The Origins of Wokeness

By Free Republic | Created at 2025-01-13 16:32:50 | Updated at 2025-01-17 05:53:48 3 days ago

The Origins of Wokeness
https://paulgraham.com/woke.html ^ | January 2025 | Paul Graham

Posted on 01/13/2025 7:31:56 AM PST by 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.

(Excerpt) Read more at paulgraham.com ...

TOPICS: Education; Politics
KEYWORDS: woke

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1 posted on 01/13/2025 7:31:56 AM PST by karpov

To: karpov

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

2 posted on 01/13/2025 7:42:58 AM PST by Sicon ("All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - G. Orwell)

To: karpov

"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.

To: karpov

This is a good read.

Thank you!

5 posted on 01/13/2025 7:46:06 AM PST by ConservativeMind (Trump: Befuddling Democrats, Republicans, and the Media for the benefit of the US and all mankind.)

To: karpov

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.

6 posted on 01/13/2025 7:56:55 AM PST by Sicon ("All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - G. Orwell)

To: karpov

An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

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

7 posted on 01/13/2025 8:02:02 AM PST by equaviator (If 60 is the new 40 then 35 must be the new 15.)

To: WeaslesRippedMyFlesh

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

8 posted on 01/13/2025 8:17:52 AM PST by Jamestown1630 ("A Republic, if you can keep it.")

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