wokeness is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 13 times across 13 issues between March 05, 2021 and January 23, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as "I am against wokeness on moral/epistemic grounds"; "wokeness is currently in a weird place; ascendant in all measurable ways"; "American conservatives claim that wokeness is “creeping authoritarianism”". It most often appears alongside Trump, America, Israel.
- Article page
- wokeness
- Mention count
- 13
- Issue count
- 13
- First seen
- March 05, 2021
- Last seen
- January 23, 2026
Outbound links
- https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/new-york-times-word-usage-frequency
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jYVJFIz5-aMi0LCgsC9AN6BncJDNVGaMU37QmwZ1vzA/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.b9xkivbksykk
- https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/letter-from-a-subscriber-my-new-therapist
- https://paulgraham.com/woke.html
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/22/the-apa-meeting-a-photo-essay/
- https://x.com/saltypsych/status/1893853128816042095
Issue trail
- Highlights From The Comments On Class
- Advice For Unwoke Academic?
- Dictator Book Club: Chavez
- Book Review: I See Satan Fall Like Lightning
- Contra DeBoer On Movement Shell Games
- My 2024 Presidential Debate
- Against The Cultural Christianity Argument
- Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
- On Priesthoods
- If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It
- Links For July 2025
- Against Against Boomers
- Slightly Against The "Other People's Money" Argument Against Aid
Related pages
Source context
I have less good advice for the Democrats because they seem less confused. I am against wokeness on moral/epistemic grounds, but it does seem to be a winning strategy (I think 25% less wokeness would be an even more winning strategy, but I think the general direction is working).
Fabian Strategy: Become a beloved pillar of his college community. Volunteer for all those committees everyone always tries to weasel out of. When some wokeness-related issue comes up - merit vs. diversity hiring, wokeness study class requirements for majors, firing professors who say unwoke things, etc - use his reputation and position to fight back. Kindly but firmly make it clear that he opposes wokeness, and that other academics in the same position are not alone. Occasionally, when the college administrators make some extreme and obvious overstep - something “we’ve cancelled all yoga classes because they’re cultural appropriation”-level unpopular - escalate it, make sure everyone in the world hears about it, then claim the easy victory when they back down.
What Message Does A Hard-Won Victory Send? Suppose in fact this guy invites a controversial speaker, there are angry protests, the college tries to fire him, he sues the college and wins, and in the end his speaker is able to speak and he remains employed. If this case makes the news and helps set everyone’s expectations, what message does it send to the average academic? It could be “have hope, it’s possible to win a fight against wokeness”. Or it could be “if you offend woke people, you’ll have to deal with angry mobs and a long court case; sure, you’ll win in the end, but it sounds horrible”.
In this post, I thought of it as rallying a previously flagging social justice movement, allowing them to make a giant show of strength, briefly cow everyone, and intimidate any attempt at change. My interlocutor noticed some of the same things, but said lots of previously woke people had secretly freaked out exactly how strong the show of strength is and gotten doubts - they’d previously bought into the “wokeness is the underdog” narrative, and only then noticed how much power and control it was grabbing for itself. He thinks a world where the protests had never happened would be woker than our current world right now.
Inline links: this post
Instead of firing squads at midnight, Chavez was authoritarian in the way that American conservatives claim that wokeness is “creeping authoritarianism”. He and his network of allies controlled the media, the institutions, and all the good jobs. If you flattered him, the media would say nice things about you, you would get preferential treatment when interfacing with institutions, and could count on a well-paying sinecure at some government department or nationalized company. If you questioned his rule, you would find that every news story about you was negative, and you were locked out of any job besides janitor or taxi driver.
Richard Hanania has a new book out by this title. I hope to review it soon. He claims that wokeness originated in civil rights laws from the 1960s.
He is writing in 1999, before the current wave of wokeness. But he’s familiar with earlier forms of left-wing philosophy, and sees them intensifying all around him. He defines wokeness (not literally, obviously in 1999 he wouldn’t use that exact word) as excessive concern for victims. It believes that social systems must be seen through the lens of oppressors persecuting victims, and all political positions must be reduced to siding with victims as much as possible.
So, since the Nazis are bad, we should stick with slave morality, and view the increasing concern with victims as good, right? Girard is uncomfortable with this conclusion. He’s a conservative Christian, so he has to be against wokeness. But he identifies wokeness as increasing fidelity to the Christian imperative to care for victims. So he has to support something like “increasing concern with helping victims was good until about 1950, and then went too far and became bad”. This is a totally coherent philosophy that might very well be true. It’s just sort of awkward, and less elegant than his other claims, and he never really says it outright. A hostile reader would naturally accuse him of being a naive conservative: social progress was good right up until the point where it produced the society I grew up in, and then after that, it became bad.
I checked to see if I was being a giant hypocrite, and came up with the following: wokeness is just a modern intensification of age-old anti-racism. And anti-racism has even more achievements than effective altruism: it’s freed the slaves, ended segregation, etc. But people (including me) mostly criticize wokeness for its comparatively-small failures, like academics getting unfairly cancelled. Why should people judge effective altruism on its big successes, but anti-racism on its small failures?
Alexander: Wow, I’m having a hard time finding any real points of disagreement tonight. Let’s stay on cultural issues, where I know the two of you have clashed before. President Biden, a lot of conservatives are worried that your administration promotes “wokeness” and “cancel culture”. What do you have to say to them?
Alexander: Mr. Trump, your response? What’s your position on wokeness and cancel culture?
Trump: I’m against wokeness. I believe in Western values. I believe in the heritage of Greece and Rome - but Rome more than Greece, because it was further west. But most of all, I believe in the values of the Aztecs, because they were most western of all. I believe that in 959 AD Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, insulted Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of water, who cried blood for the next fifty-two years. Her tears extinguished the sun and killed everyone on Earth. In his mercy, Quetzalcoatl the Winged Serpent descended to the Underworld, where he stole the bones of the last men, and dipped them in his blood to create a new human race, and Huitzilopochtli, the Left-Handed Hummingbird, ascended into heaven to became the new sun. But his sisters the moon and stars grew jealous of his light, and they launched attacks upon him nightly. Only the nourishing blood of men gives Huitzilopochtli the strength to resist their assaults and shine anew each morn. Should the fountain of sacrifice ever go dry, the sun will go black, and the stars will fall upon the world and consume it. Callouts on social media are a form of flower war, and its losers are therefore set aside for sacrifice. In this, I agree with Joe Biden. But we cannot merely consign fallen celebrities to shame and penury. We must give them to the Sun. We must place them atop the mounds of Cahokia, atop the Luxor in Las Vegas, yea, even atop the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid in Memphis, and plunge obsidian daggers into their still-beating hearts, that the dawn may come anew.
Only two things block me from becoming a Cultural Theist. The first is boring: I hate asserting false things, even if they're "practical". I don't ask anyone else to share that particular quirk. So I find the second more interesting: the Cultural Christianity argument hinges on the proposition that all liberal societies without Christianity will eventually collapse into wokeness and postmodernism. But Christianity also eventually collapsed into wokeness and postmodernism. So if they're both equally doomed, why not at least be truthful by advocating for the virtuous liberal society I wanted in the first place?
That is, suppose I were to advocate a return to 1890s norms of (let's say) liberalism and beautiful art. The Cultural Christian would tell me this is doomed, because the 1890s cultural package eventually fell apart and became the 20th century cultural package of wokeness and postmodernism (and fascism, socialism, New Dealism, etc). Therefore, I should support Christianity.
How come there isn’t a carefully-selected, persecuted group of people today who are morality-maxxing and doing much better than regular society? Is it the Mormons? Seems kind of disappointing, I don’t know, I kind of expected more than that. Is it woke people? I realize this answer will be unpopular, but if you’re a white male than wokeness involves a lot of self-abnegation, which at least rhymes with Christian morality, and they sure did grow quickly. It is effective altruists? I was going to say we weren’t growing fast enough, but 40% per decade is actually a low bar and we probably clear it easily. Maybe all we have to do is keep it up another 260 years!
Inline links: self-abnegation
People sometimes accuse modern social movements like environmentalism, MAGA, wokeness, rationalism, etc of being cults, but AFAIK this rule doesn’t apply to them - most people in these movements get involved by stumbling across the philosophy online and finding that it rings true. It seems to me like these modern movements are more likely to make unique and interesting claims about the world that could attract or repel certain types of people - whereas most cults are pretty similar (this one guy is God, he commands you to chant a bunch and give him money, and here’s a holy book saying we want world peace). I wonder if this should actually be a counter to “cultishness” accusations - “We can’t be a cult, cults always spread through the social graph, but we learned about this movement from a blog!”
I don’t fully understand why wokeness succeeded at conquering the priesthoods so much more thoroughly than any previous political fad. Maybe it was just luck of memetic evolution - why did the 1918 flu kill so many more people than the 1917 one? Maybe the rise of the Internet let various bad ideas recombine into more virulent versions or just spread faster than they would have otherwise.
My theory is that this productive tension was the vector of attack for wokeness, and the reason it took over almost every priesthood within a five-year period.
Wokeness is a beautiful resolution between contempt for the public and wanting to stay in touch with the public. The public (as represented by the average straight male white guy) is, themselves, out of touch. Not just out of touch, but the enemy of in-touch-ness, the ones who must be conquered and transcended in order to be truly in touch. By learning what pronouns to use for trans people (etc, etc), you’re learning secret knowledge, feared and loathed by the masses, that makes you cool and in touch with the youth (considered as an abstract mass). You will gender your trans patients exactly correctly, and their eyes will go wide and they’ll think “Wow, doctors are so cool and in touch, not like all the other people I meet.”
I hate to rag on wokeness further in the Year Of Our Lord 2025, but they’re still the best example I’ve ever seen. You weren’t supposed to defend racists. And so:
Comments attribute the shift to some combination of Trump, the manosphere, and wokeness, but all those things existed well before the peak in 2018. Did it just take a while for them to get big enough to have an effect? If not, what’s going on?
23: Ethan Strauss on the controversy around A’ja Wilson’s WNBA sneaker. It’s a standard wokeness fight, but inadvertently offers a lens into the crazy world of basketball sneaker and people who care way too much about them. Did you know 32 active NBA players have their own sneaker lines? Or that some NBA shoe endorsement deals run into the 9 digits, with top basketball players making more money from sneakers than from the salaries? Or that sneaker deals going to the “wrong” player garners a level of outrage I usually associate with major geopolitical conflicts?
What will our children think of Millennials and Zoomers? Might they get mad about wokeness and the pillaging of the American education system for temporary political cred? What about Trump, DOGE, and the decline of federal state capacity? Any of these seems worse than whatever happened in the Boomers’ heyday. The US has a way of bouncing back; maybe it’ll happen again. Still, the Boomers can boast that they passed on a better life to their children. How sure are you that you’ll be able to say the same?
The average person nods along to insane statements like “if Elon Musk distributed his fortune evenly, every American would get ten million dollars” and probably doesn’t have the reasoning skills to think about coordination problems clearly. Along with these reasons, it seems like people don’t donate money even when they care a lot about something. How many people care a lot about wokeness, either pro or con? How many have donated significant amounts of money to organizations promoting or opposing it? Why? Is the answer just free rider problems? Are they just virtue signaling when they talk about wokeness, and they don’t really care? Forget about reaching 90% - would even half of Americans sign this contract and follow through? Or would we announce the end of coercive military taxation to great fanfare, and then immediately be invaded by Canada and turned into the 11th province? Contra the economists, I’m not sure that we fund the military through coercive taxation only to avoid free rider problems. I think we fund it through taxation to avoid the same kinds of transaction cost issues that would sink the assurance contract. Since charity suffers these same transaction costs, the same arguments may apply. The Multiple Preferences Argument Everyone has multiple conflicting sets of preferences that change based on how they’re being elicited. These go by many names: Near Mode vs. Far Mode, superego vs. id, “my best self” vs. “my regular self”. Many people say phones are terrible and destroying society and that their life would be much better without a phone and that they wish they could quit their phone. Then they spend all their time on their phone.