Stay Woke

“Do not attempt to fix a problem you do not understand.” – Polish Proverb

Being woke. Go woke, go broke. Stay woke.

This innocuous word seems to have leapt into the cultural mainstream overnight. Where did it come from?

Well, like most new words, sometimes it can be hard to pin down. There can be different forms of it.

Some would say it’s simply “telling the truth” or “teaching history as it actually happened”. Seems totally harmless, what could be wrong with that?

You might hear a teen say to their boomer parents in the midst of innocently humiliating them for a funny TikTok “stay woke, Carol.” Or something to that effect.

In fact, the word in the pejorative sense that is common parlance among the main stream commentariat and politicians like Fox News and Ron Desantis or Trump, is something much larger.

It is indeed, an ideology, and a very specific mutation of an ideology that wreaked havoc across the world over the last century. That ideology is Marxism.

Now, you may be wondering, how could Marxism be so prevalent and why is it something that I should bother about? Isn’t that type of ideology relegated to some tiny departments on some obscure Liberal Arts college with a haughty sounding name?

If this article was written about 40 years ago, then you would be right in your skepticism. Unfortunately, times have indeed changed.

In brief, Wokeism as it manifests today in current culture (through CRT, DEI, ESG and other innocuous sounding acronyms), is a modern evolution of the fundamental ‘philosophy’ expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, most famously in the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

There is one fundamental axiom by which the entire Marxist universe goes round. It is the premise that everything in human history can be understood solely on the basis that economic conditions are the source of all power.

And in every society, there are those that control that power and those that do not. In the words of Marx; there are the oppressors and the oppressed.

Many, many people believed this theory over the last one hundred years or so. In fact, because Marx was extremely verbose in his writings and because to the sensitive observer before the 1950’s, it was true that there seemed to be an awful lot of exploitation on the part of ‘capitalists’, many believed the theory Marx put forward to be an objective ‘Science’.

Yet, this ‘Science’ proved to be one disastrous in practice. The citizens of countries that have implemented the policies of Communism well know, and as would any student of history of the regimes of said countries (Russia, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Etc.), that over tens of millions of people have been killed at the hands of their own government. All in service of bringing about the revolution and ideal society that would naturally follow Marxist principles.

This caused a massive problem in the 1950’s. Communism (Marxism in practice or Praxis as they term it), was the great hope of many intellectuals, politicians, advocates, artists, etc. on the Left throughout the 20^th century.

When it began to come to light in the late 1940’s that Russia under Stalin was committing all manner of crimes against humanity, a great schism arose.

On one hand, it caused many on the political Left in the West to repudiate communism for good. On the other hand, some doubled down, and became ‘fellow travelers’ in service of Soviet Russia.

Yet still, there was a third clique of those on the Left. Although deeply dejected by the revelations of Communism in practice, they could not give up on the ideology of Marx. And so, they went to work.

This is where we find the birth of modern Wokeism that we are dealing with today. It’s in our universities, school boards, classrooms, human resources departments, our commercials during halftime shows and myriad other cultural institutions.

The Leftist intellectuals of the time, that third clique, looked around and acknowledged the problem. They saw that the revolution as promised by Marx had failed.

Yet, how could they save these ideas? Who today (this is the period in the 1960’s – 1980’s) is oppressed? They found answers.

Women, non-heterosexuals, colonized nations, minority races, disabled people, overweight people, and so on. All of these people were ‘oppressed’. But by whom? The answer eventually developed into “White, Male, Patriarchal society”. The hegemonic force, in their own terms.

And voila, there we have it. The revolution can begin again. This time those who would promote this ideology had learned their lessons well.

It was no longer about the working-man, the proletariat, waging violent revolution in the street through protests, riots and military action.

No, now it was about capturing the institutions that produced the “Cultural Capital” of the society and turning those places on themselves.

It was no longer about the workers seizing the means of production, now it is about activists taking over the institutions.

This is the work of folks with names like Antonio Gramschi, Vaclav Havel, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Paulo Friere, Herbert Marcuse and numerous others. All these intellectuals are the architects of Wokeism.

Their individual contributions are beyond the scope of this article, but I highly encourage you to read their work for yourself.

Depending on the author their work may be more abstruse than others, but there are now many excellent resources that will help guide you through that intellectual spider’s web. I will list these at the end of this article.

Back to our main thread. These progenitors of Wokeism have been working for decades in the very institutions they claim to despise and seek to undermine. They have been quite successful in turning the fountainheads of western, liberal culture (Classically Liberal, not the modern connotation) into poisoned wells.

Given that the university trains and accredits all of our professionals in every industry, it is now clear to see that after decades of these ideas being spread into the various institutions that facilitate the ideas that professionals carry into the real world, we have things like Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI), Critical Race Theory (CRT), Social-Emotional Learning (SLE) and Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) scores in every industry.

From journalism, to medicine, to advertising, to public education, public health and so on, this ideology has spread thoroughly.

All of these innocuous (sometimes) and vaguely good sounding words, smooshed together, represent the vehicles by which Wokeism (which we can now comfortably and correctly refer to as Neo-Marxism) brings home it’s rotten fruit for you, or more likely your kids, to eat.

It is extremely important for you to recognize a fundamental trick used by those who would push this poisonous ideology.

They take words that sound well-meaning and use them in very different ways than most people understand them. This is where Woke comes from. It is intentional and a power-play, like oh so many of their tactics. But more on this in another article.

I hope this piece gave you a basic understanding of the word Woke and where it came from. I gave you a small crash course in the history of the word, introduced you to some key terms and ideas, and a list of resources so you can begin to wrap your head around the full scope of the problem; which is huge.

In the spirit of the proverb at the top of the article, do not go in blind and hard-charging into confronting this problem.

We are facing a well-organized, methodically planned agenda that needs to be responded to in kind. If you do not understand it, things will go badly for you.

But fear not, you have just taken your first right step. The next step is to keep going, one foot in front of the other.