Wokeness is not really that complicated. It is simply radical leftism applied to the issues of the day.
As for its origin, it is the application of the same genetic-cultural substrate of Europeans (universalism, altruism and a good bit of that Christian self-flagellation) to new circumstances of material prosperity and the moral invention of full equality.
How does a good Christian square the newly invented moral imperative of full equality with history of colonialism, slavery and inequality of all kinds? He must self-flagellate.
The ideology of the managerial class is mostly left-liberalism. This left-leaning managerial class yields to a small minority of woke radicals out of fear and conformity.
The corrective to a moral instinct gone haywire is reason, facts and reality. BLM would never have happened had the public been objectively informed. Same for transgenderism, mass immigrationism, multiculturalism etc. Truth disinfects wokeness completely - it just needs to get out and be heard.
This essay argues that politics is not primarily about abstract ideas, but about power. Ideologies must therefore be understood in terms of the social forces they serve and represent. This doesn’t mean reducing them to crude expressions of interest, but it does mean we cannot explain political movements by ideas alone. The relevant question is: why are some beliefs, and not others, empowered, institutionalized, and enforced?
By this light, woke is neither simply radical leftism nor misplaced altruism. It is a regime ideology, developed to consolidate a specific class coalition. It rewards some groups, neutralizes others, and delegitimizes native-majority resistance. That’s why it is institutionalized, enforced, and policed: not because it’s true or coherent, but because it’s useful to those who rule.
I regret The Westering Sun (TWS)'s semantic decision about 'liberal.' The piece speaks of 'Western liberty'. Does TWS have a name for a philosophy of that? What is it? Shouldn't TWS have a name for a philosophy of that? Doesn't TWS see that whatever name gains acceptation—as 'liberal' did from the 1770s—will in the course of time be abused and stolen? TWS throws Western liberty under the bus by not having a name for a philosophy of it.
I don’t reject Western liberty. I reject its abstraction and instrumentalisation by a managerial class that has no attachment to its historical, Christian, or civilizational roots.
If there is no symbolic or historical substance beneath the term, then the name itself is vulnerable to capture: as has already occurred with 'liberalism.' What we need is to restore the symbolic and affective continuity that once made Western liberty meaningful. That continuity isn’t primarily conceptual; it’s civilizational, ancestral, and embodied.
"Predominantly native, often middle or working class, and still retaining residual loyalties to older forms of nationhood, faith and organic order, this group’s economic productivity funds the regime and supports its clients."
...Does it? 9 of 10 of the top per capita contributors to the federal budget are blue states.
You have some interesting points but you need to grapple with the reality that the big cities with lots of immigrants run by the "managerial elites" are the economic engines of the US that support the working class natives, not the other way around.
It’s true that cities and blue states lead in per capita tax receipts and GDP figures. But these metrics are insufficient to capture real economic productivity, which is rooted in value creation through productive labour; and that remains disproportionately concentrated in the traditional population. Without a framework of social cohesion and symbolic legitimacy to sustain civilizational continuity, such productivity cannot endure.
Managerial cities are high-output nodes of global capitalism, but much of their output is extractive or parasitic: driven by rent-seeking, financial leverage, and bureaucratic expansion. They rely on a social infrastructure still supplied by the core population, which they constantly undermine in myriad ways. In this sense, blue-state cities are not economic engines but parasitic hubs, dependent on surpluses they did not generate.
The irony is that the very groups being displaced and demoralized by managerialism are the substrate upon which its functioning depends.
It’s not hard to imagine a counterfactual history in which the white elite maintain a white majority. Woke seems to be mainly a factor of white ethnocentrism slowly eroding due to the influx of new elites and/or the WASP elite surrendering/accepting the new proto-woke ideas. Also, ideas do matter—it’s very common for elites to support ideas purely due to idealism (even if it overlaps with their economic interests). Objective truth exists independently of power relations.
The UK’s regime is starting to remind me of the Nazis ramping up the death camps in the final days of the war. Even though it seems by no means certain that they’re going to fall any time soon, there’s an unhinged, desperate, manic energy to it.
"Its demographic inertia is invoked to justify mass migration, while its defensive political instincts are pathologized as reactionary or extremist. It bears the brunt of taxation, undergoes cultural and demographic displacement, and faces escalating surveillance and censorship."
A lot of this is true, but if this paragraph is basically referring to the white working class I don't see how they can simultaneously be bearing the brunt of taxation?
Maybe because I live in LA, but it was always obvious to me that Woke was driven by ethnic demographic change.....a larger population of non-whites are simply hungry for anti-white narratives that soothe the guilt of disenfranchising a native population.
As such, I always knew it was a waste of time to combat its logical contradictions with dialectic and reason....Woke is about power and the self deceptive psychology of a manifest destined ascendant group.
The first derivative of their share of the population is on their side, so they get to write the social narrative.
Its depressing but at least it allows us to identify the ultimate cause of this movement....western adoption of THE PILL!
This is all consequence of Boomers ignoring Church leaders in the 60s.....they were told birth control was a Sin, but they did it anyway. Religion was the only institution that had the intuitive Wisdom to know that demographics lead everything else.
A new religious revival and a cohort of young females that find it fashionable to shun birth control is the only way to change the trends. Let the behavioral genetics do their work unfettered by modern pharmacology.
Weve come full circle back to our ancestor's timeless battle for survival and our ancestors Tradition and Religion is the proven behavior to maximize survival and reproductive fitness.
TFR disparities between native-born christian, secular and muslim families in western countries are greatly exaggerated, and even middle-eastern TFR is under 3.0 almost everywhere. Not to say that muslim migrant groups aren't a huge problem for a variety of reasons, but nearly all the pop. increase comes from migration.
Exactly.....adjacent cultures are always in Darwinian competition.....their borders form a stasis as their birthrates find a balance against each other.
The introduction of The Pill is such a fundamental alteration of our biology...its bound to have significant consequences and, of course, shrinking population is what we would expect.
As one demographic takes over the other's niche, we get this marvelously complicated power handoff as the author describes....
The main counterbalance to pre-modern TFR was pre-modern death rates. Do you want half the population to die before the age of 30 again, or do you want to figure out how to double your food production on a finite amount of land, every generation, forever?
Yes, this used to be the norm for nearly all of human history, and nearly all of human history was a malthusian pressure-cooker where population density and living standards were inversely correlated in-between recurring bouts of famine and civil war. (Africa was like this until very recently and may run up against that wall again before the century is out.) This was true *even* with ~40% infant mortality, which I assume you're not in favour of.
I realise "shout your abortions" is not the proper solution to these problems, or really reproductive liberalism in general, but Ehrlich wasn't wrong about everything.
> "I don't see the situation as being much improved where we have had 63 million abortions"
Yeah, I'm aware the current situation is demographically unsustainable and undergirded by questionable moral assumptions, but Malthusian population constraints are a fact, not a theory, unless we find ways to escape the laws of physics.
(There's also copious evidence for genetic influences on virtually all life outcomes we care about, by the way, which means the moral arguments for eugenics are pretty hard to counter. Or would you disagree that good parents should have more children than bad parents?)
If, as you describe, woke is the militant form of beurocratic managerialism / globalism, then I am slowly coming to the conclusion that pro-palestibe activism is woke 2.0 - same playbook (call anyone that disagrees with you a bigot) and tie all causes into this set of ideas (the omnicause) just this time up the stakes even more - instead of "sexism" or "racism" now it's "genocide".
Wokeness is not really that complicated. It is simply radical leftism applied to the issues of the day.
As for its origin, it is the application of the same genetic-cultural substrate of Europeans (universalism, altruism and a good bit of that Christian self-flagellation) to new circumstances of material prosperity and the moral invention of full equality.
How does a good Christian square the newly invented moral imperative of full equality with history of colonialism, slavery and inequality of all kinds? He must self-flagellate.
The ideology of the managerial class is mostly left-liberalism. This left-leaning managerial class yields to a small minority of woke radicals out of fear and conformity.
The corrective to a moral instinct gone haywire is reason, facts and reality. BLM would never have happened had the public been objectively informed. Same for transgenderism, mass immigrationism, multiculturalism etc. Truth disinfects wokeness completely - it just needs to get out and be heard.
This essay argues that politics is not primarily about abstract ideas, but about power. Ideologies must therefore be understood in terms of the social forces they serve and represent. This doesn’t mean reducing them to crude expressions of interest, but it does mean we cannot explain political movements by ideas alone. The relevant question is: why are some beliefs, and not others, empowered, institutionalized, and enforced?
By this light, woke is neither simply radical leftism nor misplaced altruism. It is a regime ideology, developed to consolidate a specific class coalition. It rewards some groups, neutralizes others, and delegitimizes native-majority resistance. That’s why it is institutionalized, enforced, and policed: not because it’s true or coherent, but because it’s useful to those who rule.
I regret The Westering Sun (TWS)'s semantic decision about 'liberal.' The piece speaks of 'Western liberty'. Does TWS have a name for a philosophy of that? What is it? Shouldn't TWS have a name for a philosophy of that? Doesn't TWS see that whatever name gains acceptation—as 'liberal' did from the 1770s—will in the course of time be abused and stolen? TWS throws Western liberty under the bus by not having a name for a philosophy of it.
I don’t reject Western liberty. I reject its abstraction and instrumentalisation by a managerial class that has no attachment to its historical, Christian, or civilizational roots.
If there is no symbolic or historical substance beneath the term, then the name itself is vulnerable to capture: as has already occurred with 'liberalism.' What we need is to restore the symbolic and affective continuity that once made Western liberty meaningful. That continuity isn’t primarily conceptual; it’s civilizational, ancestral, and embodied.
"Predominantly native, often middle or working class, and still retaining residual loyalties to older forms of nationhood, faith and organic order, this group’s economic productivity funds the regime and supports its clients."
...Does it? 9 of 10 of the top per capita contributors to the federal budget are blue states.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-u-s-federal-tax-revenue-per-person-by-state/
You have some interesting points but you need to grapple with the reality that the big cities with lots of immigrants run by the "managerial elites" are the economic engines of the US that support the working class natives, not the other way around.
It’s true that cities and blue states lead in per capita tax receipts and GDP figures. But these metrics are insufficient to capture real economic productivity, which is rooted in value creation through productive labour; and that remains disproportionately concentrated in the traditional population. Without a framework of social cohesion and symbolic legitimacy to sustain civilizational continuity, such productivity cannot endure.
Managerial cities are high-output nodes of global capitalism, but much of their output is extractive or parasitic: driven by rent-seeking, financial leverage, and bureaucratic expansion. They rely on a social infrastructure still supplied by the core population, which they constantly undermine in myriad ways. In this sense, blue-state cities are not economic engines but parasitic hubs, dependent on surpluses they did not generate.
The irony is that the very groups being displaced and demoralized by managerialism are the substrate upon which its functioning depends.
Woke is a tool for societal disruption.
It’s not hard to imagine a counterfactual history in which the white elite maintain a white majority. Woke seems to be mainly a factor of white ethnocentrism slowly eroding due to the influx of new elites and/or the WASP elite surrendering/accepting the new proto-woke ideas. Also, ideas do matter—it’s very common for elites to support ideas purely due to idealism (even if it overlaps with their economic interests). Objective truth exists independently of power relations.
The UK’s regime is starting to remind me of the Nazis ramping up the death camps in the final days of the war. Even though it seems by no means certain that they’re going to fall any time soon, there’s an unhinged, desperate, manic energy to it.
"Its demographic inertia is invoked to justify mass migration, while its defensive political instincts are pathologized as reactionary or extremist. It bears the brunt of taxation, undergoes cultural and demographic displacement, and faces escalating surveillance and censorship."
A lot of this is true, but if this paragraph is basically referring to the white working class I don't see how they can simultaneously be bearing the brunt of taxation?
Finally, an analysis that is fully consilient.
Maybe because I live in LA, but it was always obvious to me that Woke was driven by ethnic demographic change.....a larger population of non-whites are simply hungry for anti-white narratives that soothe the guilt of disenfranchising a native population.
As such, I always knew it was a waste of time to combat its logical contradictions with dialectic and reason....Woke is about power and the self deceptive psychology of a manifest destined ascendant group.
The first derivative of their share of the population is on their side, so they get to write the social narrative.
Its depressing but at least it allows us to identify the ultimate cause of this movement....western adoption of THE PILL!
This is all consequence of Boomers ignoring Church leaders in the 60s.....they were told birth control was a Sin, but they did it anyway. Religion was the only institution that had the intuitive Wisdom to know that demographics lead everything else.
A new religious revival and a cohort of young females that find it fashionable to shun birth control is the only way to change the trends. Let the behavioral genetics do their work unfettered by modern pharmacology.
Weve come full circle back to our ancestor's timeless battle for survival and our ancestors Tradition and Religion is the proven behavior to maximize survival and reproductive fitness.
> "Its depressing but at least it allows us to identify the ultimate cause of this movement....western adoption of THE PILL!"
Probably a contributor, sure, but the average woman having 4-6 kids would rapidly create its own problems.
TFR disparities between native-born christian, secular and muslim families in western countries are greatly exaggerated, and even middle-eastern TFR is under 3.0 almost everywhere. Not to say that muslim migrant groups aren't a huge problem for a variety of reasons, but nearly all the pop. increase comes from migration.
Exactly.....adjacent cultures are always in Darwinian competition.....their borders form a stasis as their birthrates find a balance against each other.
The introduction of The Pill is such a fundamental alteration of our biology...its bound to have significant consequences and, of course, shrinking population is what we would expect.
As one demographic takes over the other's niche, we get this marvelously complicated power handoff as the author describes....
The main counterbalance to pre-modern TFR was pre-modern death rates. Do you want half the population to die before the age of 30 again, or do you want to figure out how to double your food production on a finite amount of land, every generation, forever?
Yes, this used to be the norm for nearly all of human history, and nearly all of human history was a malthusian pressure-cooker where population density and living standards were inversely correlated in-between recurring bouts of famine and civil war. (Africa was like this until very recently and may run up against that wall again before the century is out.) This was true *even* with ~40% infant mortality, which I assume you're not in favour of.
I realise "shout your abortions" is not the proper solution to these problems, or really reproductive liberalism in general, but Ehrlich wasn't wrong about everything.
> "I don't see the situation as being much improved where we have had 63 million abortions"
Yeah, I'm aware the current situation is demographically unsustainable and undergirded by questionable moral assumptions, but Malthusian population constraints are a fact, not a theory, unless we find ways to escape the laws of physics.
(There's also copious evidence for genetic influences on virtually all life outcomes we care about, by the way, which means the moral arguments for eugenics are pretty hard to counter. Or would you disagree that good parents should have more children than bad parents?)
If, as you describe, woke is the militant form of beurocratic managerialism / globalism, then I am slowly coming to the conclusion that pro-palestibe activism is woke 2.0 - same playbook (call anyone that disagrees with you a bigot) and tie all causes into this set of ideas (the omnicause) just this time up the stakes even more - instead of "sexism" or "racism" now it's "genocide".