The Woke Aren't Woke

Apathy in the guise of compassion

Before the term woke took on its modern meaning, with its fiercely negative connotation, it was regarded as a positive term, meaning simply “aware of real injustice.” A woke person was awakened to the real injustice of the world, aware of the bad things going on. In this sense, the modern woke are not woke.

So as not to confuse the things I’m talking about, I’ll use the word “awake” to refer to the original meaning of woke—awakened to injustice in the world—and woke to refer to its modern instantiation. It’s always tricky to define words, but modern wokes have various things in common including:

• Saying y’all, despite not being from the south.

• Using language typical of left-wing academics.

• Excessive focus on and discussion of structures over individual action.

• Hyperfixation on language.

• Fondness for land acknowledgements and other vacuous signals of left-wing affiliation.

• Claiming that speech is violence.

• Extreme pessimism about institutions.

• General unwillingness to punch left, except to argue that others on the left are covertly being right-wing.

When I think about a person who is awakened to injustice, a good example is Rutger Bregman. Bregman rose to prominence talking about the universal basic income, arguing that we could effectively eradicate severe domestic poverty by having a sizeable universal basic income. But what differentiates Bregman from many on the left is that he’s actually concerned about injustice, even when such concern isn’t fashionable.

He’s a vegan, who is deeply concerned about the widespread mistreatment of animals. If one is truly awakened to injustice, then they’ll be quite concerned about the fact that we annually torture, slaughter, and dismember tens of billions of sentient beings (hundreds of billions actually, but who’s counting?). One awakened to the extremity of global inequality and the horror of extreme poverty will, like Bregman, give to effective charities (he gives away at least 10% of his earnings to effective charities).

Bregman is also concerned about the kinds of terrible things that usually fly under the radar. For example, people tend not to be that concerned about tobacco, even though it kills around 8 million people a year. But Bregman is, and has written in favor of banning tobacco. Now, you can disagree with him about this, but he demonstrates a fierce independence, rather than just succumbing to social norms. He even, after being invited to Davos, called out the other people at Davos, and then when Tucker Carlson invited him on to congratulate him for calling out the people at Davos, he spent the episode bashing Tucker, until Tucker started cursing at him and kicked him off. Bregman has real principles, and he’ll put himself in socially awkward situations for the sake of his principles.

Compare his attitude to that of the woke. When you present the arguments against eating meat to woke people, they’ll use the guise of radical politics as an excuse not to go vegan. “To see a socialist radical turn into a conservative reactionary just mention animal rights,” says Mark Humanity. Such people say that they can’t go vegan because indigenous tribes in the Amazon aren’t vegan or that as a disabled ADHD sufferer, veganism is too difficult (and actually ableist). Then, as they continue to gorge themselves on the carcass of tortured, oppressed animals, as they continue to pay large corporations to torture more animals, they won’t spare even a dime giving to the highly effective organizations that free multiple animals from a cage per dollar.

They’re like the pharisees! Remember those guys in the gospels who are constantly getting wrecked by Jesus and going around saying stuff like “um, no Jesus, you can’t cast demons out of that guy because it’s Shabbat,” and “noooooo, doing good stuff would run afoul of some obscure ritual purity law, better leave that guy in the ditch with a horrible disease.” Like the woke, the pharisees combined extreme self-righteousness with opposition to actually doing anything of consequence, and spend much of their time condemning those with the temerity to try to make the world a better place, rather than joining reading groups where they fatalistically complain about the impossibility of genuine progress.

When you inform the woke that they are one of the richest 1% of people in the world and that children are dying of preventable diseases that they can stop for just a few thousand dollars, rather than being persuaded to give their money, they instead come up with elaborate justifications for why the people giving away their money are the real villains.

Leftists who claim to be aware of the world’s injustices are quite outraged that millionaires and billionaires don’t give away their money. But when you urge people like them to give some of their money away, to people who make as much in a year as they make in a week, they come up with half a dozen justifications for why that ask is racist and colonialist. Charity for thee but not for me.

Such people tend to be almost exclusively concerned about those who are vulnerable in America, even though the poorest Americans are among the richest people in the world. The woke tend to be violently opposed to giving money overseas, even though the people overseas are much easier to help and much poorer than even the poorest Americans. The people who go on endlessly about the horror of injustice seem bizarrely unconcerned with what they personally can do to combat that injustice.

In fact, so long as the concerns that you raise are not the sorts that are fashionable in left-wing academic circles, among leftists, they almost inevitably fall on deaf ears. There’s a suspicious correlation between the problems such people care about and the ones they get credit for caring about. While such people are concerned about the few injustices that happen to be politically salient that day—Gaza, police violence, and the visible American poor—the hundreds of millions of people living on less than two dollars a day never seem to cross the mind of the typical woke person.

In the rare event that the woke spare a thought for the hundreds of millions of people who eat only one meal a day because they can’t afford more, who sometimes don’t eat for an entire day so their kid can enjoy the luxury of two measly meals, they’ll take a few seconds to blame their problems on colonialism, before quickly forgetting about them. Certainly they’ll be outraged by the suggestion that they personally should do anything about the easily-helped poor, miserable, and destitute, who cannot afford toothbrushes, medicine, adequate food, or a house of any sort.

Being concerned with the small slice of injustices that your social group happens to care about isn’t genuine concern about injustice. If people simply conform to the views that are popular among their peers, then if they’d been in the United States during slave-owning times, or Nazi Germany, they would not have been opposed to the holocaust or slavery. Instead, they’d likely have been focused on the harms that they got social credit for caring about—perhaps harms to poor Germans or white Americans who could no longer own slaves.

Because caring about animals isn’t fashionable, the woke tend to ignore their plight. As Gary Yourofsky says “humans have victimised animals to such a degree, that they aren't even considered victims.” This is a general feature of extreme injustice. The worst crimes are carried out against those so thoroughly victimized that they aren’t treated as victims. Unless you carefully reflect on the practices of your society—and your social group—the historical track record is clear: probably you are complicit in a horrendous atrocity.

Now, most people are quite blind to great injustice. This isn’t conjecture; most people have been fine with slavery, the subjugation of women, and deeply evil actions carried out during wartime historically. In the modern day, most people are tragically indifferent to the plight of the billions of beings languishing in feces, filth, and cages; to the cows separated from their parents; to the pigs that are forced to give birth in a tiny pen too small to turn around; to the billions of baby male chicks deposited in blenders; and to all the rest of the injustice in the factory farming industry.

But it’s particularly ironic that those whose claim to fame is concern about injustice remain almost entirely blind towards the world’s great injustices, particularly the ones they could do something about. If such people were slightly shrill and offputting, but genuinely opposed to injustice, that wouldn’t be so bad. But when you suggest that they ought to do something about all the terrible things happening, they use leftist language about oppression and domination to justify oppression and domination.

They construct elaborate and self-righteous justifications for stuffing their face with the tortured corpse of an animal produced through repeated rape and hoarding the money that they—one of the richest 1% of people—acquired. It’s pharisaical hypocrisy and apathy wrapped in the guise of compassion; as they carry out evil and ignore injustice, they hyperfixate on utterly trivial matters, like whether people use the term “master bedroom.” They oppress on a daily basis, do nothing about the oppression they could prevent, and actively criticize the people doing anything about oppression, all the while pompously claiming to be on the side of the oppressed.