Being woke basically means seeing/looking for offence/injustice/outrage when there's no good reason to perceive things that way, and virtue signalling to court favour with over-sensitive people who might bond with you or buy what you're selling (goods, services, education, political propaganda) if you pander to their whims. We can all hopefully agree that being aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues surrounding justice is a good thing, but only when there are genuine injustices going on. If you're trying to define woke as noble challenges to social injustices, then you're probably in denial about what woke really is. If you see racism, sexism, unfair prejudice, economic injustice, oppression and phobias when there are better explanations on offer, and you're eager to express your offence and outage, then you are what we mean by 'woke'.
I've said before that I believe there is probably a link between wokeness and psychological disorders, and I've recently learned that in their book The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have arrived at a similar viewpoint. It’s difficult to deny that if you look at the people (especially young people) associated with extreme social justice groups, climate groups, trans-rights groups and other radical identitarian groups, the majority of them appear to have high levels of anxiety, and/or mental health issues that probably haven't yet been diagnosed or addressed sufficiently.
It must have struck you as strange that you can never ever convince a woke person that they are wrong about the grievance they claim to have. It might have struck you as equally strange that there is a dichotomous personality trait attached to wokeness; absolute conviction in the thing they believe, but at the same time, a severe lack of conviction in themselves as individual beings. Perceived certainty without the ability or willingness to partake in rational engagement is one of the most predictable indicators of a disorder of the mind. You can see this by considering in contrast the opposite kind of person; one who willingly partakes in rational engagement while all the time displaying the kind of humility with which openness to correction is apparent in dialogue.
Naturally, mental health is a complex issue, and each individual can only be assessed on a case by case basis. But irrespective of what's driving wokeness, it is easy to observe the symptoms being played out in society - black and white thinking, attention-seeking, proneness to ill-examined outrage, a feelings-over-facts kind of entitlement, an exaggerated sense of foreboding, a victim-mentality, envy towards successful people, that sort of thing. The more of these you can tick off in a game of woke bingo, the more you woke you probably are.
And this should come with severe warnings, because whereas these traits are all things that those who bring healthy influences in your life will help you eradicate, woke culture actively encourages and celebrates these traits - creating waves of anxiety, insecurity, paranoia and resentment - and as a consequence, almost immeasurable societal harm, of which we haven't even begun to see the peak costs yet.
And what's worse is that because so many citizens have rolled over and let woke walk all over our nation, the UK is now infected with a top down woke-driven power structure, where we now have political woke, institutional woke, establishment woke, corporate woke, academic woke, media woke and entertainment woke - with most of the population disliking what British society has turned into, but unsure what to do about it.
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