So woke and anti-woke are both classic examples of "offending from the victim position" which is a form or retaliation. For me the question becomes, "how did we get here in the first place?" I don't think we can separate wokeness from trauma. I think that wokeness came out of generations of trauma experienced at the hands of the socially/culturally acceptable institutions in the U.S. at least, for examples, slaughtering indigenous peoples, slavery and Stonewall. There is no denying that Black, indigenous and LGBTQ groups have experienced societal intergenerational trauma on a large scale which is the root of the woke movement, as I understand it. There is a lot of healing that needs to happen and the current anti-woke movment is not accomplishing that.
I might have been conditioned at uni doing a social work degree but that was 20 years ago and it was all about anti oppressive practice / policy and equality of opportunity- to me the woke thing is just those groups gaining their voice. But it might be simplifying it and not fully understanding the complexity. Overall what I see now with the divide between my friends - which has been really shocking to me in the last 5 years - where friends I’d always aligned with were anti woke and saying there is a woke virus - now we are aligning again re inequality with class or the mega rich. So there is definitely a shift back from the divide as far as I can see - even if views are still opposed in some areas.
I was empathetic to the Marxist narrative about class struggle until I learned economics. Start with Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell, or even his Basic Economics book. The idea that there is only a wealthy class versus a worker class is a myth. Most people tend to move up from the lower quintile over time and many in the upper quintile fall into a lower quintile after a few years. Lower quintiles contain younger people with less experience and monetary savings. Also worth noting is that centrally-planned economies underperform market-based economies in both personal wealth and standard of living; that is based on facts. Capitalism is not a zero-sum game. If anyone is interested, read Sowell's books about economics. Some Marxists introduced identity into the class struggle narrative because they needed to shift the conversation away from economic facts, and instead focus on other types of inequality just to keep the Marxists idea alive. We should also ask why the Austrian school of economics isn't taught more broadly in Europe? Perhaps because that would reduce public support for socialist programs.
So woke and anti-woke are both classic examples of "offending from the victim position" which is a form or retaliation. For me the question becomes, "how did we get here in the first place?" I don't think we can separate wokeness from trauma. I think that wokeness came out of generations of trauma experienced at the hands of the socially/culturally acceptable institutions in the U.S. at least, for examples, slaughtering indigenous peoples, slavery and Stonewall. There is no denying that Black, indigenous and LGBTQ groups have experienced societal intergenerational trauma on a large scale which is the root of the woke movement, as I understand it. There is a lot of healing that needs to happen and the current anti-woke movment is not accomplishing that.
I might have been conditioned at uni doing a social work degree but that was 20 years ago and it was all about anti oppressive practice / policy and equality of opportunity- to me the woke thing is just those groups gaining their voice. But it might be simplifying it and not fully understanding the complexity. Overall what I see now with the divide between my friends - which has been really shocking to me in the last 5 years - where friends I’d always aligned with were anti woke and saying there is a woke virus - now we are aligning again re inequality with class or the mega rich. So there is definitely a shift back from the divide as far as I can see - even if views are still opposed in some areas.
I was empathetic to the Marxist narrative about class struggle until I learned economics. Start with Economic Facts and Fallacies by Thomas Sowell, or even his Basic Economics book. The idea that there is only a wealthy class versus a worker class is a myth. Most people tend to move up from the lower quintile over time and many in the upper quintile fall into a lower quintile after a few years. Lower quintiles contain younger people with less experience and monetary savings. Also worth noting is that centrally-planned economies underperform market-based economies in both personal wealth and standard of living; that is based on facts. Capitalism is not a zero-sum game. If anyone is interested, read Sowell's books about economics. Some Marxists introduced identity into the class struggle narrative because they needed to shift the conversation away from economic facts, and instead focus on other types of inequality just to keep the Marxists idea alive. We should also ask why the Austrian school of economics isn't taught more broadly in Europe? Perhaps because that would reduce public support for socialist programs.