On a Trending Question: What Is 'Woke'?
A Simple Summary
Questions regarding Critical Race Theory (CRT) and “woke” pop up frequently, the latest iteration being directed at Karol Markowicz for not coming up with a definition sufficient enough in a short time-frame for the clip-bait outrage mobs; but it seems like the simple answers are lost each time. While I have been writing a longer work on the subject, it may be good to cut to the chase:
• We are experiencing a worldwide movement of weaponized slave morality.
• "Woke" is slave morality.
You can read James Lindsay point out that "woke" is "critical consciousness" — and he is right — but that is the "woke" language. As Lindsay himself says, this rhetoric is designed to hide behind the esoteric. This is true even to the left, who joke about the right not knowing what "woke" means while they secretly hope that no one asks them for a definition.
But underneath Maoism, Marxism, Leninism, socialism, communism, and all of the political projects that promise undue rewards for the masses of weak and ineffective peoples, there is the weaponization of slave morality.
Nietzschean slave morality has a few key ingredients which should be immediately recognizable:
• Nihilism, resentment, bad conscience, and a constant psychic sickness; a mediocrity and personal failing that desperately awaits an external object to blame in order to evade accountability (consider the fictional narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground).
• A perpetual belief in an oppressor/oppressed binary.
• A belief that the only solution to this binary is to reverse it against the "oppressor" (i.e., not to end slavery but to enslave the "masters").
• An inversion of morality — what is "good" for the "oppressor" ("oppressor" as identified by the slave, often erroneously) is spoken of as "evil" for the "slave". Nearly all values face this unraveling and distortion.
• An inability to correctly reconcile cause and consequence — slaves are denied true action; they live in delusions and within the shadows of Plato's Cave, so they cannot properly discern what is causing their personal failures. They accept instead mediators to fill their consciousness with false causalities and useful scapegoats.
In a related podcast, The Lotus Eaters have been right to talk of intersectionality as being key for "woke", but consider what intersectionality does: it unites entire global populations that possess slave morality.
What is common among...
• aborigines in Australia,
• Māori in New Zealand,
• Native American and black communities in the U.S.,
• migrant communities in the UK,
• the reliable voting blocs of the Western-international left,
• drug abusers, delinquents, criminals, and
• LGBTQ2S+NAMBLA ?
These groups are more likely to possess slave morality. They are more likely...
• to resent people who are more successful (an "oppressor"),
• to benefit from a total reversal of system power,
• to benefit from an inversion of morality wherein they — despite themselves — are considered the new "moral"/"good",
• to praise a system that allows them to ascend by being slavish rather than by striving to be strong, greater than they once were, or noble.
Groups possessing slave morality would normally fail to achieve anything beyond their own petty self-destruction, but they are being artificially empowered specifically because they possess slave morality. Those not possessing it are being encouraged by propaganda to accept it — to accept this weakness and debasement and to blame their faults on an “oppressor”. Those within these target groups who do not possess slave morality are chastised or “struggled”, since it is important that they possess slave morality even as they are given power, lest they learn virtue, live outside of the oppressor/oppressed binary, or learn true causality.
The funding of resentful groups causes societies to fall.
The people funding slave morality are using it to collapse the West.
Consider, for example, which nations and which peoples are opposing this slave morality: often BRICS+, certain religious communities, certain oligarchs. Notice that they insulate themselves from the effects of slave morality while promoting it for the masses.
And this pattern of using slave morality to disrupt power has a long legacy; it can be seen throughout history from the Servile Wars (the Spartacus slave revolts), to the larger falls of Rome, to Germany, to Haiti, to any number of nations targeted by governments and competitors for destruction. This is not new; it is only novel in that it is now being used worldwide, exposing the core of its functions through its common denominator: enslavement for a totalitarian power.
A totalitarian merely needs to ask what type of person is most likely to accept totalitarianism.
The answer is obvious: a slave.
No word games. No semantics. No esoteric deconstruction of Critical Theory.
The totalitarians need slaves.
A people possessing slave morality — a "woke" people — are more easily enslaved.