The modern phenomenon of ‘woke’ is hard to pin down. Is it a movement, a religion, an attitude, or a lifestyle? Here we offer our own definition that places woke in the broader historical and political story of the West.
We start with a list of attitudinal elements that most people would agree should count as part of woke. In this we are spoiled for choice, with a whole smorgasbord of examples from the personal, political and corporate spheres from which to discern the core elements. Here are our top five:
- Identity theft. This is best exemplified in gender appropriation, whereby anyone who says or believes they are a woman is indeed a woman and must be treated as such by others, at pain of social disapprobation and even legal punishment. The woke lack respect for previous identities.
- Illiberalness. The woke perspective in many areas features a suspension of belief in public debate and the value of diverse viewpoints, to the point of being willing to invade and sabotage public spaces in which such debates and viewpoints are aired.
- Cancel culture. We see the cancellation imperative of woke in the destruction of symbols and rituals of the previously dominant Western culture: felling monuments, defacing art, negating traditional days of celebration, using disruption and chaos to draw attention to causes, and targeting the careers of those who defend the pre-existing culture.
- Victimhood. Woke places primacy in the public sphere on helplessness and victimhood, preferably victimhood resulting from perceived injustices at the hands of traditional Western culture.
- Alarmism. Woke promotes the idea of the collapse of civilisation due to human-induced threats (like climate, viruses, or the Chinese government) and adopts ever new totems allegedly to ward off that collapse.
Identity theft has always been a go-to in the toolbox for hopeful cultural coup d’états, as for example when the Christians outfitted their Devil with the trident of the Greek god Poseidon and the goat feet of other religions, bolstering their own credentials while marginalising the older culture. Illiberalism is a staple of communism and fascism, both Western inventions. The absolutism of cancel culture is a mutation of traditional liberalism. Victimhood is an old Christian meme. Alarmism has been the bread and butter of subsidy-dependent international groups for centuries.
These five elements have long antecedents in our cultural history. Yet they were not of prime importance in mainstream Western culture, say, 30 years ago, so their collective centrality in today’s discourse is novel. Woke’s incessant harping on about tolerance, acceptance, inclusivity, and caring is all posturing, and in fact is the 180-degree opposite of the reality of its actions and reactions. Yet wearing that mask helps it exploit the naivete of those who previously adhered to other faiths.
Woke Activities 1: The Raid
The primary activities of the woke movement collectively can be viewed as a territorial raid: a takeover of the cultural and economic spaces previously occupied by other groups and cultures. This is a historically normal occurrence in times of turbulence, when opportunistic groups take advantage of distracted populations to snatch away privileges and undermine the existing culture. In this sense, the woke phenomenon is just an extension of other quite recent raids in the West.
For example, the latter-wave feminist ideology of resistance to ‘the patriarchy’ can be seen as an attempt by dominant white Western women to usurp the privileges of dominant white Western men. ‘Intersectionality’ can be viewed similarly as an attempt, mainly by white Western women, to take down white Western males by allying themselves with other ‘oppressed’ groups, because, supposedly, they were all victimised by white Western males.
Today’s woke movement ups the ante by advocating the takedown of all things Western, including white females, who have thereby been hoisted on their own petard and are thus feeling rather betrayed. Their raid on the privileges of their men has been overtaken by a much bigger raid that the very men they had been targeting would previously have combated.
In the vanguard of the current usurpation are young white Westerners, showing the economic theme of woke: it is an attempt of young white youth to muscle privileges away from ‘old whites’. Once again this kind of dynamic is very normal in royal courts, seats of power that typically attract many hangers-on who have nothing genuinely productive to do but instead just fight over privileges.
Woke Activities 2: The Religious Experience
Woke, with its alarmism and cancel culture dimension, is an outgrowth of a kind of spiritual journey by a new generation that is searching for new overarching religious narratives. Consistent with the central tradition of Western mainstream religion, the new woke religion follows an absolutist mould: just as the first commandment in the Bible is to “have no other God but me”, woke is similarly absolutist and violent towards anyone refusing the ‘one God’ dictated by woke in an area targeted by woke.
Disciples of woke have abandoned the ideology of freedom of faith and speech that typified the Enlightenment, and have instead travelled back to the Middle Ages for their inspiration. Tearing down the symbols and rituals belonging to old gods and defeated groups is (like raiding) a historically normal activity of rebels and would-be ascendant groups in Western culture, or any culture really.
Woke Activities 3: Parasitism
Woke feeds like a parasite not merely on the successes of previously dominant groups and religions of the West, but on anything healthy and fertile in the West. We see this in its attack on families, its attacks on positive historical images of whole countries, and its attacks on actual health embodied in the peddling of unhealthy lifestyles (for example, advocating masks and safetyism) and the celebration of unhealthy body types (for example, those of obese or gender-converted people). During covid especially we saw this parasitism on success in woke’s attack on science, as it instead celebrated the ‘truths’ put out by authority figures. Diversity is healthy, and accordingly we see woke attacking it too (though its adherents would never admit this), whenever it seeks to cancel diverse opinions.
The Telling Case of Posie Parker
The woke phenomenon has had bittersweet moments. Take the experience of Posie Parker (Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull) in New Zealand. Posie travelled the world loudly proclaiming in demonstrations that “a woman is an adult human female”, essentially implying that womanhood is a biological fact and not a choice any adult can make, thereby defending the territory of women in Western culture.
This was in open defiance of the ideology that self-identification has primacy over biology, leading New Zealand’s immigration minister to call Posie’s views repugnant. A violent mob of over 1,000 ‘trans activists’ in Auckland intimidated Posie and her supporters, leading the Guardian (arguably the ‘home of woke’ in the media) to call her an anti-trans activist and to publish an opinion piece calling her an ”agitator” and her language “hateful” and “dangerous”. All this violence and virtue-signalling was neatly summed up by Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator as “a ritualistic shaming of a witch, a violent purging of a heretic”. Quite so.
The irony of the whole thing was that it took burly male police officers to save Posie from the mob. Posie’s main allies in the last few years have been second- and third-wave feminists whose principal enemies until recently were masculine white men – i.e., the very types of people who came to her rescue: men who took their ancient patriarchal role of protectors seriously. The lesson of being careful what you wish for was delivered in spades to any woman watching.
Our Definition of Woke
Assembling the attitudes and activities that characterise the woke phenomenon, we arrive at the following definition of woke:
Woke is a movement that invades and usurps public spaces and economic roles occupied by dominant cultural forces and group identities, displaying moral absolutism, intolerance, narcissism, victimhood, identity theft, alarmism, and the appearance of tolerance and diversity instead of their substance.
Our definition is quite a mouthful, but that is hard to avoid when trying to capture a complex, large-scale sociological phenomena. If we were writing a dictionary for the common man and needed a simple one-liner, we might write that woke is a “sterile death cult of unproductive whining kids who find each other in a raid on the adults they hope to replace”.
The Politics of Woke
On the upside, a movement like woke could, in our judgment, be crushed by money in an instant. If Big Money wanted to, it could use mass media and political tools to steamroll woke within weeks, and would moreover be cheered on as it did so by the vast majority of the population.
Why doesn’t this happen? For the simple reason that the activities of woke fit the economic interests of large corporations, international agencies, and the globalist class. The enemies of the globalist class are patriotism and virile communities capable of seeing the truth and organising themselves against the globalists. The globalists then naturally back woke, following the ancient Arab saying that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. There is also a clear economic rationale: by aligning themselves with the fluffy face of woke, corporations, NGOs, and international agencies can get more business, more money and more power. (In recent times, we have seen a few corporations – like Anheuser-Busch – fall afoul of their own eagerness to jump on the woke bandwagon, but those scant examples have not yet delivered enough pushback to reverse the movement.)
Some have tried to trace lines of international corporate funding (e.g. via woke scoring systems and the ESG investment system), an ongoing investigative task made difficult by a lack of financial transparency rules.
Still, what can be observed fits with economic incentives. The woke are being given resources and exploited by the globalist class as a kind of fascist shock army to assist in dividing and ruling the populations of the West, while the globalists dream of eventually establishing a technocratic neo-feudal empire that they control.
The globalist class – about whom we have written previously – is playing with fire when it aligns itself with woke. It is betting that its members can personally escape the downsides of woke, and that it can squash woke when it is no longer useful, both of which are probably fair bets.
Yet the globalists are also wagering that the woke agenda will not undermine the rule of law on which their own property rights depend, or the strength of the whole West on which their international status depends. This is a far riskier wager, akin to burning down a house in order to evict the occupants and then live there yourself.
Woke’s lust for destruction has emerged from the heart of a decaying Western society. Woke is an attack on the most potent and healthy elements of that society, backed by the super-rich who seek more control. At once a sterile new religion of the useless to celebrate uselessness, a fanatical doomsday cult, and a thief of what is good, healthy and self-affirming, woke represents in four letters what ails the West, and the antithesis of what is needed to heal the West.
Paul Frijters, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a Professor of Wellbeing Economics in the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics, UK. He specializes in applied micro-econometrics, including labor, happiness, and health economics Co-author of The Great Covid Panic.
Gigi Foster, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a Professor of Economics at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research covers diverse fields including education, social influence, corruption, lab experiments, time use, behavioral economics, and Australian policy. She is co-author of The Great Covid Panic.
Michael Baker has a BA (Economics) from the University of Western Australia. He is an independent economic consultant and freelance journalist with a background in policy research.
This piece was first published by the Brownstone Institute.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
‘Woke’ is a totalitarian socialist movement: socialist fascism.
Totalitarian socialism is a political ideology based upon state controlled economics, nationalism, the total involvement of the state in internal affairs, the importance of the state in preserving socialism.
It advocates a massive centralization of power and the desire to spread the ideology with force if need be: socialist fascism.
The emphasis on minority concerns is simply a front to gain control of the levers of political power through moral leverage; blackmail.
And it is working.
The globos are Communists. Their whole goal is to burn the house down. It’s what Commies do. They’ve spent the last few decades hollowing out the West’s industries and placing them in the Communist East. There’s nothing left for the West but financial collapse and civil war with the immigrants we’ve let in. At that stage the woke will be the first to have their heads on the chopping block, because they will have served their purpose.
The globalists will then come in and rule over the rubble from their new proxy in China and their bases in Switzerland and Israel.
And yet the poor of the world have nearly all benefited from independent Industrialisation and it’s labour saving fruits, all of which came about from a peaceful and bottom up revolution. Meanwhile, as you state, the French revolutionary and it’s violent ‘solutions’ have spread around the world like the great plague and with equally bad outcomes. The Bolsheviks expected the British working class to join their revolution, except the British working class were infinitely better off than the Russian peasant and largely through their own efforts. The left continue to use the Russian peasant lens as a template to evaluate the world and seem incapable of viewing the world through an independent minded British engineers’. This probably explains why many on the left cannot comprehend how Great Britain became wealthy so quickly – it is supposedly not possible without slavery or top down organisation. It is blatantly evident that Communism is nothing more than an over intellectualized variation of all previous top down social structures such as the Assyrian Empire.
Yes, but none of that British industry remains today. All that really remains is the City Square Mile. The World’s Financial Toilet. Our torch for being the originators of the Industrial Revolution has long since passed on.
Once we became the centre of the worlds financial transactions, we became the centre of the global planned economy through monetary policy and central banking.
And what did we as a nation get out of it? A welfare state, tertiary services industries, lots of immigration and a few very rich people.
We have further to go to get back to an industrialised economy than any other nation in the developed world.
I think the rot began as soon as WW2 ended. Churchill was voted out and the new Labour Government began with a WW2 victory parade, except our Polish and Czech fellow soldiers were not allowed to take part, so as not to offend Stalin. The Civil Service got busy ‘re-imagining’ the UK and moving us toward nationalisation. The Miles M52 project was cancelled for no good reason as was our fledgling and potentially successful rocket programme and the long march of nationalisation killed off the insight and vision of independent engineers. There have been many others cancelled projects since. Unfortunately Mrs Thatcher’s kitchen economics, while bringing the Unions under control, was incapable of understanding the very deep roots of the multi skilled British workforce, as the deliberate de-industrialisation of the UK appeared to be based on a two dimensional view of free market economy. Perhaps, she had here ear bent by the growing band of global technocrats? I don’t think Adam Smith’s interpretation of self interest was meant to be interpreted as ‘do what you want when you want’ with no regard for anyone else, or culture. Tony Blair has to be the worst as he seemed hell bent on disenfranchising and dumbing down the British electorate as part of the process of abolishing the identity of the British people.
Now we have Net-Zero and the only viable alternative to Hydro-carbon fuels is nuclear. It just so happens that Rolls-Royce, our indigenous industry, is experienced in making small scale nuclear power engines. Rolls-Royce is able to make these now so that we can power our towns and cities. For whatever reason the government (Civil Service) has decided that we must tender for this on the international market. It is as if the Civil Service is doing everything it can to make sure we are not independent or have any industry.
Perhaps the Civil Service is made up of people that agree with the following? To be absolutely clear the following are so wrong.
Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?
Maurice Strong
Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.
Maurice Strong
Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun
Paul Ehrlich
We contend that the position of the nuclear promoters is preposterous beyond the wildest imaginings of most nuclear opponents, primarily because one of the purported ‘benefits’ of nuclear power, the availability of cheap and abundant energy, is in fact a liability.
Paul Ehrlich
The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man
Club of Rome
A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer
Paul Ehrlich
…the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million people but less than one billion
Club of Rome
The addition of a temporary sterilant to staple food, or to the water supply. With limited distribution of antidote chemicals, perhaps by lottery
Paul Ehrlich
I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.
John Davis
The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing
Christopher Manes
It’s interesting you mention the Second World War.
Hitlers war was against Communist Russia (a significant majority of the Bolsheviks happened to be Jewish) and we and the Americans decided to come to the aid of the Commies as the Nazis marched East.
After the war, we gave everything East of Germany over to the Commies.
We were then surprised when we started to see Communist influence spread throughout the world. We had a so-called Cold War which dragged on for a long time with our former allies, which only seemed to bolster their nuclear capabilities. The Americans tried to arrest the spread through McCarthyism, the failure of which demonstrated that Commies were and remain very much in charge.
Then we have the so-called Conservatives, who did nothing to reverse the redefinition of citizenship under Citizens of the UK and Colonies and dressed up the total deregulation of the banking system (the Big Bang) as a period of industrial economic growth. They also completely folded in the wake of the Long March Through the Institutions.
Where we are today is the product of generations of subversion that has corrupted the seeds of progress we had in the 19th Century. It is only going to take an inflection point, such as the upcoming destruction of the US Dollar, to see it all come down like a house of cards.
Then the Commies win. I’m not sure that all of us speaking German would have been much worse, but I also don’t see why we wouldn’t have allowed them both to destroy each other, unless some very powerful people wanted this result in the first place.
I think Roosevelt was naïve about Stalin expecting him to join the free west. Churchill didn’t trust Stalin and it became evident not long after the end of WW2 with the blockade of Berlin
I think the Roosevelt rationale is similar to excuses we all make for murderous Commies that we would never have made for murderous Nazis. The same rationale is used as the basis for putting all our industry in the hands of the Communist Chinese.
As for Churchill, I think he knew very well that the reason for going to war against Germany was that they wouldn’t join the global financial order. We had to crush their independent industrial capability as we did in WW1.
“The globos are Communists. Their whole goal is to burn the house down. It’s what Commies do”
and with no coherent alternative to put in its place…
We have a very coherent alternative. 19th century laissez-faire industrial capitalism with external tariffs, that at most trades internationally with the Commonwealth (and even then only if they’re under proper management). No IMF, no fiat money printing.
We’ve managed to break what was already working. No need to invent an unnecessary alternative.
I agree with this. However the headline seems unnecessarily reductionist, since the movement has already IMO been better traced and linked to Cultural Marxism by James Lindsay because on careful reading it is clear Marxism, despite the commonly held view, is in fact concerned more with culture than economics. He describes very clearly, why despite claims to the contrary, this is a highly appropriate description of the woke movement. The movement is always seeking to utterly destroy establishment institutions and replacing them with undifferentiated and incredibly dangerous “equality of outcome.”
Very much agree with how it is being funded and promoted by globalists with ESG as one of the mechanisms. The quicker people wake up to the fact the majority of the billionaire class are very far from capitalists, and totally mischaracterised as capitalists the better. They would be quite happy for there to be a woke neo-Marxist revolution, because in their arrogance they think they will remain global CCP style puppet masters at the top. They have come to this view precisely because anti capitalist tilting of the playing field through lobbying for authoritarian policy making is working so well for them. ESG sees a direct siphon of funding away from free market profits, into mandated curated boutique social businesses, where the regulatory framework endows subsidy and guaranteed returns. So the private equity finance sector owned by the billionaire class, and outside of public share trading markets, is heavily invested in the land for wind farms where we are told how wonderfully economic they are once the capital has been invested, but where prices are in fact pegged to bad prices, driven up by war and the 2030 agenda and which have seen a massive transfer of wealth from the lower and middle class to the ultra rich. They are heavily invested in the insect protein businesses, and the heat pump businesses, the “impossible meat” businesses and the eco fuel supply.
Making air travel their preserve only increases the margin of their power relative to the hoi polio. same with 15 minute cities. The confiscation of farms is welcomed when you are in the position to buy the land and make the upfront capital investments these new non food production ventures require. They are happy with the upfront capital costs, because they have the money.
They are happy promoting China because they see they are in line to be in the global equivalent of the CCP.
The Woke are happy for large numbers of immigrants to flood in even though almost all of these will have an cultural hostility to anything woke.
And here is another angle on immigration:
“Angela Merkal’s astounding open border policy granting close to a million Muslim immigrants entry into Germany could be seen as self-flagellation for Germany’s historical transgressions. Laced with typical progressive lunacy, what better way to make up for the Holocaust than by admitting “refugees” who frequently exhibit genocidal hatred of Jews.”
Gad Saad
Because nobody has said ‘No!’ to what has become a generation of emotional and intellectual retards.
Well it’ll spoil the headline; I’m old(ish) and white, but not privileged – def. “having special rights, advantages or immunities”. I suspect that’s true of most people.
And yet destructive political activism is trying to make my well-deserved impending retirement miserable. Well, it won’t work, you infantile bastards.
Heavens above! Well if Woke is a religion I guess worshipers will be right at home here;
https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1665225684023668737
“Woke” = sleepwalking into tyranny
Woke” = sleepwalking into tyranny
As definitions go that’s pretty damn good.
A classic example of overthinking somebody else’s stupidity. Do the author’s truly believe that the youth of today have the time, inclination and cerebral ability to construct such a philosophy?
…. nd without bothering with such estanblished ideas as elections.
I dunno but I’m thinking the unnaturally giant arm gives the game away…
https://twitter.com/MalesInDisguise/status/1665421619177705473/photo/1
There are possibly six trans people in that photo.
Some of the argument used here is somewhat tendentious.
Look at the documentary evidence of Christianity and you won’t find the description of the devil as given by the author. In the wilderness temptation of Christ, Satan is depicted as being able and willing to give anyone anything they want. Satan’s offers to Christ are matched accordingly with Christ’s missionary objectives.
In the historical context of the first century, the churches were organised in the same way as all the other free associations in the Roman world and were indistinguishable from them. Christianity altered the previously subservient position of women in ancient Roman society.
If there’s any connection with religion in whatever passes for ‘woke’, it is that the woke attitude is simply the old temptation to look good without doing any good. Victimhood may be what is preached in the churches today, especially those of the Church of England, but to make it and the liberation from it into a general principle of Christianity is to grossly distort the scriptures.
There is a biological truth of the identification of a man or a woman. This cannot and should not be denied. There are levels of manliness and womanliness which may try to force a “grey area” in that definition, and people at extreme ends of the scale from their defined gender may wish or prefer they were the alternative gender. I think most people can understand that and accept that they may want to be referred to as a different gender to that which they were born with. I sympathise with these people and support their need to refer to themselves and be referred to as the gender they choose. What I find difficult to accept is people who see personal benefits from claiming a different gender, either to be fashionable or exceed in something like sport.