Are you Ware of Woke?
Author: P. Henge
22 May 2021
A year ago in 2020, I had not heard the term Woke, but it is now in 2021 all around us yet still misunderstood by most. Recently, I asked someone for a definition and received the reply that woke meant cool. For many others it seems, it simply means being nice to others and saving the world – having a hyper-awareness of social issues.
Yet it is really something else entirely and perhaps the most corrosive ideology since the French terror or the Maoist cultural revolution. However, this ideology may be even more pernicious, as it has been thoughtfully and most cleverly created in universities over the course of decades. Like an artificially created virus, it is equipped with its own receptors allowing it to readily infect the host, and formidable defences to ward off attack. Some seem immune to this virus, perhaps because of a strong sense of cultural identity and understanding of the past. Yet for others, it is as irresistible as a cult, filling a meaning-shaped void, seducing them to do its bidding.
While mutating since the 1960s, it has recently come of age – the leadership of most institutions has been completely taken over. The general populous is largely oblivious to the threat and governments seem powerless to act. Scarily, while corporations have always been against communism, with its anti-private property stance, the fact that woke appears to be just a cultural phenomenon they believe they are not the target and can virtue signal without consequence. This completely misunderstands the goal of the ideology.
Woke is like the other “liberation” ideologies that have preceded it. It is based on conflict theory, with society divided into classes or identity groups which compete for power. Within the ideology, victim classes, defined by convenient identity markers, are kept down by systemic oppression mechanisms – normativities. Lack of parity in any walk-of-life is taken as evidence of systemic discrimination, rather than explained by essential human nature and accompanying liberty to choose. Yet it is the duty of the woke to be on the lookout for any action which may support the narrative of systemic oppression – hypersensitive to any utterance, intended or unintended, that might be useful to the cause. At every opportunity, such incidences are to be catastrophised, collecting as much visceral testimony as possible. One visceral anecdote is worth a thousand pages of objective statistics, easily promulgated via the echo chambers of social media.
If that is all woke was, it might be possible to present evidence to show that the oppression mechanisms do not exist as asserted, and that disadvantage is a truly multi-factorial problem. Yet the true woke ideologues have internalised the postmodernist ideas developed in the 1960s, rejecting evidence, logic, and scientific reasoning as being part of the toolkit of oppression. Within this frame, attempting to present evidence is just a sign of one’s complicity in oppression. Woke rejects the notion of absolute truth, placing each identity-group on an epistemic island complete with their own truth and way of authenticating knowledge. In their cynical view, the epistemology of the oppressor group is designed with the sole intention of keeping other groups down. Thus mathematics, science, the law, are all irredeemably sexist and racist, with a type of Lysenkoism the probable outcome. Power, to the ideologues, runs through all of society like a power grid, with all members of the dominant group complicit in oppression.
Borrowing further from postmodernism, the ideology focuses on language, distorting it often beyond recognition. This means that while uninitiated may think the woke ideologue is expressing one idea, they always mean something else entirely. Words are expanded to encompass more than the traditional meaning, yet the response retains the original penalty. Thus “silence is violence” and can, therefore, be met with real physical violence in response. This example exists but is extreme and rare. More insidious examples can be found buried within policy documents of organisations, creating a new para-reality step-by-step. Anti-racism, while sounding better than non-racism, is yet another woke manipulation of the language describing actual racism directed towards the melanin-challenged (so-called) oppressor group. Racism has now acquired a downward pointing power-vector and, therefore, cannot be directed towards those with a so-called oppressor identity, allowing the most horrendous slurs to be made with impunity. Hate speech has been redefined as any utterance that does not align with the victim narrative. If systemic oppression is based on skin colour, why do Black West Indians do very well in US society? Jews as a group have experienced much historical oppression, why are they now part of the white oppressors? Such questions will lead to cries of “shut up bigot!” as the true believers are well versed in Herbert Marcuse, the master of anti-free speech repressive tolerance. He called for the complete tolerance and elevation of marginalised opinions and actions (even anti-social and violent) while suppressing opinions of so-called oppressor groups. Moreover, as truth is viewed as purely an instrument of power, the activist may freely invent history to achieve a political objective – “Who controls the past, controls the future.”
To be clear the goal of the ideology is not to assist the victim groups as many of the sympathetic adherents believe. On the contrary, victimhood and misery are to be amplified, since these identity groups form the collective wedge to be used as a battering ram against liberal democratic societies. Minds must be reprogrammed at the earliest age, parents eventually removed from that right and responsibility, to generate more and more ideologically pure cultural warriors. Shame and “bending the knee” to the aggrieved group for eternity is the only acceptable response by the oppressors, with no redemption. The goal is societal revolution turning the tables on historical oppression, and, with it, the destruction of the West, its epistemology, and aspirational virtues. At the end of the revolution, Utopia awaits just like all the times this has been tried before. This is the greatest threat to Western society in centuries and will not end well if not checked. Awareness, or being Ware, of what lies beneath is the first step.
This short introduction has, by necessity, left much of the evolution of woke out. For further reading refer to the excellent but quite heavy Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay or for woke in the context of Australia see Cancel Culture, edited by Kevin Donnelly. Stay Ware peeps.
