Woke. It’s a word that like ‘like’ competes as winner in the most painfully ubiquitous word stakes. A friend recently asked, ‘what even is woke?’ as though implying it were some fabrication designed to attack liberal values, rather than an unchallenged ideologue that drips down the institutions with the quiet determination of a bathroom water leak, ignored until the kitchen ceiling downstairs grows speckled with archipelagos of dark islands.
She is from Brighton, so it’s not dissimilar to David Foster Wallace’s apocryphal story of the older fish asking the younger fish ‘How’s the water?", to which they answer ’What the hell is water?’ If it could, Brighton would manipulate the weather to create a permanent rainbow over the town centre to announce its embracing of diversity (so long as it isn’t diverse opinion). Places like Brighton are so steeped in pink-haired fury masquerading as kindness that it’s hard to reach the end of a sentence without mention of ‘Tory scum. Half the city might be permanently nursing hangovers, yet it’s a gladiatorial arena of virtue signalling as a competitive sport that utterly ignores the questionable ethics of buying cocaine, or the necessity of oil production to facilitate the standard of living they clearly enjoy.
The origin of Woke reportedly lies with 1930s folk singer Lead Belly, its usage reflecting Black Americans' need to be aware of racially motivated threats. More recently it indicates when an individual becomes so acutely aware of social injustice that they can barely leave their flat without getting tearful. It is however an ideal vehicle with which to demonstrate to the world what a virtuous person they are.
However, the challenge of noticing injustice in the world is that like ants, once you spot one, you spot a hundred, until you’re a gibbering wreck stamping the ground like someone’s emptying a machine gun at your feet and screaming about how unfair life is with the subtlety of a child informed of the unlikeliness of getting the Haribos they’d set their heart on as though life bereft of them is an endless and loveless wasteland. There’s nothing fair about life. There never has been. You play the cards you’re dealt or try to steal someone else’s. It begins and ends in pain, and lacking in any obvious meaning, is a puzzle you alone can solve. The woke movement, like Walkmans, orbital raves and gong baths, might simply be the latest fad in finding a sense of significance to life, but unlike gong baths (unless you’re doing them wrong) its underlying goal is patronising, simplistic and authoritarian.
The first necessity of combatting social injustice requires clear identification of apparently wounded parties that the virtuous might swing down and save. Woe betide any member of said groups who fail to see themselves as victims: after all you can’t save the self-determined. Minorities are required, and the smaller and more niche the better. Even those with sexual kinks such as S&M or animal role play are now elevated to privilege status due to their perceived marginalisation. The woke warriors will be coming for the hermits eventually, their solitude and isolation proclaimed because of heartless capitalism, and deaf to the pleas of ‘I’m fine’ and ‘leave me the fuck alone.’
Someone else recently said woke is just being kind, isn’t it? Well, like pissing and sneezing at the same time, it’s impossible to take a comment like that seriously. It suggests that before the wokerati arrived to enlighten us, we were wandering around looking for reasons to push one another into a canal. Wokeness is nothing to do with kindness, and all to do with division. Woke has a god that is to be worshipped, and it’s called Victimhood. People are measured for their victimhood (not manhood for obvious reasons) and then defined as either oppressors or victims. It’s entirely the same as children splitting the world into goodies and baddies. There’s no room for nuance. Nuance is probably far right according to the doctrine.
Tragically, competitive victimhood is the celebration of a gallop to the bottom. Woke leans into a helplessness that subsequently demands intervention, ultimately from the State. Much as Covid exposed a willingness of people to delegate knowledge and expertise to the Government, the wokearati see victims as an opportunity to promote their own virtue. They see themselves as puritanical and incapable of any badness that is as inherent in human beings as goodness. Its denial on a currently global, or at least Western, scale. It results in lefty, undernourished pin-ups like Archbishop Justin Welby referring to collective sin inherited by white people and by the British, as though no other race on earth has sinned. That includes the Romans, the Sumerian’s, Vikings, the Ghana empire, the Ottomans, the French, the Benin empire, Germans, Russian communists, China, the list goes on.
Its reductive view of the world discovers an injustice, and immediately attributes it as the defining identity of that social demographic, and cancels anyone who challenges the idea. It bestows victimhood upon huge numbers of people, whom are apparently indistinguishable from one another, whether they want it or not, often by white millennials, who rather than standing proudly on the shoulders of their ancestors, prefer to dismantle generational progression in a flurry of hysterical guilt.
However, the problem is that any divergence from being a victim pitches you into the oppressor camp, which implies success is to be avoided. Even attractiveness, confidence and strong self-esteem seen through the woke prism is an injustice to those without. And let’s face it (if you’ll excuse the pun), it’s easier to make everyone unattractive or less confident than the hard work required to elevate people. Hence the contemporary obsession with asexual, ill-fitting, rags for clothes and body mutilation. Although the doctrine demands diversity, it is often difference that results in inequality, so really they are fighting for uniformity, After all, the injustice of mathematicians being rewarded for preferring to spend their days solving a Diophantine equation than watching Oprah and Cheers reruns, is answered by forcing the mathematicians to prefer TV.
How can a society thrive when it ignores merit and sees only skin colour, gender, or sexual orientation as an indicator of inequality and injustice; that there is nothing to be celebrated in achievements, only attributes are important? Come fly with us, we have a diverse workforce of pilots, none of whom can land a plane in a crosswind, but they are trans. It also absolves groups of any personal or collective responsibility; victims evidently cannot be oppressors, even when publicly advising people to punch TERFs in the face.
Ultimately being woke is more about the person claiming to care than it is about the cause. It provides life with meaning that you don’t really have to work hard for, with denial of internal badness via public and performative displays of being ‘good’. However, if the wokies really wanted to make a difference why don’t they campaign against the ineffectiveness of contemporary blunt cutlery knives that would actually make a difference to peoples’ lives by spreading hardened butter, rather than sowing division, and slinging Nazi and fascist slurs at anyone daring to not submit to their cause with the subtlety of a ticker tape parade. Instead, the Woke movement is exactly when the liberals became illiberal, utterly intolerant of dissenting opinion or diversity of thought. All they see is that the world is a rotten place, and they are the ones to cure its ills, rather than the genuinely diverse, contrary, beautiful and affecting place it can so often be.
Haha! Lovely. Thank you Chris. Much appreciated.
if this were a game of darts you'd have scored 120 with that 🎯