Woke ideology defines the privileged and the oppressed according to racial, gender and class characteristics.
If you’re woke or progressive, your ultimate political aspiration is to insist on diversity of melanin content in every sector of society. My principal objection to wokeness is not that this insistence on diversity of skin tone encourages uniformity of thought (“If you’re not progressive, then you’re a despicable human being!”), although it certainly poses a problem.
The political aspirant considers it “radical” to invert past hierarchies of social/racial groups in the sense that, if white people and men were on top of the social ladder, they are now positioned at the bottom end with their opposites occupying the top end. But an inverted hierarchy is still a hierarchy; a relation of power. It is not justice. That is effectively what is taking place now. Wokeness is not the realisation of justice in the world. It maintains the same power structures as before. It simply replaces their occupants. It is a power grab masked as progressive.
I find it astonishing that it is always the few privileged and the elite who go on about privilege and elitism. It is never the average person, who aspires to a better life. The privileged person with the guilty conscience wants to bring everyone down to the abject level at which he esteems himself.
But – and to put matters in a broader perspective – this is not surprising. According to Peter Turchin in End Times, the overproduction of an intellectual elite divorced from reality is one of the markers of a declining civilisation. Nothing testifies to this disconnect more clearly than the woke ideology is taught at Ivy Leagues.
It is an ideology based on a moral hierarchy of victimhood. Those at the bottom end of the hierarchy — in this instance, white men — are expected to neuter themselves to be deemed worthy of everyone’s love and approval. Those at the top end — trans and women of colour — have to be worshiped as the newfangled priests of the sect.
This ideology is defined by the war of the privileged versus the oppressed. It is heir to both Nazism and communism, paradoxically, to both at once. According to Nazism, history is the struggle between races with the Aryan race eventually winning. According to communism, history is a class struggle that terminates in the dictatorship of the proletariat and, eventually, in the establishment of a socialist state.
Woke ideology defines the privileged and the oppressed according to racial, gender and class characteristics. In consequence of this, it morally licenses racism against white people, gender discrimination against men and sexual discrimination against heterosexuals. It is incompatible with the rule of law but compatible with autocracy and with a society hierarchically organised along racial, gender and class lines.
In a culture that rewards claims of victimhood and frailty, the production of fake victims becomes the unspoken rule and the oppressors against whom they are defined — white people and males — are demonised.
What explains this morally warped situation and decline?
Various facts. One of them is some trends of contemporary capitalism. It is no accident, for instance, that porn sites perfectly realise the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion. There isn’t a sexual taste and inclination that isn’t represented on them. The inflated value of representation in the porn industry and identity politics stems from a culture obsessed with branding.
Let me cite another fact.
In parts of the left in the West, there are some who deny the existence of sexual difference and overvalue gender identity. Sexual difference — the fact that humans are generally born male or female, one or the other — is denied by them in the name of kindness and justice.
You hear them sing the refrain, “Let’s eliminate the word ‘woman’ in favour of ‘womb-haver’, ‘menstruator’ or ‘birthing body’, because it’s unkind to individuals who don’t identify as such.” What matters is who you feel on the inside, regardless of who you are on the outside. Your gender identity, once thought by feminists in the 1990s and earlier to be imposed by society on individuals, is thought by them to be something you discover on the inside through your feelings.
This retreat to the inner world of feelings (and fantasy) correlates with the denial of our embodied, sexed life. This is not unique to the left. It is emblematic of a cultural pathology. There is a correlation between the inordinate amount of time we spend online and the denial of certain patent physical facts. Social interaction is embodied. Online communication (the user experience) is disembodied. Our growing attachment to our online identities coincides with a rapidly increasing detachment from our embodied identity.
Take the cliched romantic encounters of Hollywood movies of the 1990s and early 2000s. Two strangers walk by on a busy street. Their eyes interlock. Something transpires between them that neither of them can quite put into words — something intimate that awakens in them a world of possibilities. The digital world that is now scripting human mating rituals has made this almost something passé.
The digital world is a frictionless reality. It is causally constrained neither by the laws of physical nature nor by the norms and taboos of civil society. It is a purely personalised world. It is identical to the dream world or fantasy, in this respect, which is private and frictionless, tethered neither to society nor to material nature.
Two things happen when your thoughts are no longer constrained by shared physical truths. The first is that it becomes possible to manipulate your sense of reality. The second, and correlatively, is that every person gets a reality cut to the measure of their virtual identity and the persona they inhabit on various platforms.
It is not without reason that this age thinks of itself as “post-truth”. Take, for example, the “Big Lie”. A mob of US President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. According to the Democrats, Joe Biden won the election, Trump refused to concede and had attempted a coup. According to some Republicans, Biden’s presidency from 2021 to 2025 was illegitimate because he didn’t win. People disagree, not because they have different opinions about what happened, but because they have different facts about what happened. The idea of a shared world is something that is also almost passé.
The net effect of living out your life on a digital island, physically isolated yet virtually connected, is to withdraw from reality, including from the biologically sexed body and from social institutions. It produces a generalised mistrust in reality.
What happens when trust in democratic institutions fails? Conspiracy theories flourish, paranoia abounds, at the same time as a call for an autocratic ruler becomes more and more pronounced — a ruler who will restore order, set limits and boundaries.
Trumpism (the Make America Great Again movement) and woke ideology issue from the same predicament. They offer different explanations of the fragmentation of our shared reality and they promise a return to order and normalcy. They are palliatives.
The Gutenberg invention (the printing press) in the 1450s led to the Wars of Religion. It is to be feared that what resulted from the US’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency in the 1970s — chiefly the internet — has set us on a path that will lead to a similar outcome and that we are today in the grip of its first matutinal signs.
Rafael Winkler is an associate professor in the philosophy department at the University of Johannesburg.