The Origins of Wokeness

https://paulgraham.com/woke.html ^ | January 2025 | Paul Graham

[karpov]

The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up the definition, it will sound familiar. Google's isn't bad: A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others. This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and its age is an important clue: it shows that although wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it's an instance of a much older one.

There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin's Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it's social justice.

So if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask is not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs. The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to ask when and where wokeness began.

The answer to the first question is the 1980s. Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.

This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now? I've often been asked to define both wokeness and political correctness by people who think they're meaningless labels, so I will. They both have the same definition: An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

[Sicon]

The origin of wokeness lies somewhere between brain damage and deep corruption.

[WeaslesRippedMyFlesh]

Dude “prigs” seriously.

There are free thinkers and dupes

It goes like this:

From a famous Freeper class of ‘98:

https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3651149/posts

[Telepathic Intruder]

"Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness"

That's pretty much how I would define it. The Left doesn't like being called 'woke', but that's the term they once used to define themselves. "Woke" to them meant awareness of all the supposed harm done by western culture and white male Christians. Basically, it's political correctness combined with Critical Race Theory, modern feminism, atheism, and whatever else you can put into that witch's brew. It's a false morality that looks good on the surface but underneath is a festering cauldron of evil.

[ConservativeMind]

This is a good read.

Thank you!

[Sicon]

In 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video.

This is a lie. Saint Floyd of Fentanyl was not asphyxiated by Derek Chauvin.

[equaviator]

An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

...Means the same thing as social justice warriors putting on a show.

[Jamestown1630]

I don’t think any group lacks an element of ‘groupthink’ and its errors. We have it on FR, too.

[WeaslesRippedMyFlesh]

Really? that’s it?

The power of conditioning the human mind to believe it’s best to go against your own self interest is a trivial topic.

How about this GFY!

[aquila48]

“We should have a conscious bias against defining new forms of heresy. Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we’d previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they’re wrong. Only our initial assumption of course. If they can prove we should stop saying it, then we should. But the burden of proof is on them. In liberal democracies, people trying to prevent something from being said will usually claim they’re not merely engaging in censorship, but trying to prevent some form of “harm”. And maybe they’re right. But once again, the burden of proof is on them. It’s not enough to claim harm; they have to prove it.”

So after that loooong essay, his cure for wokedness/political correctness is what the founders realized 250 years ago - freedom of speech/expression.

But, then he makes the mistake of saying that it should be limited if someone can “prove” that it causes some “harm”. Well there is lots of expressions that someone can genuinely say it hurts them, their “feelings”, and that’s what the woke crowd has been using to limit speech. So his cure is no cure at all.

There’s always been a limit to “free” speech, things you shouldn’t say in “polite society”, but it was imposed by social norms not legalistic means. The punishment would be social ostracization, not jail or loss of jobs.

In other words the verdict of one’s speech “offense” would be rendered by his circle of acquaintances and they would individually decide whether they wanted to continue to be associated with the speech offender.

Now in the case where more than feelings are involved, such as direct monetary harm, there are libel laws for that.

Bottom line, our current system ain’t bad, but the freedom of speech must be more strictly enforced and “feelings” should not be used to legally limit it.

[WeaslesRippedMyFlesh]

“I don’t think any group lacks an element of ‘groupthink’ and its errors. We have it on FR, too.”

I don’t think in 26 years I have ever read anything more moronic than you comment.

Seriously.

You, Jamestown1630 (if thats your real name) are a complete imbocile and fraud.

[Jamestown1630]

LOL! My screen name is as real as ‘WeaslesRippedMyFlesh’ is.

[WeaslesRippedMyFlesh]

seek help

[Jamestown1630]

Your wit is astounding.

[sauropod]

Bkmk

[aquila48]

“All that changes is the rules they enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin’s Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it’s social justice.”

But he never defines “social justice”.

What the left means by social justice is “equity” - equality of outcome, of existence.

There is a genetic predisposition in some people that truly enrages them at seeing the rampant inequalities in the world. Some people basking in luxury while other barely scraping by living in the streets. After all, supposedly we’re all created equal, we’re all God’s children so why are some so much better off? Well, whatever the reason, we can’t have that, so we must take from those that have it and give it to those that don’t, that way everybody is equal and thus just.

Because it’s genetic, that predisposition has always existed and will always exist. But it’s a delusional predisposition, it goes against reality. Wanting everyone to be equal doesn’t it make it so regardless how hard you try. But for the delusionals, hope springs eternal. Every so often they have a bit of success in infecting others (useful idiots) with the same delusion, but reality soon exacts it’s revenge and sends them packing But only until they camouflage and rename themselves as something new to again sell their old delusions. Ironically, in the same breath they also clamor for “diversity” which is the opposite of equality, doubling down on their insanity.

There’s a great quote from Tocqueville that captures this “depraved taste for equality” so well...

“There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom. “

[nicollo]

Wokeness is self-righteous condescension born of victimology that holds that victims of “oppression” are superior to their “oppressors”, and those who uphold the theory, especially those from among the “oppressors”, are doubly righteous.