalistic re-identification with the nation state, as represented by Trump
3) identitarian politics, as represented by the woke movement.
Option 1 is the most hated by the elites, since it requires substantial distribution of resources towards the working poor; option 2 has become attractive to rural populations, small business holders and the native working class and this movement gave us Trump; but to a substantial degree, Trump represents giving up Empire to save the Nation, which is contrary to the neoliberal choice of giving up the Nation for the sake of Empire. Trump represents a rival alliance than the current neoliberal compact.
And this is what makes option 3 so attractive to the elite. Option 3 represents a new compact of the elites, to make hard a new redistribution of the spoils with the upwardly mobile minorities, but at the cost of sacrificing the working poor of all genders and colours.
It is the cheapest option, that allows the ruling elites 1) to maintain the Empire by expanding its social base with new middle class representation; 2) to avoid more massive egalitarian redistribution.
Giving the alliance of minority elites a stake in the system creates a new sociological compact, and expands elite buy-in, creating a bulwark against majority demands that are much more dangerous and costly.
Woke Ideology And Class
Rhyd Wildermuth:
"These are all what can be identified as core ideological beliefs within Woke Ideology without delving into sectarian or secondary corollaries. It’s important to note the crucial difference between the core beliefs of Woke Ideology and the core beliefs of Marxism, and we can do this best by looking at the one identity category which doesn’t appear in the list, class.
Class analysis forms the core of Marxist political beliefs, as iterated in the first two sentences of The Communist Manifesto’s first section:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.⁹
Of course, Marx and Engels proposed a dichotomy of opposing categories, “oppressor and oppressed,” but these categories were specifically economic class categories, rather than racial, gender, sexual, or other identities.
The key to understanding how class and identity differ is in the functional nature of class. Identity describes traits of people (black, straight, disabled, female, pansexual), whereas class describes a material relationship and function: producer versus exploiter, or worker versus owner. There is no inherent trait or characteristic at play in class categories, and your position in one class or another has nothing to do with how you feel, what color your skin is, who you have sexual relations with, or whether you have ovaries or testicles. Instead, class is determined by whether you control the means of production of wealth, or whether you do not.
Of course, certain identity traits historically made it more likely you would be in one class or another. If you were the descendant of an African slave in the Americas, chances are you would not later be part of the owning class of the United States. However, being a heterosexual man in quite perfect health descended from European settlers in the United States is no guarantee you will be a capitalist rather than a waged worker, especially if your ancestors had been poor in Europe.
The point to remember here is that class is not an identity and therefore is rarely accounted for in Woke Ideology. The reasons for this are numerous and will be explained later, but for now consider how class cuts across each Woke identity category, rather than intersects with them. A homeless straight white man belongs to all the dominant identity categories. Thus, he would be seen as inherently oppressive and privileged in all interactions he might have with a black property owner demanding he be arrested for trespassing or a trans woman CEO pushing for city laws to make vagrancy a crime. Class analysis can easily account for such situations; Woke Ideology cannot."
(https://rhyd.substack.com/p/what-do-the-woke-believe?)
Alban Wegner on Redistributionist Strategy
Alban Wegner:
"My take on this is as follows: "Wokism" represents a certain type of claims-making in modern-day democratic capitalism, as it exists in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural societies. "Claims-making" IMHO understood to mean three things concurrently:
Firstly, woke spokespeople claim to represent (the overriding interests of) certain social, mostly ethic- or gender-based constituencies. By their specific way of doing this, woke spokespeople reify social groups which progressive scholarship and theory had worked so hard to deconstruct. Instead of seeing ethnicities, classes, and genders not as structured processes in specific places and time periods having to be "made", remade and "unmade" in the Edward P. Thompsian sense of the word, but as always-already-coherent entities, woke spokespeople ennoble themselves to be seen as (only) legitimate authorities on those groups and their interests. (Note: On this point, woke SJWs are no different in their overall political approach than their detractors such as Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany or radical right wing populists claiming to speak for the "real" people as opposed to the "elite", the "real", disaffected working class etc)
Secondly, what sets woke locutors apart from earlier civil rights and most social movement activists is that their representative claim always carries a categorical indictment of today's society ("systemic racism"). It's not about society not living up to its promises, but about about the whole darn thing being a lie from day one, needing to be exposed by woke intellectuals and their targets being denounced as being part of privileged groups, a form of collective guilt. From this the affected cannot hope to escape, but can only hope to be redeemed from in a very religious sense of the word, provided that they submit and subjugate themselves to the more than just quasi-religious ceremonies, rituals, therapies, bans, stigmatizations, commandments and cancellations that woke spokespeople demand. (On this, please read John McWhorter's brilliant, scathing review of Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility").
Thirdly, from points 1 and 2 follows an claim to a part of the cake for woke spokespeople on behalf of the groups and grievances which they claim to represent. It is collected not as a direct entitlement on GDP but flows to them as a by-product. Since society is bad and the silent (cis-, white-, male- etc) majority is to blame for it, it can only be redeemed collectively by following woke prescriptions, which individually translates to people buying woke books, tickets to woke talks, companies and public agencies (including, I kid you not, Lockheed & Martin and the CIA) inviting woke authors to coach their managers and staff and using woke videos to recruit trainees. Woke redistribution functions as an analogue to politicized religion in the US, and as such, follows a well-proven and tested template to obtain other people's money.
Of course, were woke politics to be even more successful, they could in theory establish a claim that because of past and present injustices y, group x is entitled to z percent of GDP as a matter of restorative justice. I wonder how Lockheed Martin might react at this point..."
([2])
The Spiritual Underpinning of Wokeness
1. N.S. Lyons:
"One does not simply walk away from religious beliefs. What is called “Wokeness” – or the “Successor Ideology,” or the “New Faith,” or what have you (note the foe hasn’t even been successfully named yet, let alone routed) – rests on a series of what are ultimately metaphysical beliefs. The fact that their holders would laugh at the suggestion they have anything called metaphysical beliefs is irrelevant – they hold them nonetheless. Such as:
The world is divided into a dualistic struggle between oppressed and oppressors (good and evil); language fundamentally defines reality; therefore language (and more broadly “the word” – thought, logic, logos) is raw power, and is used by oppressors to control the oppressed; this has created power hierarchies enforced by the creation of false boundaries and authorities; no oppression existed in the mythic past, the utopian pre-hierarchical State of Nature, in which all were free and equal; the stain of injustice only entered the world through the original sin of (Western) civilizational hierarchy; all disparities visible today are de facto proof of the influence of hierarchical oppression (discrimination); to redeem the world from sin, i.e. to end oppression and achieve Social Justice (to return to the kingdom of heaven on earth), all false authorities and boundaries must be torn down (deconstructed), and power redistributed from the oppressors to the oppressed; all injustice anywhere is interlinked (intersectional), so the battle against injustice is necessarily total; ultimate victory is cosmically ordained by history, though the arc of progress may be long; moral virtue and true right to rule is determined by collective status within the oppression-oppressed dialectic; morally neutral political liberalism is a lie constructed by the powerful to maintain status quo structures of oppression; the first step to liberation can be achieved through acquisition of the hidden knowledge of the truth of this dialectic; a select awoken vanguard must therefore guide a revolution in popular consciousness; all imposed limits on the individual can ultimately be transcended by virtue of a will to power…
I could go on, but the real point is that these are faith-beliefs, and ones capable of wielding an iron grip on the individual and collective mind. And they have a strong civilizational resonance, because they are in fact not arbitrary but deeply rooted in a metaphysical struggle that effectively stretches to the very beginning of Western theological and philosophical thought. In other words, “Wokeness” is much more than just a political program. And that’s unlikely to change anytime soon, because…
2. The void of meaning still hasn’t been filled. I mean, did the gaping hole of meaning in people’s lives created by the uprooting forces of secular liquid modernity get resolved in some alternative way while we weren’t looking? You know, the spiritual void that this creepy chimeric faith-ideology and its romantic political crusades rushed to fill in the first place? Has there been some kind of genuine, organized religious revival? Has decadent nihilism stopped being the defining sentiment of the age? Did the young even become hyper-nationalists or revolutionary Marxist class-warriors instead? Have they found an alternative passionate heroic narrative to act out in some new Davos slide deck? No. And in fact, meanwhile, it also seems that…"
(https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over?)
2. By Alexandra Nieuwsma:
"In American Awakening, Joshua Mitchell argues that identity politics is ultimately a relocation of religion to the realm of politics. Through an analysis that is theological, philosophical, and psychological, he offers a penetrative diagnosis of just what ails America: the “three separable but ultimately related ailments” of identity politics, bipolarity, and addiction. While mainline Protestant churches are deteriorating, identity politics wokesters have hijacked the Christian concepts of guilt and innocence, and stain and purity. This is taking place alongside a denunciation of both Western inheritance and the idea of liberal competence.
While vast improvements are constantly being made in the material economy, an “invisible economy” looms over us which measures transgression and innocence. Identity politics comprehends this economy “in terms of the relationship between visible groups.” Rather than focusing on who we are as individuals, identity politics is concerned with the “stain and purity associated with who we are as members of a group.”
For instance, the white, heterosexual man, simply by virtue of his existence as a descendent of a race that historically enslaved black Americans, is irredeemably stained. He is doomed to perpetually atone for the sin of his existence by “innocence-signaling”—supporting social justice causes—although doing so will never completely wipe away the stain of his transgressor status. In reality, there is no healing power to which he can appeal, and his purpose is to serve as the scapegoat for the identity politics innocents, who consist of ethnic and sexual minorities. It is only through their relationship to the transgressors that these victims establish their identity as innocents and are justified.
In making determinations of guilt and innocence, the identity politics wokesters effectively determine who can and cannot speak, silencing all those they deem transgressors while declaring legitimate anything that comes from the mouths of the purported innocents. Rather than focus on who are the most competent practitioners, identity politics banishes the value of liberal competence completely to further its goal of proportional representation.
Because it is vital to clearly determine who the transgressors and innocents are, identity politics must assign an “unequivocal group affiliation” to every person. Yet here the identity politics crowd enters into some difficulties because it ascribes a uniformity to group members that differs drastically from the reality: not all blacks have the same experience, neither do all women or all homosexuals for that matter."
Wokeness and Subjectivity
N.S. Lyons:
"Atomization is probably the inevitable byproduct of liberal modernity. That is: liberalism made the autonomy of the individual its highest good. To maximize individual autonomy, the state therefore found itself obliged (being unable to resist claims that it must enforce an expanding array of rights) to exercise its power to help progressively liberate the individual from all limits and constraints, including from tradition, religion, geography, community, family, and nature itself. (This is certainly deserving of more argument than I have space to recap here; see “Four Big Questions for the Counter-Revolution” for a bit more.) Liberalism has thus acted as a centrifugal force, severing all the centripetal counter-forces that once kept individuals connected to recognizably human communities and launching them outward towards solitary orbits where they can drift cold and alone in their pods.
From this perspective it is more obvious why the amorphous ideology referred to as “Wokeness” so often seems mixed up and chaotically self-contradictory: it is the confused response to two opposite instincts. On the one hand it is actually a kind of anti-liberal reactionary movement, a blind, emotional scramble to grasp desperately for collectivism in the most basic, tribal sort of community seemingly still available: in identity groups, and in fixed racial identity in particular. But, on the other hand, it simultaneously attempts to continue embracing the boundless autonomy of individual choice as its most sacred principle, celebrating an individual’s right to self-define everything about themselves without limit, up to and including their own concept of material reality. (This cognitive dissonance has never been much more than an ideological speedbump, however – don’t get your hopes up.) And this hyper-individualism has now collided head first with the technological revolution, which increasingly positions itself as offering hope for the boundless potential necessary to escape from any natural limits whatsoever, including by fracturing any solid definition of what we once thought it meant to be human. And, speaking of technology and fracturing, meanwhile…"
(https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over?utm_source=url)
Directory of Concepts
A
C
D
E
G
- Gender
- Group Identity:
I
- Identity Politics
- Implicit Bias Training ; Implicit Association Testing ; Unconscious Bias Training
- Intersectionality
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
- Spiral of Silence
- Spiritual Authoritarianism and Wokeness
- Standpoint Epistemology
- Successor Ideology
- Systemic Racism
T
V
- Victimhood Culture
- Virtue Signalling
W
- White Privilege
- Whiteness
- Woke Ideology
More information
- Why be concerned with a few thousand cancellations, rituals of degradation and berufsverbot for dissenters ? Because it's just always a beginning, not where it ends. Read this absolutely stunning essay by James Lindsay: Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism