Lexical interlude: "Wokism" and "Wokish," explained

Hint: If you can't criticize it without being threatened or sanctioned, it probably belongs in the "W" column

I take suggestions from readers seriously. It would be asinine not to, unless my only goal here was to churn out unfiltered thoughts and let people think what they want of the resulting splash of concepts and their framing.

I am no more able than anyone else to serve as the superego of my own output. I can look over every word of what I write and imagine the picture created by each sentence and the movie thus formed in everyone’s mind by a given string of sentences. But I will never know what it is like to read my own writing from an outside perspective; at best, I can cobble together a general idea of the typical movie others see when reading these posts, and what this “film” appears to tell them about its director.

And I’m not talking about the basic presentation of the blog. Even if I caught every typo and other kind of mistake in every post before publishing them, being better at custodial duties does little to improve the overall perceived value of an intellectual property.

Whether I adapt anything in my approach after processing a given suggestion depends not only on how on-point it seems to be but also on my own willingness to relinquish ingrained patterns. Sometimes I would rather write exactly what I think even knowing it will probably cost me readers, an ethos that is both honest and self-defeating. And the more the government exerts censorship as well as dispensing lies on every major media platform, the more I want to write things merely because they would be disallowed almost everywhere else, which is usually also self-defeating. I often want to stop writing anything at all.

Yet why should I heed the rhetorical imperatives of knowingly dishonest low-wattage people just because they happen to be government officials or spoiled dingbats with gifted Ivy League degrees and media jobs? These are all just chittering monkeys who, like me, slid onto the world covered in slime through a trench about one inch from an anus (C-sections excluded) and whose dead bodies will eventually be either burned, buried pointlessly underground so no one can watch their corpses rot, or vainly preserved.

Most of these iconic figures are overwhelmingly the beneficiaries of luck, not smarts or unusual industriousness. Were there no stock market and the concept of remote wealth nonexistent, no one would care who was running companies like Blackrock, Disney, or Comcast, not that these would exist in their present demoralized forms.

Fifty years from now, not person will care how much power any of the world’s diabolical but transformative figures believed they held over anyone in 2023. Most of their misbegotten kids will see them as no more than money faucets, not people worth remembering after they finally shut up and croak. In fact, in fifty years, if this whole circus is even here at all, it will scarcely resemble the current one, unless you happen to be reading this from China.

Nevertheless, even a writer who centers his efforts on an activity very few people care about would be foolish to intentionally limit his audience, even someone who doesn’t do the usual things to promote it.

I was recently chastised for using the c-word, along with the explicit advisory that such language, like as not, invariably flicks a switch in a certain proportion of readers that blinds them to any merits in the surrounding text. Although it would be easy to protest in any number of ways (e.g., “Well, why is this word OK, then?”) it makes more sense for me to acknowledge extant rather than aspirational reality and doggedly shape this groaning fart of a newsletter into something marginally less allergenic to a general audience.

Also, because I can get across whatever I intend to convey with that word using around ten other words, each of them independently benign, this is a concession I am happy to make. My only counterargument to this, and it’s weak, is that people will be even more distressed every time I patiently spell out what I mean by the c-word in a given instance, such as a high-follower, if increasingly disreputable and mocked, Twitter user and pseudofeminist gaslighter falsely accusing me of stalking and threatening women. See? That was easy.

Broadly offensive words and phrases are one thing, but I have also been advised that I should clarify what I mean by “Wokish” and “Wokism,” since new or occasional readers who get most of their information from propaganda outlets may think I’m criticizing the idea of traditionally limited subpopulations of Americans (and others) gaining access to better opportunities in life.

One reason some people find the use of “Woke” and its derivatives to describe a set of bleak principles precarious is that “woke” has roots in the black community reaching as far back as 1962. Most people who complain when they see or hear it, though, are upset not at this evolution of terminology but because they don’t believe anyone has the right to contradict them at all.

It’s pretty simple. “Wokish people” are practitioners of intellectual dishonesty who use real or perceived social injustices—i.e., unfair differences in access to opportunity based on ethnic, gender, or other inherent traits—as substrate to push knowingly false and intentionally damaging ideas while aggressively punishing dissenters. Wokish people are to social justice what people like Jerry Falwell and Ted Haggard are to the message of Jesus Christ: Insincere, self-dealing, and ugly to the core.

Monetary gain is often a motivator, with the majority of the high-level grifters being middle-aged white women like Robin DiAngelo or Tema Okun. But resentment toward more appealing or successful others, and an often-subconscious desire to derogate their status (such as agitating for mentally disturbed junior-varsity-level men to compete against top-level female athletes), plays a big role, too.

And any goodness in the actual messages trumpeted by the Wokish is negated by their brazen lying. When they rise to positions of power, they become even uglier and more dangerous, and canceling people with the temerity to point out how insane they are is never far from their minds, as is true of anyone knowingly pushing falsehoods.

Notably, they don’t care if what they do actually harms people within the supposed movement, as Black Lives Matter has done to poorer black people. They tend to be noticeably less intelligent (unless acting) and less attractive (never an act) than normies, and a lot of them have florid personality or mood disorders.

“Wokism” is the fire-and-brimstone, take-no-prisoners religion these people practice. A recent post at Public by Michael Shellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse captures the main tenets of the faith:

The separate Woke dogmas have come together to offer the unity provided by traditional religions. Where climate change offers the apocalypse and Black Lives Matter offers absolution from the Original Sin of white supremacy, “being trans” gives one a soul. The three issues form the trinity of Wokeism. As a single religion, Wokeism manipulates powerful emotions, including fear, guilt, and anger. 

The emotions are put to work in bullying individuals and institutions to cave in to irrational demands. A black professor in Compact magazine last week recounted how a Woke black student last summer turned the entire seminar against him by accusing him, the author of a book called Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination, of racism.

How all this took root in Western cultures appears something of a mystery. But Wokism, also dubbed Critical Race Theory, is plainly a melding of postmodernism—i.e., the idea that everyone gets to choose whatever “facts” suit their whim—with the kind of identity politics that were bandied around in university social-science departments as far back as the late 1980s, all echoing of the variously perverted philosophies of the Frankfurt School. Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne took a stab at this last year.

How these ideas became amplified once they emerged is less of a mystery. In the wake of George Floyd’s death in the spring of 2020—when the nation was already reeling under massive changes to public wrought by the appearance of a (synthetic, as we now know) virus that caused often-undetectable upper-respiratory-track infections—essentially every corporation on Earth immediately pledged money to Black Lives Matter, the ACLU, and associated organizations.

Between mid-2020 and mid-2021, corporate donors shelled out a staggering $12 billion in the name of “racial equity.” It’s no exaggeration to say that every penny was spent on provoking divisiveness, not promoting unity. It was nothing more than a massive shotgun blast of cash in the direction of grifters of color and minority sexual status and—in concert with the World Economic Forum’s ESG scoring system—a means of enforcing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training, including pronoun management, in practically every workplace in the United States.

The theory, not borne out by statistics or other measures of reality, is that the U.S. had reached a critical and unprecedented moment of racial division. The media projected this through the selective use of wrenching footage and by simply making things up. The idea here was to get people to accept absurd psychosocial concepts at the same time they were being asked to accept extremely unlikely medical concepts, all of which proved to be just as fraudulent as the decadent and hate-driven frivolities of Wokism.

To the people running the world’s mammoth corporations, there is no difference in value whatsoever between a fat black woman in the inner city getting by on a distance-running grift and a white runner making $100,000 a year in a solid professional niche. All of us are pawns to be monitored and controlled. What we can and cannot say with impunity about covid and overseas wars and elections and trans people, what’s put in our bloodstreams, and other freedoms we once took for granted have been not-so-subtly manipulated in recent years.

The more we peons fight over pronouns and reduce everything to skin color, the easier it is for governments now being directed by the World Economic Forum to implement their plans. We’ll all stay angry at precisely the wrong people as the lives we used to know are gradually taken away amid a flurry of false promises from the government.

I’ll get more into specific examples of Wokism in the running world in a post I’ll publish sometime in the next few days, where I’ll also describe its specific and general impacts on me personally, which reduce to “No more of the same work; it was nice while it lasted” and “Fuck this ride, I’m off at the next stop” respectively. It’s one thing to be presented with a bunch of plainly stupid imperatives by a sham government and a bunch of strange-looking unwell people handed jobs in that government, but it’s another for ruinous policies to take root and for most people to just seem okay with deleterious, crybaby nonsense that helps no one and hurts many. That’s just a joyless path toward a dead end.