Why Woke? Because It's Easy
It is the year of our Lord nineteen hundred. David Hilbert has just issued his list of Great Unsolved Problems in Mathematics.
You, dear reader, are an aspiring mathematician, anxious to get ahead. You want to be acknowledged by your peers and the men of your time as a fellow worth consideration. What is the best way to advance yourself?
Simple: memorize, by slow painful repetition and re-proving, the great body of work produced by the giants who came before you. Then, considering that work for a time, and half a time, see how it all fits with Hilbert's list. And then, and only then, proposing a fascinating, and true, extension, or even a solution to one of the twenty three problems.
To succeed requires years of brutal hard work, married to substantial luck in circumstance, and being blessed with a mind capable of rare feats. Chances are you won't make it. At best, you will be one of the vast horde of math appreciators who never manage to make out clearly enough the vague dark shapes you dimly perceive. You, like most of us, are more likely to be a Salieri than a Mozart.
Such is life. It is useless to complain, and even pathetic, if not outright effeminate.
Let's jump in our minds' time machine a century ahead. It is now the glorious year of our Lord two thousand and twenty two. You, as before, want to get ahead in mathematics. How?
Skip the old way. Much too hard! Besides, even if you could put in the labor, you suspect you couldn't even reach Salieri level, let alone anything higher.
What to do? Simple: tweet that "Math is white supremacy", or "Correct answers be white thinking", or "Memorization is patriarchal", or "Math is literally violence". You follow this up with a column or two, submitted to the most prominent mathematical journals, who eagerly accept them, and which contain statements like those tweets, composed of words tossed as a salad in a chaotic manner that would make even Kamala Harris blush.
If you are lucky, you won't pass out from the dizzy speed at which you are promoted.
There is noting special about our mathematics example. It applies with equal vigor to all fields, from physics to photography. Woke works wherever it is tried. And the reason is obvious:
Work is hard, woke is easy.
It takes no special intelligence to be woke. It is not that lack of intelligence is beneficial to woke, because it takes something like average to slightly above average intelligence to use woke to manipulate the system and propel yourself forward. It is hard for those of great intelligence (in their own fields) to be woke, unless they are devoid of conscience or have evil motives. You will have noted the parenthetical condition, to be joined with another below.
Our paradigmatic example of woke is this tweet:
This is a false flippant statement, given only to gain applause, giving an opinion everybody, most especially its author, knows is false. It is woke because it is an opinion the intellectually feeble and unscrupulous know they should be seen agreeing with. It is also very, very easy to make, consuming no intellectual resources.
Because lying is painful (as we have often observed), and because (hint hint) the midwit excels at inventing evidence for cherished beliefs (and fails to consider evidence which refutes these beliefs), doubtless those who nod along with Luce will conjure observations which "prove" Republicans are the most evil force evah. This is easy.
Woke appeals best to the midwit because it is easy but can be made to appear difficult. The "difficult" part are the airy theories the woke invent for themselves that, to them, sound like thinking has gone on.
You have the idea. But this theory of incapability married to envy glued to ambition is insufficient. Consider if you parroted Luce-like idiocies to mathematicians in 1900. "I refuse to do proofs because they are white supremacist!" You'd be fortunate not to end up in a padded room.
Woke needs at least this one more thing for it to work: cowardice. Woke in a world of men with chests backfires. Woke requires fear, woke builds on an absence of courage.
Buy my new book and learn to argue against the regime: Everything You Believe Is Wrong.
Visit wmbriggs.com.
Yes, a lack of integrity by those who knew better and remained silent, and an overabundance of cowardice on the part of so many are how a worse-than-average flu season helped take down the West. That's the real deadly pandemic.
Now they're prepping us to eat insects. Soon we'll be treated to the spectacle of two "influencers" arguing over whether desiccated worms are tastier than cricket protein.
Rational scorn, of course, is the only way to reply to woke lit. Yours has an appealiing blend of sarcasm and reason.
Just a further thought: for woke to work the public must be shamed by sin, guided by invidious discrimination, obsessed with the fragility of victims, ruled by the gullible and coddled by the feminine. That is to say that a favored person who publicly claims to be the victim of the sin of an unfavored other must be publicly unchallenged, yet rewarded by the sinful public, much as a doting mother would give treats to soothe her whining child whose feelings had been hurt.