DiscussionWhat 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?

submitted by yousaythosethingsFind and Replace "gatekeeping" with "having boundaries" from self.LGBDropTheT

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[–]Destresse🇨🇵 10 insightful - 1 fun10 insightful - 0 fun11 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

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.

[–]yousaythosethingsFind and Replace "gatekeeping" with "having boundaries"[S] 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I appreciate this response. You captured in words a lot of what I’ve been thinking.

Especially this

Wokeness has declared war on our natural limitations.

And this

Going on borderline religious crusades to remove all of our judging functions

I’ve been absolutely feeling like there is the absolute denialism about the basics of humanity going on. And complete disregard for more proximate perils. Everything is violence except actual violence. Everything is threatening and dangerous except that which is actually, obviously, and indisputably threatening and dangerous. We pretend we do not see people’s sex and that it doesn’t matter. We pretend that we don’t just use pronouns based off people’s discernible sex. When no one in the general public out and about has ever asked for my pronouns or called me anything but “she” as I’m obviously female. We pretend that a victim of a sex crime “misgendering” her attacker commits an equal crime by doing so.

We pretend children have more wisdom about the basic realities of the world than adults. We pretend children who believe that Santa visits all kids in the world in one night and that boys who put on dresses become girls are capable of deciding that they should skip puberty and have their healthy sex organs cut off (and if children know for sure, are never wrong, and should always be affirmed, what is the woke argument against performing these surgeries even earlier when the children are tiny and their classmates don’t know them as someone else?). We pretend that in a women’s prison obviously women face no threat from obvious men but in a men’s prison, a less obvious woman faces and a less obvious man face an intolerable threat from men.

You can only persist in this thinking if you isolate yourself from hearing the thoughts of anyone who doesn’t 100% agree with you. You are told to outsource your thinking, which is funny that I’m doing that here but only because I wanted to explore the idea of whether there are unified conceptions of wokeness since I realized it’s a lot of different things together and different aspects of it are generally recognizable by everyone who criticizes wokeness but different aspects are most important to different people. Liberals and conservatives who criticize wokeness focus on different things with some overlap.

I also want to add that in line with what you said, I get the impression that they think they’re creating a utopia that everyone wants, but the way they go about it is the antithesis of what they say they want. They are creating what looks more like hell to most people.