What is Woke?

Woke is a term that has been around for quite some time. A quick read of history shows its roots going back to the 1940s. It was originally used primarily by African Americans in those times, but they didn’t realize it hit the mainstream until the Black Lives Matter movement.

Strangely enough, the term is in both the lexicons of the right and the left. For the left, they see woke as meaning “being aware of systemic injustices,” and the right (for the most part) sees it as “radical cultural Marxists who wish to completely remodel society.”

The right’s general definition of woke is correct for the most part, but there are two crucial factors that are missing.

Wokeness is driven by envy, fear, and greed, which gives us six separate groups of people who support wokeness.

Wokeness relies on Marxism, but out of convenience, not necessity. Therefore, wokeness is not an ideology.

So, what groups prop up the idea of wokeness and further its existence? There are six primary groups here, each of which is inspired primarily by one emotion (although they may be influenced by many others).

True believers who are driven by envy. These are ANTIFA thugs, raging trans activists, woke college students, etc. They have fully bought into cultural Marxism. They hate anyone who has it better than them.

The thought leaders are also driven by envy. These are your gender studies professors, your feminism professors, etc. These are the Betty Friedans of the world who have nothing better to do than to espouse their envy with a bunch of fancy words in a row that mean nothing.

The unwilling thought leaders are driven by fear. These are professors as well, but not ones teaching feminism. They might be teaching philosophy, psychology, or sociology, but they aren’t true believers. They may even think the logic of the thought leaders is horrible, but they accept it for fear of the DEI department.

The toxically empathetic classical liberals are also driven by fear. These are your classic old-school liberals or even centrist Republicans. They are soccer moms, small business owners in the city, or workers at corporations. They just want to go along to get along. They don’t agree with the craziness, but they’ve seen the cancellations. And even if they haven’t, they don’t wanna be the talk of the town after raising concerns at the next PTA meeting.

The grifters are driven by greed and partially by evil, as they have no true value system. These are corporations and the people who see a profit to be made in wokeness or job security. These are the Coca-Colas, Disneys, Cenk Uygurs, and Ibram X. Kendis of the world. They don’t really buy their own garbage. They just sell it.

The chaos agents are driven by hatred of the world and by evil as well. These are the George Soros of the world, who seek to sow chaos and destruction purely for the sake of comic book evil and see wokeness as a way to do that.

The question is, how do all of these groups fit together into wokeness? The answer lies somewhere in this. Wokeness is not an ideology. It is a useful force for achieving goals. What those goals may be can vary by the individual, as they vary widely for the groups presented above, but they also result in the same thing: chaos. Wokeness is simply the endgame of leftism, utter and complete chaos, breakdown of reality, and confusion.

To understand this, first, you must understand the basis of the three main ideologies currently fueling the fire of wokeness. These ideologies are critical race theory, gender theory, and feminist theory.

Anyone who has had the misfortune of reading the works of all three of these theories might notice something. They’re all based on the Marxist dynamic of oppressor and oppressed.

For CRT, it’s blacks versus whites. For gender theory, it’s the LGTBQ club versus straights. For feminist theory, it’s men versus women. So, the basis of all of these philosophies is defined by those they hate, and why is that? It’s because they hate their power, of course. They envy them.

So then, where do those who are fearful yet woke fit in?

Therein lies a distinction, there are willing wokes, and non willing wokes. Those who operate based on fear are unwilling and those who operate based on envy and greed are willing.

The reason why these Marxist ideologies didn’t become woke until now is that they lacked amplification and the ability to make it beyond the halls of academia. Amplification gives the wokes the ability to appear much bigger and scarier than they did before via concentrated shows of force like cancellations and shows of activism facilitated by the internet.

This word amplification here is key. Wokeness did not exist before 2010 in my estimation, and the factor that set it off was social media. Social media has served as a guidepost for the wokes. It has helped the media, the thought leaders, and the true believers to connect in a way that allows power to be wielded nearly instantaneously. It has also functioned as a tool to instill fear in the hearts of those who don’t believe via cancellation and public shaming.

Before, with social morals, enforcement may have been through strange looks for people in your neighborhood or less people talking to you at the PTA meeting, but now if you say one thing wrong on the internet, you might lose your job, and thousands of people will say hateful things to you all at once.

Where once far-leftism had no real way of effectively channeling its energies into one place, now with the invention of the internet, it can do it in seconds.