What is Woke? Definition and Characteristics of Woke People

/wōk/ 

adj.

Having the tendency to view personal or societal problems as primarily the result of deliberate or systemic bias or unfairness, and which must be solved by actively redistributing resources such as money, rights, or attention to victims.

Common beliefs of the woke

• Economic or social problems are primarily evidence of bias or unfairness, and not differences between groups.
• Awareness of problems comes with the responsibility to solve them in a redistributive way, by taking resources from one group and giving them to another. E.g. once you are aware of homelessness, you must champion social housing. The solution to poverty is to give money. Racial diversity should be achieved via affirmative action, and so on. The woke may claim they are fighting merely for awareness (of some type of injustice). But when pressed, the desired solution will always be political and redistributive.
• Paradoxically, the woke worldview is also fixated on addressing “root causes”. Practically fixing problems is often not acceptable, and the woke frequently invoke entire systems as corrupt and needing to be fully dismantled (#end this, defund this, abolish that, and so on).
• Acknowledging a person’s struggle can heal their pain. The compliment to this is discussing non-woke explanations or solutions is equivalent to harm. The woke prefer to suppress discussion (by deplatforming, shouting down, and so on) of non-woke explanations so as to prevent this perceived harm.
• Righteous victimhood is the highest source of status, which provides virtue and protection from criticism. Multiple forms of victimhood can be combined to elevate status (“as a queer, indigenous woman of color…”) or diminish it (“of course you’d say that as a white man”).
• If not a victim themselves, the woke can pursue virtue in a number of ways:
  • Activism or “allyship” with victims (creates a perverse incentive to find, inflate, or create new sources of victimhood which they can advocate for).
  • Wokes with oppressive-coded identities (wealthy, white, straight) may self-flagellate and put their guilt on display, diminishing their own ideas as invalid or their presence as harmful (concept of “acknowledging one’s privilege”).
  • Wokes may also promote the idea that the entire system or society is corrupt, and thus everyone is a victim.
• Woke ideas are morally irreproachable (“on the right side of history”).
• The virtues of compassion and kindness are supreme above all others. Simply attempting to solve a problem in a compassionate or kind way is intrinsically virtuous, regardless of outcome.
• Woke beliefs are immune from criticism since they are no different from being kind, fair, caring, or simply aware of social issues.
• The woke may insist that people who use the term “woke” define it, so as to avoid discussing the material aspects of an issue, or even go so far as to claim wokeness is only a synonym for compassion, kindness, and so on.
• The woke tend to fetishize:
  • Activism: Activist is a high-status title for the woke. Championing woke causes is always a good thing.
  • Destigmatization:  The woke believe words and ideas can cause serious harm, so any social stigma must be neutralized for the sake of anyone who feels uncomfortable. Discussion of non-woke explanations for issues is avoided for the sake of anyone who might be stigmatized.
  • Community input: Deference to the ambiguous concept of “the community”, which is a never-ending source of victim groups. Even a small handful of “victims” is enough to stop progress or discussion. Activists working under the guise of “community members” can always pessimistically raise problems and block progress in the name of community input.
  • Ancient wisdom: Life was better before industrialization and capitalism, primitive people were more enlightened.
  • Tearing down established systems or heroes: “Did you know the Founding Fathers owned slaves?” “Christopher Columbus was a genocidal colonialist.”
  • Problems as wholesale indictments of entire systems: Overexaggeration of legitimate problems and making illogical leaps to denigrate larger parts of society. “Racism was common during the founding of the United States therefore it is a racist country today.” “It’s irresponsible to have kids in a world that’s burning.” “Getting married is a capitalist trap.”
• Different groups cannot understand each other’s perspectives because their experiences are so different (see concept of “intersectionality”). A paradox when considered with the first bullet which makes the assumption that differences in group outcomes are solely the result of discrimination or oppression.

Why wokeness is sticky and self-perpetuating

Wokeness feels like enlightenment or solid moral ground. It is a particularly sticky belief system because it holds itself immune from criticism in several key ways.

• Because the woke believe problems are only caused by bias or power imbalance, wokeness has the special property of disabling the believer’s critical faculties, since to question a woke belief is to imply that bias is not present or important, which is a racist/classist/oppressive perspective. If a woke believer is afraid to be seen as an oppressor, or believes discussing something will cause harm to victims, they are not likely to discuss it and thus can never legitimately critique it.
• Wokeness prevents moral progress because it sets rules about who can discuss ideas. Instead of being open to new ideas from anyone, it limits participation based on characteristics such as race or gender. An example would be someone making a moral claim and defending it by saying something like “you’re not my race/gender so you could never understand.” This conflates the valid idea that it’s not possible to truly experience another persons life with the wrong belief that their ideas cannot be understood.
• Wokeness insists that plans, progress, or growth must be paused until the needs of all potential victims are addressed. There is always more woke “work” to be done.
• The woke frequently redefine or introduce new words. One stated purpose is to make language more “inclusive” (in practice: less specific) so as to accommodate as many oppressed victims as possible (e.g. “birthing persons” instead of mothers) or they may be attempting to make a political statement (e.g. “black bodies” instead of black people, or deliberately capitalizing “Black” but not white). This has the effect of creating confusion and doubt. There is always a new cause or victim class to be identified and considered, and new rules about what can or cannot be said. This has the effect of making everyone afraid to say the wrong thing, which further chills discussion and limits the growth of knowledge.
• Wokeness is appealing because it offers instant hierarchical status to its believers, a one-move solution to being moral. To be woke is to be enlisted in the irresistible fight for “justice”.

Woke motivations

• The woke may be misguided in their search for a better world. In a sincere effort to help, they may latch on to the woke worldview and be lulled by its seemingly easy explanations and solutions. A feedback loop occurs when they see their own morality or status raised among other woke people. In this way they become trapped in an epistemological valley, unable to grow their understanding of the world because their own beliefs prevent them from doing so.
• Like everyone else, the woke may have personal problems or shameful secrets for which they fear they would be judged or penalized. But the woke cope with this by creating a “culture of inclusiveness”, or promoting the idea that flaws are normal or even good (aka “normalizing”) in hopes they will not be judged for their particular shortcoming should it be made public.
• The woke may be looking to compensate for their own unaddressed guilt of being upper class.
• The woke may simply be burned out on life, blame the current system and want to rationalize their urge to check out by painting large parts of society as evil (racist, sexist, transphobic, patriarchal, etc)
• They may not understand how to be successful or fulfilled in their life or career and may be looking for a defined path to find success or meaning (e.g. helping an organization reach their “social justice” goals).
• The woke may look to identify oppression to give themselves permission to express their own shadow behavior (vengeance, spite, bullying/their own oppressive tendencies).

“Michigan’s DEI efforts have created a powerful conceptual framework for student and faculty grievances, and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding some further administrative intervention or expansion. On a campus consumed with institutional self-criticism, seemingly the only thing to avoid a true reckoning was DEI itself.”

Nicholas Confessore, New York Times

Acknowledgements

Hat tip to Bethany Mandel, whose embarassment at not being able to define the term “woke” spurred this post, David Deutsch (The Beginning of Infinity, assorted interviews) for the concept of anti-rational memes, Freddie deBoer^{1, 2} for the need for a succinct woke definition, and Thomas Sowell (assorted interviews) for the similar concept of “the Anointed” and seeking non-woke explanations.