Woke Is A Career, Not A Principle

Woke is not a moral movement of any kind. It isn't even a cockamamie religion.

Religious commandments come in three parts: one that defines its practices of worship and the believer's relationship with the God(s) of the religion; another that sets out how to behave like a decent member of society; and the third that creates shibboleths (a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important) to distinguish the Faithful from the kuffers. Bacon. Circumcision. Beards (or not). Eating beef. Leavened bread. Drinking alchohol. Wearing only plain clothes. These are usually found in the commentaries.

Obedience must be despite, not because: obedience to a rule means nothing, after all, if there's a beneficial reason for you do whatever it is, whether it is a rule or not. Shibboleths are great obedience-tests.

The best shibboleth is trivial and arbitrary. It's exactly because there is no reason for it (What did pigs ever do to anybody? What is so gosh-darn important about your wife wearing a scarf over her head?) that following it becomes a sign that one is Going Along to Get Along.

After a while, the shibboleths supersede the Commandments. Not killing someone who steals your sheep is tough: it's easier not to eat pork. Gesture becomes more important than substance. Exceptions are made for good earners who are prepared to put on the social show. A man may beat his wife and steal from his neighbour, but as long as he keeps his beard long, and kicks back to the Bishops, he will be considered a Good Man. It's shallow, but a lot of societies function with it.

A lot of people understand 'Woke' as just such a coherent, if fanatical, collection of shibboleths. Sexism, Trans Rights, Climate Change... that kind of stuff. These are, you guessed, useful idiots. That includes every journalist who writes as if 'Woke' is a coherent moral movement or trend.

It isn't.

Each of the Woke shibboleths has single-issue activist organisation(s) pushing it. Each of those has their financiers, for whatever reason they have, and their leaders and chief ideologues. Some of those people have conducted successful entryist campaigns in what were once respected institutions (the BBC, the Met Office, the National Trust, amongst others) and turned them into organisations campaigning for the chosen ideological ends.

Take #MeToo. Between its transformation into a high-profile movement in late 2017, and a New York Times article about a year later, around two hundred mostly older men had lost their jobs, and around one hundred of them had been replaced by women. That was not a consequence, it was the purpose.

The preferred targets are older, preferably with waning reputations. Who are in the way and vulnerable. Who may no longer be profitable and whose business partners want to dump them. Who can be sacrificed to protect the others. Who may have been a**holes, and can finally be dumped to everyone's great relief.

Woke is not about righting wrongs. It's not about social justice.

It's the instigators of a cancel-campaign demonstrating their activist moxie, a calling-card, a CV bullet-point, for a salaried job with an activist organisation.

It's a tactic for getting jobs in, or getting people sacked from, a group of professions: politicians, academics, media folk, pundits, authors, actors, photographers, artists, activists.

Why these professions? Because serious businesses have a lot of filters in hiring, and generally do a lot to protect their productive people from whatever is the latest parasitic nonsense. Also, the kinds of people who go in for this year's nonsense avoid jobs where they will have to do some useful work involving actual skills. This is why Wokesters don't fight for representation in sewage maintenance, bus driving, North Sea oil rigging, or even computer programming. Too dull, and too easy to see if someone actually knows anything and is contributing.

Next time you see Woke outrage, remember it's about getting someone into or out of a job.

Judge an idea by the company that keeps it: Woke sucks.