How Did the “Woke” Become Insane?

It seems as if the “woke” in the U.S. are taking over the Democratic Party. In the process, they want to fundamentally transform American cultural, social, economic, and political institutions. Yet, when you look at what they want to coerce us into believing, the intellectual structure they are building is inconsistent with both history and logic. If the ideas of the woke are so incompatible with social reality, how have they become embraced by such a large number of people? As you might expect, the answer has to do with political power, and who has it.

What It Means to Be “Woke”

What is this phenomenon we call “wokeism?” It seems to have newly erupted into the American consciousness over the past few years. In fact, it seems to have become the dominant secular religion of the West. What does it mean to be “woke?” Some time ago, the word “woke” was merely the past participle of the verb “wake.” Now that it has become a political and ideological word, what does it mean in that context?

Dictionary.com gives us the following definition: “having or marked by an active awareness of systemic injustices and prejudices, especially those related to civil and human rights:” The word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in June 2017. The OED informs us that

The original meaning of adjectival woke (and earlier woke up) was simply ‘awake’, but by the mid-20th century, woke had been extended figuratively to refer to being ‘aware’ or ‘well informed’ in a political or cultural sense. In the past decade, that meaning has been catapulted into mainstream use with a particular nuance of ‘alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’, popularized through the lyrics of the 2008 song Master Teacher by Erykah Badu, in which the words ‘I stay woke’ serve as a refrain, and more recently through its association with the Black Lives Matter movement, especially on social media… Because of the term’s prominence in today’s popular culture, as well as the role it seems to have played in the 1960s and 70s, the OED Appeals Program is currently seeking any contextual evidence (i.e. not from a glossary or definition) of woke meaning ‘well informed’ or ‘alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’ that dates from earlier than 2008.

Oxford English Dictionary

In fact, through heavy usage and its association with Black Lives Matter (BLM), being “woke” has come to mean a belief in Critical Race Theory (CRT). The connections between the woke, critical race theory, and cancel culture have made their combination into a hellish stew that is poisoning society.

The Historical Antecedents to Critical Theory and Critical Race Theory

To understand the woke, we must then comprehend Critical Race Theory. CRT, in turn, is a specific application of something called Critical Theory. Critical Theory is a set of Marxist ideas put together by a number of sociologists in the 1930s at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. Collectively, they called themselves The Frankfurt School. What they wanted was a method of dialectical reasoning for critiquing and changing society. The difference between it and more traditional social theories is its emphasis on action to change society into something different. Critical Theory focussed on relationships of power and domination, and how they could be changed. Below is a video of James Lindsay explaining Critical Theory, emphasizing its Marxist nature. Lindsay is an American mathematician, author and cultural critic. One of his notable contributions was a co-authorship with Helen Pluckrose of the nonfiction book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. 

If you listen carefully to Lindsay (the going gets heavy at times), you will see how the methods of Critical Theory could be compatible with the classically liberal ideas from the Age of Enlightenment. However, the way Critical Theory has been used by The Frankfurt School and by other leftist theorists to the present day has been profoundly destructive of classically liberal ideas. The Marxist assumption is that evil can always be found deep-rooted in society and a way must be found to expunge it. The Marxist version of Critical Theory (the one always used today) presumes the powerful always foist their assumptions about social reality onto everyone else. The powerful, i.e. society’s elites, always form these assumptions to benefit themselves, to the cost of everyone else. It is these assumptions the Critical Theory must tear apart and point the way to destroy them.

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, Marxist Critical Theory was nurtured in the academia of both Europe and the United States. During that period, the New Left arose in reaction to the Vietnam War and to the Civil Rights political struggles. Primarily a protest movement, the New Left had no unified political theory or orientation, although they were greatly influenced by Karl Marx’s ideas of individuals’ alienation from society. Prepared to believe the worst of their own country, the minds of New Leftists were fertile ground, seeded with the French import of poststructuralism. In the United States, this French import became postmodernism. The progressives who control higher education, particularly in the social sciences, belong to this postmodern Left.

The modern society to which the postmodern Left is “post” is the rational society of the Age of Enlightenment and Reason. The postmodern philosopher (or other academic or politician) is extremely suspicious of any of the products of reason and denies the validity of the general philosophical viewpoints of the 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment. Among their disagreements with the enlightenment are these:

1. Postmodernists do not agree that there is an objective reality that has existence and properties independent of any human observer. They believe this view to be a kind of naive realism. According to them, whatever reality exists is a construct of the mind, an artifact of scientific methods of observation and the language used to describe what is experienced.
   
2. Following the rejection of objective natural reality, the postmodernists deny that statements from scientists and historians can be objectively true or false. Postmodernists sometimes say there is no such thing as Truth.
   
3. Postmodernists believe that science and technology do not necessarily cause human progress. Some hold the misguided use of advances in science and technology lead to applications for killing on a massive scale, and are inherently destructive and oppressive.
   
4. Postmodernists claim that reason and logic are not universally valid. Instead, they believe reason and logic are themselves conceptual constructs. Specific applications of reason and logic are valid only within the established intellectual narratives in which they are used.
   
5.  There is no such thing as an inbuilt human nature. All human behaviors are instilled by social forces, with all aspects of human psychology being socially determined.
   
6.  Language cannot refer to or represent a reality outside of itself. Words acquire meaning only through contrasts and differences of meaning with other words.
   
7. According to postmodernists, it is impossible to find a foundation of certainty upon which knowledge can build a picture of reality empirically.
   
8. Postmodernists believe it is in principle impossible to construct general theories to explain anything in the natural world or the social world of humans.

Given this general suspicion of reason and of empirical reality, you can begin to understand how Critical Race Theory can twist observations any way desired to fit its basic assumption of a racist-dominated society. As an application of Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory applies the methods of Critical Theory to prove society is fundamentally racist, no matter what the evidence. James Lindsay shows how this is done in the PragerU / YouTube video below.

The Insanity of the Woke

To disregard empirical evidence and reason unless they affirm the woke assumptions of an evil, racist society automatically places the woke among the insane. Yet, contradictions to those assumptions are easily found, both in history and in present-day society.

Woke insanity is confirmed by the kind of society they would build. No better example can be found than the society Black Lives Matter would like to create. As an enthusiastic backer of Critical Race Theory, BLM has often been accused of being a Marxist organization. This accusation is somewhat problematic, as many supporters of BLM are more interested in advancing civil rights than converting the U.S. into a communist nation. Yet, the original and highest leaders of BLM are self-confessed Marxists.

One of the co-founders of BLM was Patrisse Cullors. She was a protege of a former agitator for the Weather Underground, Eric Mann. For those not old enough to remember it, the Weather Underground was a violent terrorist organization that wanted to foment a Marxist revolution in the U.S. Cullors once stated in an interview that

The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia [NB: Another cofounder of BLM] in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk.

Patrisse Cullors in a Real News Network interview with Jared Ball

In the Sky News Australia video below, Candace Owens explains how BLM manipulates people to support them. In particular, she explains her own experience as a young black woman of how blacks have been deceived by progressives into believing the Republican Party is evil and against black interests.

Below is a video of Dr. Carol Swain, a tenured professor of politics and public policy at Princeton University and a former professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University. In it, she analyzes the tactics of BLM to motivate more moderate people to advance BLM’s more radical goals.

The woke are those who follow organizations like Black Lives Matter. Although they might not realize it, the Marxist social organization they are, perhaps unwittingly, promoting has created failed states around the world. How more insane can they get?

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