What does “woke” or “wokeness” mean to you and how would you explain that to an intelligent woke gay friend who you were trying to convince it poses a problem for the gay community?

Elvira95 · 2021-07-14T21:57:08+00:00

Woke people are usually privileged who think being politically correct or supporting minority by painting the majority as the always culprit and the minority as always saints, makes them look as moral superior.

Horror-Swordfish · 2021-07-14T20:36:50+00:00

There's a website called New Discourses that's run by James Lindsay that actually breaks down pretty well, in their articles, exactly what Wokeness is and where it came from. I've never been a fan of Wokeness myself, so it wasn't exactly eye-opening but there's definitely some good information there that might help you come up with ways to talk to your friend. Specifically, there is a "Social Justice Encyclopedia" that defines a lot of terms in the Woke sense. That can be really helpful, considering that Critical Theory seems to be very much about replacing definitions for certain words or terms with a new definition in order to make communication with "the outside" basically impossible. After all, if we can't even agree on the definitions of words, how can we possibly accurately get our ideas across to another person?

I don't have any practical advice, sadly. I did have a friend who was very Woke years ago, and it seems like she's backed off of that some. Not entirely, but she's also not super vocal about politics all the time anymore, so she's easier to tolerate. Unfortunately, though, Wokeness is effectively a cult and it's really hard to get someone that's in a cult out; keeping people in is one of the things that cults are really good at. Especially when you're looking at something like Wokeness, which, on its surface, seems like a good thing, it can be hard to see that you're actually perpetuating ideas that are nonsensical at best and dangerous at worst.

You might be able to find some avenues to just have discussions about things if she's actually receptive to hearing other points of view, but if she's not, it might just be something you've gotta let her work out on her own. Surely after enough time she'll realize that her point of view is only serving to make herself miserable all the time and she'll snap out of it.

JulienMayfair · 2021-07-15T00:59:42+00:00

One post here noted that the woke engage in borderline religious crusades. I'd go one step further.

I'm far from the first one to say this, but I think Wokeness has become a new religion insofar as it seems to appeal to people who have given up traditional religion and have a "religion-shaped hole" inside them.

Wokeness presents us with things like Gender Identity and a whole ideology/theology that surrounds it, and it includes a morality. If you believe in its principles, you're a good person. If you don't believe, you're a heretic and must be silenced and/or punished or made to recant.

I think we somewhat naively believed we could have a secular world where people didn't need religion, but religion has a way of popping back up in terms of communities of believers who truly believe that they are fighting a great battle against Evil.

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, so I always knew people who tended to religiosity. They need religion. There was always a certain proportion of the population that was susceptible to that, and that hasn't changed. It's just that instead of posting every day to Facebook about how Jesus Loves You, they post their latest cause.

Destresse · 2021-07-14T21:52:00+00:00

Not an English speaker so I might be missing the point entirely depending on how well I understood your post.

"Wokeness", to me, defines the infinite need to have an idealised, anesthesised social climate. Where no one hurts, no words hurt, and we are all cute rabbits and teddy bears getting along.

Since this is impossible, because life is the way life is, the only way to achieve this kind of social climate is with, no surprise, extreme authoritarism. Using guilt as primary weapon. Shaming as second. Punishment as third.

Wokeness is giving up on laws of nature. Nature is unfair, unequal, random, chaotic. Wokeness feels superior to nature, it's the idea that we are bigger than our real, natural limitations. No, we cannot care about every single injustice in this world. No, we cannot help but feel wary about people who look unfamiliar. Yes, we tend to trust good-looking people more. Yes, we have prejudices, expectations, snap-judgements. Wokeness has declared war on our natural limitations. The brain does this for 1/ survival, and 2/ efficiency. But we can simultaneously accept it and not become a slave to it. We can live with it while not letting it rule us. Going on borderline religious crusades to remove all of our judging functions is... Well, pick your word. Stupid, irresponsible, illogical, disrespectful, insulting, hubris, unrealistic, etc. I'd pick hubris. The sheer arrogance of these people. They'd do well to remember we're just animals on a planet inside a universe. We aren't gods. We don't control everything. (like people's sex, lol. As if we could ever do this. The arrogance.) I've noticed they tend to have this in common. They just refuse to accept humility as humans. They want to control their body, their mind, their environment, and other's bodies, and minds, and—...

Yeah, wokeness is all about humans as all-powerful beings who are above laws of the universe lol.

It's about absolute control.

GatitoMalo · 2021-07-14T20:42:13+00:00

https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-woke-wokeness/

Basically post-modern, neo-Marxist systems. That's wokeness. The rabbit hole runs deep, and it's a yugeeee intellectual effort to try and understand it (and I don't claim to have a great handle on it, myself.) It's a very insidious philosophical system, and it's no surprise to me that people fall for it. Certain demographics seem more susceptible to it than others. It's an activist philosophy, so it's not something that somebody concocted and then other people took it up because they felt it was worthwhile. It's deliberately being plied onto people by activists with agendas. It has invaded the academy.

I think this topic is important to DropTheT, because that's where a lot of this madness is coming from.

I won't argue with Judith Butler types (Queer Theory, which shares a genealogy with the rest of the woke stuff) the same way I won't argue with flat-earthers. Earth's round, get over it. Sex ain't socially constructed, looking at you, Judith Butler.

To give an incredibly abbreviated account of neo-Marxism, the proletariat didn't rise up and overthrow the bourgeoisie, so the Marxists went back to the drawing board. Instead of reasoning... hm, maybe we're wrong about this whole Marxist thing, they decided, no, we're right, and there must be other things at play. They decided that there are power structures subtly and perniciously embedded into society, even going as far as to say that the language we have available to even talk about maybe guillotining people is inherently oppressive. Neo-Marxists are looking for oppression in places it does not exist, because they're not getting the activist outcomes they desire. It's a cognitive dissonance.

There's a huge focus on language... hmmm where have we seen this? Changing the meanings of words, like "man," or "woman," or "homosexual," or ...

PatsyStone · 2021-07-15T01:18:03+00:00

The best approach I've always found is to find out what bone of contention someone already has with the ideology and walk her through how that illogic translates into gender theory.

For instance, many years ago I was diagnosed with PTSD. I had therapy for it and am now functioning normally. When I first encountered "woke" people, before they even had a name, I clocked the way they fetishized trauma and especially that they actively encourage it. Trigger warnings prime someone for symptoms and actively discourage improvement (at least based on what I was taught- but my therapy worked!) They immediately left a bad taste in my mouth, and when I met Transwomen with fake PTSD things started to come together in my mind, like, this is a sexual thing with these people.

I think everyone has subjects they are experts on, or that they have personal experience with, that you can build a critique of woke ideology on. I would try to find something in her personal life she knows they're wrong about and use it to illustrate more academic critiques related to gender and sexual orientation.

Chunkeeguy · 2021-07-14T23:40:32+00:00

Wokeness is acute and smug awareness of problems that don’t exist outside your white middle class ivory tower.

bopomofodojo · 2021-07-15T04:30:13+00:00

I'd definite it as a secularized neo-Puritan social movement, based in the United States. The "4th Great Awakening" if you will.

First, I'll get it out of the way - as a Marxist, Marxism has absolutely nothing to do with Wokeness. It's so, so common for people to call it "Neo-Marxism" or other shit. It's not. It's fundamentally a post-modernist philosophy which (should) reject Marxism. Though I will admit it has co-opted a lot of leftist/Marxist rhetoric.

At its core, wokeism is a worldview and philosophical system based on an us-vs-them mentality. It can be compared analogously to just about every similar one throughout history: "we" are the just, moral upholders of decency, morality, and "what is right", everyone else is a demon/evil person actively subverting us.

It makes heavy use of the (bunk) concept of Whig History, thinking that "now" is "the end of history", that "progress" - and specially "social progress" - is a linear, forward moving march from "bad" to "good". "Progressiveism" is a virtue, "conservatism" is a sin. "The right side of history" is quite literally the definition of this thinking.

As I mentioned above, modern Wokeness is based in postmodern philosophy. A key, almost fundamental, tenet of postmodernist philosophical discourse is the rejection of notions of historical narrative and absolute truth (in the sense that, say, the mathematical property "2 + 2 = 4" is "true") and is, in the philosophical sense, incredibly Idealist - that is, positioning mental ideas above physical, material reality. This is why it is contrary to Marxism, which is fundamentally a historical narrative, and materialist philosophy. Think "the mind shapes the world" versus "the world shapes the mind". This is most clearly evident in the context of the Trans debates, since the entire notion of "trans" is built off the idea that the mind has some magical, mystical, metaphysical superiority to the body, and in the idea of "lived experience" trumping statistics, provable fact, etc.

Beyond that, we get things like the Critical theories, specifically Critical Race Theory and Query Gender Theory, which is something that could (and should) have thousands of pages of essay debunking. I don't know it well enough to really speculate. But this has also been included in Wokism.

I mentioned above that it is a "neo-Puritan" movement, because it functions almost entirely like a cult. There are mantras that must be repeated without question, base truths that must be accepted without question, it is "us-versus-them" against the "bad world", leaving results in excommunication and shunning, etc. But it is not centralized; there is no "leadership", it's a broader cultural phenomenon.

It is ultimately driven by activist culture and white guilt. An offshoot of mainstream American Liberalism, it seeks - again in very Christian fashion - to "atone" for the "sins" of the past, especially the sins of "cishet white men". This is the crux of it all - "smashing X" to "dismantle" the "systems" that "oppress minorities". But it is, at best, a surface-level analysis - as liberal analysis often is - and misses many of the most critical structural issues (namely, Capitalism and the relation of workers to property) while simultaneously co-opting its discourse, terminology, and such. Hence "intersectionality", "class reductionist" accusations, etc. It fundamentally cannot, and will not, achieve any actual success in its objectives because it is fighting symptoms rather than diseases, and misdiagnosing the symptoms at that.

Finally one last thought, why it's bad - it's bad because, basically, it is a distraction. It is the perfect tool of the ruling classes (the billionaire class and their political lackeys) to divide working people into ever and ever smaller and isolated groups/"identities", both to sell us things, and to prevent us from unifying in opposition to them. This has been clear since the 1960's and 1970's when the CIA devoted numerous resources to studying and influencing the French postmodernist philosophers, and they have worked to push this ideology in academia for decades. Now it is leaking into the "real world" due to a generation or two being raised on it and the rise of social media allowing its ideas to spread like a virus.

wafflegaff · 2021-07-22T20:12:06+00:00

I won't have time to dig into this one for a few days at least, so I will just contribute this observation: Part of being "woke" is being gullible, sympathetic, and easily played when the usual narcissistic suspects come along to jump on a platform and claim fake victimhood to gain power. Great example (other than the endless TRA examples): "Believe all women." Sure. Have you ever met one with NPD or BPD who makes it their business to make false accusations regularly? (Men with Cluster B issues do this, too, but women tend to be believed more often.) That will change your mind right quick. No group of people is categorically saintly. Don't be a fool about this. Those people WILL use you to get what they want, because you (the woke) will compliantly sit there repeating your foolish little mantras to yourself about an alternate social and behavioral reality that does not exist. Sanity check your assumptions. Don't abdicate your responsibility to consistently engaging in critical thought. A sad or tragic story might be true; it might also not be true. A villain might exist; the alleged villain might also be the actual victim. And you need to lose any naive innocence you have about this sooner rather than later. It sucks but it must be done, because the exploiters of the world are looking for you and when they find you, they will Trojan-horse the bleep out of you. Often to get back at some other target they were already mistreating.

Daddiescummies · 2021-07-14T21:42:49+00:00

From an American viewpoint, "Wokeness" is just a general realization that White supremacy culture in America is a systemic problem that infests systems and influences personal biases. Racism (xenophobia and anti-Blackness, specifically), homophobia, ableism, and classism are all products of White supremacy culture.

Wokeness is the absolute least effort someone can put into deconstructing White supremacy: Actual anti-racism, gay-allyship, and disability accommodation would require a shift of power away from able-bodied straight white men, and those adjacent to White supremacy (White gays, White women, White disabled people, straight Black men, ect) who benefit from inclusion within White-supremacy structures.

Deconstructing White supremacy is too much work for most people, so they perform activism ("Protect Black disabled trans women of color") so that their access to the power bestowed by White supremacy is not compromised.

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