{"id":3647,"date":"2021-10-04T09:13:16","date_gmt":"2021-10-04T08:13:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edgeverse.org\/?p=3647"},"modified":"2025-04-16T05:01:51","modified_gmt":"2025-04-16T04:01:51","slug":"waking-up-to-woke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/edgeverse.org\/?p=3647","title":{"rendered":"Waking Up to Woke"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Waking Up to Woke<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Seth Godwynn & A.P. Atkinson<\/h5>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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A question that often comes up when people complain about \u2018wokeness\u2019 is \u201cHow exactly are you defining woke?\u201d This is a purely rhetorical question, based on the presumption that nobody really knows what it means, because it doesn\u2019t exist in any formally established sense. It\u2019s a \u2018gotcha\u2019, as it were.\u00a0<\/h5>
We believe that those of us who find \u2018wokeness\u2019 inherently abhorrent all understand instinctively what it is, but find it difficult to articulate or pin down consistently, because it is a constantly mutating virus spanning multiple levels of despicability, akin to wrestling a greasy pig or writing long form fiction using Microsoft Word. To address this, we will attempt to extrapolate its darker depths below.<\/h5>
Here, Jack highlights some of the symptoms that typify wokeness, and explores some of the dark agendas behind it, while Seth digs out the root causes, and explains the psychological mechanisms that enable it. Neither of us disagree with the other\u2019s take, which is unusual, so they should be taken as complementary.<\/h5>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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Jack's Take:<\/h3>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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\u2018Woke\u2019 is the promotion of certain new political ideals over well-established ones that have been proven over many generations to work. By this definition, it can only be seen as a systematic undermining of everything that\u2019s gone before, with the intention of replacing it.<\/p>

The most common use of \u2018woke\u2019 in popular culture is the systematic (not \u2018systemic\u2019\u2014that word does not mean what you think it means) removal of male role-models to be replaced with \u2018empowered\u2019 females who did nothing to earn their new position. A similarly common mechanism is the racial shifting of White characters for the sake of \u2018diversity,\u2019 This has become so common that it\u2019s rare to see any of the large, established franchises with any of its original identity intact.<\/p>

The primary reason for this is the removal of the old tentpole of Western culture, the hard-working male role-model. Archetypal masculine traits can be expressed as supporting a family, gathering resources, building, improving, protecting and creating. Those things are now considered \u2018toxic\u2019 in a world where our leaders want to control all the resources themselves.<\/p>

We constantly see icons of old being eroded away, replaced with weak place-holders who never earned their status, but simply acquire the role without facing any challenges themselves. An excellent example of this is the movie-franchise \u2018Men in Black.\u2019 In the original film, Will Smith\u2019s character must overcome his ignorance and sacrifice everything his life has always been to take on this new role, all while fighting to achieve his eventual status as an equal to the established personnel. In MIB \u2013 International, a female character is simply accepted because she wants to be: she overcomes no challenge or adversity, and ultimately achieves nothing.<\/p>

It\u2019s not unlikely that the reason we see these weak characters is that they\u2019re created by similarly weak people. In modern times, media creatives only arrive in the places they find themselves if they echo the political agendas that are being promoted. They never really needed to earn their own statuses, and don\u2019t understand that in the really-real world where the rest of us actually live, that just isn\u2019t how reality works.<\/p>

So \u2018woke\u2019 can be understood as a political movement aimed at undermining established strength. It\u2019s as much about removing the characteristics of \u2018masculinity\u2019 as it is about replacing the men themselves. It\u2019s about undermining any vestige of strength, any rebelliousness, any resistance to authority. It\u2019s about taking everything that built Western civilisation and subverting it with ideals that only want to tear it down.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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By offering rewards and social-status to victims, we encourage victimhood. We are now at a stage of rewarding failure and mocking any attempt at working towards success. The message here is to give up\u2026 Give up and conform...<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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The real question then, is why is this happening? This can\u2019t happen unless someone is making a very deliberate and very expensive shift in the entire power-base of the global establishment. What we see in our media is very deliberate propaganda designed to slowly indoctrinate people into a pattern of thinking. It\u2019s a pattern whereby the good-will of people who believe in fairness and genuine equality of opportunity is being subverted into spite and hatred.<\/p>

You might ask yourself why people are buying into an agenda that clearly makes no sense whatsoever, collapses under any degree of scrutiny, is self-destructive and illogical. The answer is that only a small minority really do believe in this, and they are quite simply the weak and the powerless who can only find expression this way. There are the bullied and downtrodden people who can\u2019t get any attention on their own merits. They have suddenly been given a voice that they did nothing to earn, and their new-found \u2018influence\u2019 is seductive enough to draw in others.<\/p>

\u2018Woke\u2019 movies always follow a pattern. There can never be a woke movie franchise based on a new idea because it never lasts long enough to earn an audience. The political agenda doesn\u2019t work (for if it did, there would be no need for propaganda in the first place) and the audience doesn\u2019t buy into it. Films made that promote trendy and destructive agendas collapse very quickly.<\/p>

Instead, we see established franchises being usurped. We see the propagandists buying up well-loved properties and forcing their agenda into them, destroying the beloved characters of old and replacing them with cheap wafer-thin imitations.<\/p>

This also never works.<\/p>

One of the most insidious story-elements of the \u2018woke\u2019 agenda is the ignominious ending. As well as gender and race-switching, there is the \u2018death of masculinity\u2019. In this trope, the male icon is killed, leaving the audience to deal with the loss. Now, to put this into perspective, some parts of the human brain do not distinguish reality from fantasy, so the loss of a character in a story is felt as keenly as a real person of equal significance.<\/p>

Often, the character will suffer a needless demise, a death that just leaves the audience feeling demoralised or lost. Often they will be replaced with someone more in-line with the agenda they\u2019re wishing to promote.<\/p>

\u2018Woke\u2019 is not the problem, it\u2019s a symptom of a much larger-scale problem. It\u2019s the latest leading edge in a battle for your mind. It\u2019s part of an agenda where education has been completely undermined, populations are undergoing massive indoctrination, rights and liberties are being stripped away, the media overtly misinforms without consequence, and lies have replaced common-sense.<\/p>

We all want fairness and equal opportunities, but \u2018wokeness\u2019 never was, and never will be about this. It\u2019s a weapon used by the ignorant against the masses. The only way to beat it, is to deny it any power.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Seth's Take:<\/h3>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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On the surface, to those buying into the concept, wokeness is about trying to be better people and making the world a better place for everybody. This surface facade is like a heavily barricaded stronghold on a hill overlooking a vast, bustling, but poorly defended village below\u2014a classic example of a \u2018motte\u2019 and \u2018bailey\u2019 setup\u2014when the village comes under attack, the villagers quickly retreat to the safety of the stronghold. Much like the stronghold (or \u2018motte\u2019) a goal by itself is often admirable and defensible, but this does not make everything that happens in its name an act for the greater good. The village (or \u2018bailey\u2019) is a marketplace for some pretty terrible ideas\u2014but more on this later\u2026<\/p>

At the opposite end, right down at its roots, wokeness is advocacy for Communism. On the surface, that too appears to be for the greater good. Under Communism, everybody is equal, everybody is well off, everybody is happy.\u00a0<\/p>

But, history and our knowledge of human nature teaches us that the reality of Communism is that it\u2019s about destroying the very things that make such a society appear plausible and desirable in the first place\u2014Western civilisation, Christian values and the capitalist market system. The woke allow themselves to be convinced that they would benefit from such destruction. They would not. Only the 0.0001% benefits. Everybody else loses. Everybody else gets to wither and die in a ditch, cold, hungry, diseased, afraid, alone. Yay equality!<\/p>

So the simple answer to \u2018What do you mean by Woke?\u2019 is \u2018Communism!\u2019<\/p>

However, most of the regular wokesters you will come across have not yet made the conscious connection between trying to do the right thing and demanding widespread poverty as Lenin\u2019s little helper. As is often the case, the truth for most people is going to be found in the nuances.\u00a0<\/p>

On the surface, wokeness may have the facade of doing good deeds, but just beneath that self-same surface, it\u2019s really about personal vanity. The \u2018virtuous\u2019 among us feel that the true reward of good deeds is having people believe they are just better than everyone else. This reward is so integral to the virtue that it isn\u2019t even really necessary to perform the good deeds in the first place. In fact, it\u2019s actually permissible, and even encouraged, to do considerable harm if it helps project the image of having done good, because they will still receive the social validation they feel so entitled to. The end always justifies any means when the outcome is this specific!<\/p>

Many advocacy causes are also considered woke. These are causes that on the surface appear to be for the greater good, and likewise just under the surfaces are about vanity. They too often advocate for considerable harm.\u00a0<\/p>

For the more elevated, it isn\u2019t necessary to create such a cause, as one can merely advocate for pre-existing woke causes. The more of these causes you advocate for, the more virtuous you are in social circle-jerks. And one doesn\u2019t have to engage in harm on behalf of any given one of them, as it\u2019s much easier and equally rewarding to just publicly shame people for being insufficiently woke, and persistently insist that your personal or group grievances should infringe on everybody else\u2019s liberties.\u00a0<\/p>

The specifics of the causes are absolutely irrelevant to the concept of wokeness, as the woke will throw any and all of them under a bus at the tip of a hat, and often have. For example, the rights and dignity of sexual and ethnic minorities are popular contemporary woke causes, but when a gay or black person has political views that don\u2019t fit the Communist agenda, they will be subjected to the sort of abuse not seen since Jim Crow\u2014all for the greater good, of course.<\/p>

It\u2019s also worth noting that the specifics are constantly mutating in ways that make no sense whatsoever. Ask a wokester what they think of Jim Crow and they\u2019ll tell you it was a terrible time in history and that whites owe blacks a debt over it. Ask them if, in that light, their college should have \u2018safe space\u2019 drinking fountains and segregated classes for black students and they\u2019ll vigorously approve.\u00a0<\/p>

A Canadian journalist was banned from entering Britain because of an incident of \u2018hate speech.\u2019 The hate speech involved was the \u2018woke\u2019 suggestion that Allah is gay (after all, he is everyone!) The responses were invariably that this was really offensive\u2026 Of course, to say that is offensive is to acknowledge that being gay is bad, or at the very least that discrimination against sexual minorities is perfectly fine in some circumstances. It\u2019s unlikely any minds were actually changed over it, because the specifics of their causes are simply not that important.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Minds indoctrinated to accept illogical patterns of thinking find it very difficult to think about things critically or rationally, because to do so would undermine everything they believe they understand about the world and people around them. Many choose instead to just accept without question, because the alternative guarantees a decade minimum of painful reprogramming followed by a lifetime of misery and disbelief at the stupid things being propagated around them in the public sphere.<\/figcaption>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figure>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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I mentioned earlier the ‘motte and bailey’ setup. Understanding the two patterns it typically takes can help you understand the thinking behind the woke mindset.\u00a0<\/p>

The motte is presented as a simple ‘virtuous’ concept that most rational people would basically agree with. For example, ‘rape is bad.’ \u201cTherefore,\u201d says the wokester. \u201cAll boys must be castrated at birth.\u201d This is the less defensible bailey.\u00a0<\/p>

Now if you point out that the proposed solution is somewhat disproportionally extreme (attacking the bailey), they will retreat to the motte and respond with, \u201cSo you think women deserve to get raped, then?!\u201d They can\u2019t lose. You concede, or you\u2019re a rape-enabler.<\/p>

The second pattern is when the path between the motte and bailey can actually be destroyed with facts\u2014for example: \u201cResearch has actually shown that castrating boys at birth would not reduce rape.\u201d A reasonable person would respond, \u201cThen we must find some other way to reduce rape.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

A wokester will respond, \u201cThen we must find some other reason to castrate all boys at birth.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

Most of the time, they are not consciously aware they are doing this, and it takes considerable introspection to actually see it for what it really is. Minds are stubborn creatures at the best of times.<\/p>

So how did all this start? Or perhaps more to the point, when? It\u2019s often difficult to pinpoint an exact timeframe because to some extent it\u2019s an inescapable fact of the human condition that there will always be people like this. However, what we\u2019re seeing now is perhaps the most severe case of mass hysteria in modern history, and it couldn\u2019t have happened so extremely and so quickly without something driving it. So what happened over the last decade to cause it?<\/p>

Truth is, western society has been building towards what we see today for much longer than a decade. Much much longer. The seeds of this current insurrection of sanity were sown back in the 40s and 50s during the Cold War, but were done so using psy-ops techniques documented thousands of years earlier by Chinese strategist Sun Tzu of \u2018The Art of War\u2019 fame.\u00a0<\/p>

It was confirmed back in the 80s by a former Soviet operative that around 85% of the KGB\u2019s espionage budget was spent infiltrating Western society with the sole intent of destroying it from the inside. They did this by (among other things) stigmatising religion and virtue, while elevating hedonism and vulgarity to high culture in the public mind. It was a self-sustaining long game spanning multiple generations, which worked first by appealing to the rebellious nature of people who wished to do good, and then making nice-sounding promises that didn\u2019t bear scrutiny, guiding them so their own momentum would lead them naturally towards the Communist agenda. It deliberately appealed to all the fringe and niche factions that by themselves were powerless, and brought them all into lockstep with a unified direction to march. They became a powerful entity, and a new generation of teachers and media personalities who had, themselves been indoctrinated\u00a0 into the \u2018new ways\u2019, genuinely believed it was a force for good that must be shared with the next. The \u2018old ways\u2019 of course were harshly relegated to the smelly dustbins of comic-book villain history\u2014they were suddenly so backwards it was a wonder we\u2019d even survived this long as a species.<\/p>

Things progressed slowly like this for several decades (because advocates of \u2018the old ways\u2019 were a pretty stubborn bunch that provided much needed pushback), and although both myself and Jack were indoctrinated ourselves as children, we were overtly aware as early as our young teens that something smelt very very off with society\u2014everything we were being taught contradicted everything else. We also saw vast crevices between the way that people behaved and the way they said they behaved, something they were clearly oblivious to.<\/p>

It wasn\u2019t until the turn of the Century that it started to accelerate though, with the normalisation of the internet in people\u2019s homes, then hands. On the internet, everything you could possibly imagine is true miraculously is. You were right.\u00a0<\/p>

Yay you!\u00a0<\/p>

Educational systems have put no effort into teaching kids how to handle the sheer quantities of uncurated, and often completely inaccurate, information at their fingertips, because for the most part they\u2019re as indoctrinated as the kids they\u2019re teaching are so it\u2019s just not a priority.<\/p>

And that\u2019s where we find ourselves now\u2014in the land of the walking blind.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

It\u2019s time to wake up!<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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