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The Truth About "Wokeism" and Today's Woke Society

These are strange times indeed within human society. The current trend within society is “wokeness”. And this should make a spiritual figure like myself very happy. After all, awakening is a virtue. Society is served by people being aware and well informed. It is served by people being actively attentive to and responsive to important societal issues. But alas, I am not happy. Because the woke movement is not what people think it is. It is not wokeness at all. Instead, it is a human society that has fallen into yet another pothole of both the ego and unconsciousness.

What used to be a social movement fueled by empathy and compassion and the desire to make a positive change.

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Featured

 A Brief History of Wokeism

From a word used to denote awakening against racism, it morphed into an extremist ideology of justice against all majority oppressions, intermittently tasting power in the real world.

 How Wokeism Is Ruining Medicine

The Woke Revolution’s takeover of K-12 schools, the criminal justice system, higher ed, the media, the military, the C-suite, museums other cultural institutions has been highly visible, playing out in blogs and the media for all to see. The conquest of the healthcare system has attracted far less attention, though arguably it is the most consequential. After all, human lives are at stake.

Articles of Interest

An Excess of Woke Thinking May Harm Mental Health or Relationships

Some far left sociocultural norms and habits of thought contradict what we know about healthy relationships and emotional regulation.

Is ‘wokeism’ slowly killing scientific merit? Look to the latter for the real threat to science

It has become quite common to complain nowadays that, given the overall concern for marginalized groups and the claim that social justice should be of interest to anyone, ideology rules science. Some go even as far as comparing the current research system with Lysenkoism, a flawed approach to plant genetics promoted by Soviet and Chinese authorities.

Medical Education Goes Woke

Future doctors will be obliged to learn how health relates to ‘systems of oppression.’

Opinion: It's Time To Put 'Woke' To Sleep

Here's to evolution and adaptation. Let's promise to leave a word that's past its prime in 2018. It's time to put woke to sleep.

Shadow of an Axe: the War on Wokeism

For those who don’t want to comply, who want to champion creativity and move towards a healthier society for all, who see no issue with being ‘aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues’, then exhaustion and tension are discomforts we will have to live with. But, there is hope here, too, under the shadow of the axe.

The Childishness of Wokeism

Wokeness features too many flaws even to list – never mind to discourse upon – in an essay of reasonable length. But one among these many flaws stands out for me as being the most irritating: incessant childishness.

The Fatal Tension at the Heart of Wokeism

Whether you think woke is a curse or a blessing, you’re likely to share one assumption: woke is left, or far-left, or hard-left. What makes woke positions hard to define is that they’re fueled by all the emotions traditional to most progressive views: sympathy for the marginalised, indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical wrongs must be righted.

The Other Problem with Woke Schooling: It's Psychological Child Abuse

Unfortunately, the outrage over subject matter has led even thoughtful observers to overlook the fact that woke curricula involve much more than warped views of history, the scientific method, and social relations — they also employ instructional methods that have been shown to inflict serious psychological harm completely independent of what is being taught.

The Problem With Wokeness

The problem with wokeness is that it doesn’t inspire action; it freezes it. To be woke is first and foremost to put yourself on display. To make a problem seem massively intractable is to inspire separation — building a wall between you and the problem — not a solution.

The Psychology of "Wokeism"

On the political left, wokeness sometimes drifts into wokeism—a system of thought and behavior characterized by intolerance, policing the speech of others, and proving one’s own superiority by denouncing others.

The Rise of “Woke” Islamism in the West

Wokeism, in its various manifestations, arguably constitutes a perfect political vessel for Islamists. The tendency to blame “whiteness” and the white man’s allegedly domineering tendency for most of the world’s woes is, for example, a perfect fit for an ideology like Islamism that was born in the first half of the 20th century in opposition to colonialism and that has since blamed a large part of the Muslim world’s problems on the West.

This Is How Wokeness Ends

My friend Rod Dreher recently had a blog post for The American Conservative called “Why Are Conservatives in Despair?” He explained that conservatives are in despair because a hostile ideology — wokeness or social justice or critical race theory — is sweeping across America the way Bolshevism swept across the Russian Empire before the October Revolution in 1917.

What does being woke mean and is it an insult? ‘Wokeism’ explained

‘Woke’ is a word found all over social media and the news – being used as praise, but far more commonly as an insult, depending on the situation.

Why Wokeism Will Rule the World

The woke movement could be the next great U.S. cultural export — and it is going to do many other countries some real good.

Why Wokeness Will Fail

But, like many movements that overspill their initial causes of action, Wokeness now connotes much more than an effort to reform the police or denounce racial injustice when it occurs. It is, instead, an allegation that racism is a defining feature, not a flaw, of nearly every aspect of American life, from its inception to its present, in the books we read, the language we speak, the heroes we venerate, the roads we drive, the way we do business, the way we select for merit and so on.

Wokeism

There’s been much discussion about “wokeism”, and I think a definition might help to clarify things. My followers on Twitter helped me with this.

Wokeism - Then & Now

Wokeism? What is it? Is it a force for good, for bad? Is it political correctness gone mad? Is it really everywhere? Or is it a red-herring? A New McCarthyism? Puritanical? Cancel Culture? Dogmatic? This idea of being woke – of wokeism – appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Does it have a history? What’s going on under the surface when you strip away the noise?

You Can’t Define Woke

The word is not a viable descriptor for anyone who is critical of the many serious excesses of the left yet remains invested in reaching beyond their own echo chamber.