Where did Woke Come From? Anarchy, Selfishness and Revolution

To understand where woke came from - and where it is going - just look at its ideological begetters

Over the past few years, we have seen a marked increase in the use of woke in our vocabulary.

But where did it come from?

According to experts, the term was initially used by those who considered themselves to be, so to speak, in a state of “awareness” of ongoing “social injustice”. The woke believe they have “opened their eyes” and become aware that we live under the yoke of an oppressive (environmentally destructive, racist, patriarchal, cis, colonial, etc) society. Furthermore, they consider themselves to be a “minority” in a world where the majority remain ignorant and in need of being woken.

Tragically for these individuals, today the term is mainly used as a slur. To the mainstream public, on the other hand, the term came to prominence abruptly and only in recent times. As a result, many have come to think of woke as a new and unprecedented phenomenon. Most explanations about its origin have thus focused on relatively recent events from the past few years.

The reason I believe it is important to understand where woke comes from is because the ideology is severely impacting Western society. What’s more, woke’s globalist, authoritarian, censorious, and violent tendencies are becoming brasher with every month that passes.  

Tracing back the origins of woke

Some think woke started spreading in American academia as recently as around the mid-2010s, when videos such as the infamous Halloween Email Protest, began surfacing on Youtube. In this video, Professor Nicholas Christakis – then of Yale University – appears surrounded by young people taking turns to berate him for his wife’s heinous hate crime. Mrs Christakis's crime? Sending an email to students in which she questioned a directive from the university’s ‘Intercultural Affairs Committee’. The directive had advised students not to wear feathered headdresses or turbans for Halloween. The reason given was that doing so constituted ‘cultural appropriation’. Mrs Christakis deemed the directive to be ridiculous, and, in expressing her views, incurred the wrath of the wokest of woke: American elite university students. In the video, Professor Christakis is seen trying and failing to communicate with the student who had not come to see him with the intention of conducting mature debate but to perform a ritual of collective wokeism. This consisted of whining, whimpering, and working themselves up to the point of triggering a collective and self-induced nervous breakdown in the hope that the professor would then beg for forgiveness and relinquish his position on the spot. Shortly after the incident, the Christakis were fired from their respective positions, and just like that, the new progressives had claimed one of their first scalps. Most importantly, they had successfully used the victimhood narrative as a revolutionary tool to overthrow those who they saw as their oppressors.  

Barely noticed across the pond, the spectacle seemed far too farcical to warrant our concern. A bunch of rich students from one of the most pedigreed universities in the world descending into childish tantrums and claiming to suffer extreme discrimination was only a threat to wacky Disneyland America.

Or so we thought…

A decade later, the United States finds itself submerged neck-deep in the culture war, and we – in the rest of the West – seem to have woefully underestimated our own universities, political leaders, and public institutions’ desire to jump at the opportunity to sprawl and surrender at the altar of woke. What’s more, today, in the United Kingdom, we find ourselves in an absurd situation where the confused and dying “Conservative” Government thinks woke will be placated by passing new legislation to enforce free speech in academia while simultaneously having its own ministers publicly subscribe and opportunistically promote intolerant woke causes. Moreover, the British police have begun arresting people for thinking un-woke thoughts or for removing doom cultists trying to block people from getting to hospitals. Some would even venture to think that perhaps the “conservatives” have somewhat failed to grasp the gravity of the situation.

From this perspective, many could be forgiven for concluding that woke is a new phenomenon ‘Made in USA’, and that we can insulate ourselves from its excesses by rejecting Uncle Joe’s cultural degeneracy.

However, this would be a very narrow analysis indeed. The fact is that – just like the telephone and the train – the ideology that gave rise to woke was developed in Europe and exported to the New World. America has only given back to Europe what belongs to Europe, albeit with enhanced trappings such as corporate sponsorships, institutional backing, blue hair, ‘body-positivity’ flabbiness, and child mutilation.

How anarchists use rationality to justify the overthrowing of tradition

Despite its new colourful packaging, however, woke belongs to the old twin traditions of progressivism and anarchism. Today’s woke are roused by the same principle that inspired revolutionary movements throughout history, namely: the outright rejection of inherited tradition and authority which they consider prevents the individual from acting freely and according to his own reason.

To better understand this point, it is important to dig further into the ideological development that led us to the current era of woke. For this, we must look at ideas which elevate reason to the position as the only source of legitimate authority.

Reason is, chiefly, our capacity to rationalise, to look at the ratio and proportion of things, to measure, quantify, categorise, and conceive aspects of our physical world. In short, reason allows us to approximately perceive the present order of things through our physical senses. It would be disingenuous to deny the fact that reason is one of the most important tools we have at our disposal when it comes to navigating the physical world. However, reason has its limits and operates on existing and accepted knowledge. Rationalists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau have long believed in the existence of a “state of nature” preceding society as we know it, and in which only physical laws applied. It followed that in order to derive and consciously abide by these laws we needed to exclusively apply our individual reason in complete freedom.

Moreover, progressives have argued throughout history that it is only due to the irrationality of tradition and spirituality – which they equate to tyranny and superstition respectively – that we have allowed arbitrary rules to be imposed. This, they argue, results in illegitimate authority unwittingly being assimilated and passed on from one generation to the next.

Progressives believe that the solution is to demolish the old institutions, reject inherited authority, destroy the nuclear family, and make rationality the sole arbiter of morality.

This worldview has been present throughout history, even all the way back to the times of Ancient Greece. Take for instance the Greek philosophers Antisthenes and Diogenes. The former was credited with inspiring the Cynic school of Greek philosophy (Cynic from Cyno, meaning Dog-like); the latter was his ideological follower. Antisthenes was an extreme rationalist who, like today’s woke used to literally “bark at injustice”.

Diogenes of Sinope went further and believed that social conventions such as the nuclear family and any notion of modesty needed to be obliterated in order to return to “natural life” and to act with honesty. He advocated doing whatever one felt like doing as long as no harm was caused to others as this would lead to living honestly.

Those who peddle the idea of individual self-interest as the only source of legitimate authority have long depicted reason as a lamp or a torch irradiating its light and banishing darkness. Take for instance the fact that Diogenes is represented – at its most respectable – as an unconventionally free man who disregarded social norms, walked barefoot, lived in a barrel with stray dogs and carried a lamp which helped him in his “search for an honest man” and to “expose the hypocrisy of social conventions”.

Throughout history, revolutionaries have sought to liberate the individual from the oppression of tradition so as to rationally progress towards human perfection. We have had many proponents of rational utopias such as Oliver Cromwell, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Francois Rabelais, the Diggers, the Jacobines, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin, Karl Marx, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Thoreau, John Stuart Mill, the Chartist movement, the Suffragettes, and the Feminists to name just a few.

As stated before, the predecessor ideology to woke was exported from Europe to America. To further illustrate the link, let us examine the ideas espoused by one of the most important Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine, an Englishman raised in a secular Quaker household. In January 1776, a few months prior to the revolution, Paine published Common Sense a book heavily promoted by Benjamin Franklin (a deist freemason) and Thomas Jefferson (also a deist or protestant), printed, and distributed across the entirety of America and Europe, and which was pivotal in turning the American public against the British Crown. In its opening passages, Paine makes his entire argument clear when he writes:

For, were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver.

Despite all the above, it would be naïve to lay the blame for the conception of woke squarely on Reason and Rationality, just as it would be unfair to blame important figures of the past such as Locke, Jefferson or Voltaire for inspiring the new secular religion of woke. Many Enlightenment figures were in favour of liberty, not for the purpose of justifying complete disorder and disobedience of any conceivable authority, but to ensure the basic rights of individuals and to limit the power of the State – and in many cases that of Monarchs which had become tyrannical.

I’d like to think that the philosophers of the Enlightenment would repudiate today’s woke without reservation. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the over-reliance on the individual’s capacity to reason as the only legitimate tool to derive truth and moral codes has been co-opted by the anarchists and progressives throughout history. They have used the arguments for liberty to justify and fuel an ever-accelerating revolutionary and destructive impulse.

As I have said before, the woke consider all tradition and hereditary authority to be oppressive just like Thomas Paine believed they subjected future generations to a form of tyranny where the dead had control over the living and over those who are yet to be born. In his pamphlet The Rights of Man (1791) Paine responds to the counter-enlightenment philosopher, Edmund Burke, claiming:

That which a whole nation chooses to do it has a right to do […] Mr. Burke says, no. Where, then, does the right exist? I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away and controlled and contracted for by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead, and Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living. […] Those who have quitted the world, and those who have not yet arrived at it, are as remote from each other as the utmost stretch of mortal imagination can conceive. What possible obligation, then, can exist between them — what rule or principle can be laid down that of two nonentities, the one out of existence and the other not in, and who never can meet in this world, the one should control the other to the end of time?

Repeated ad infinitum, each new iteration of progressivism seeks to overthrow their forebearer’s systems, without considering for a moment the fact that the next generation will also tear down what they themselves have achieved and had hoped to transmit.

This revolutionary impulse - to forever start again and to reject hereditary authority - and the elevation of one’s own reason above all else is also a revolt against the responsibilities and the requirement for sacrifice which maintaining a tradition depends upon. Family, the main pillar of our Western society, has been one of the main targets of progressive revolutions because it requires parents to sacrifice themselves for their progeny. In short, the progressives want to be relieved of the weight of virtue and instead want their self-interest alone to be the moral compass and the arbiter of their behaviour. For the progressives, a system built upon the family has therefore always been the most oppressive. Woke is the current highest expression of this mindset.

Given all this, what should be done to stop woke from causing further harm to the younger generations and to the West?

I believe we must start by realising that we cannot stop the revolutionary cycle through yet more revolutions.

In effect, we cannot fight fire with fire. Eventually, as each new generation of revolutionaries peels off yet another layer of tradition in search of the ultimate rational truth, the revolutionary movement will eventually self-combust into nothingness (perhaps AI will help them get there faster?). We should not engage in so-called “counter-revolution”. We should not be so daft as to think that yet more “awakening” is the solution to woke.

We should therefore not simply concern ourselves with woke in its current form but rather we should learn to recognise what feeds the engine propelling the revolutionary impulse: Fear.

Furthermore, we should also know that the gift of free will which each one of us is endowed with from birth is there not for us to dilapidate in hedonistic pursuits but also to freely choose to be good, to learn to sacrifice ourselves for others, and to serve rather than to be served without expecting anything in return. More than anything we should be wary of those who sell us the dangerous idea of liberty through revolution. The counter-enlightenment philosopher Edmund Burke pointed out in his Reflections on the Revolution in France:

The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints.

I think Burke had a point.

If freedom is valuable, it is to choose to serve and sacrifice ourselves for our friends and family. If freedom is the excuse for the selfish to do as he pleases, it is pernicious and will lead him to eventual destruction.

A century after Paine’s Common Sense, the United States of America was gifted the greatest symbol of the present victory of progressive revolutionary ideology over Tradition: A colossal yet hollow Liberty elevating the torch of reason above all else pretending to illuminate mankind just like the homeless beggar Diogenes of Sinope intended with his lamp - standing on his barrel with his dog - 2000 years before. Perhaps a return to Tradition will eventually save the West before it destroys itself, but for now, it is clear that premature congratulation for the achievement of woke liberty is gradually turning to complaints.