The Psychology of Woke

Introduction

Before I became a therapist, I worked as an electrician. The jobs I used to love the most were the ones where you had to go round someone’s house or office and find out why something wasn’t working. I just loved going through the system, bit by bit, and tracing out where the fault was.

In like manner, I’m intrigued by cultural phenomena out in the world that seem to me to be strange, new or fascinating. Why are they occurring? What’s really going on in my mind and in the mind of the someone who adopts those beliefs or behaviours?

Regular subs to this channel will be aware of my writings about conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists, my attempts to trace out what’s going on in my mind, their mind and the world.

In this piece, I want to look at the modern phenomena of “woke.” I think most people have these days some sense of what the term refers to, because it’s been around a while. But I guess for me it’s about people who apply status-indicating labels, like “good” or “bad,” to individual or cultural attitudes about phenomena like inclusion, caring, race, sexuality or gender.

I want to resist the ever-present temptation to start applying status-laden labels myself. Rather I want to propose two basic psychological mechanisms that are driving this behaviour.

#1 - Trying to Hack Deeper States of Mind

I look up to people who I perceive as possessing more depth of awareness, more “presence” than myself. People who can remain present and self-aware under strong emotional triggering, not hiding from their feelings but not simply being driven down a path of reaction.

A behaviour that I’ve seen in people like this is that they have the capacity to care about people, even when those people are doing some deeply triggering stuff. They can also treat people with remarkable equanimity and fairness, responding to their ideas and positions regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or relative position of power or wealth. I look up to people like this. They impress me and make me want to be like them.

But those people seem to me to have all gone of a deep inner journey to get to the place where they are now at. They had to face many challenges, delve into their “shadow” side, understand their reactivity and confront their fears. It likely took them decades.

But, says wokeism, what if there’s a short cut? A hack? What if we just apply status-labels to certain behaviours? Labels like…

• caring = good; not caring = bad

• inclusion = good; exclusion = bad

• non-white people = good; white people = bad

Won’t this allow us to hack being a remarkably present and self-aware person?

This might perhaps sound crazy but I see that my mind does work like this. It looks for short cuts that avoid doing the real heavy-lifting. And sometimes those short-cuts work, though mostly they don’t. I believe that at least one aspect of wokeness is driven psychologically like this. It’s actually an attempt to hack being a deeper person.

I think that enough years of “wokeness” have now passed that we can state pretty clearly that trying to hack deeper states of mind does not work. Simply labelling behaviours and trying to only do the “good” ones whilst demeaning those people who do the “bad” ones will not make you more self-aware. It will not give you depth. It may, however, serve to redress some of the unfairness that has developed in a culture.

Now I want to look at what I believe to be the second psychological driver.

#2 - Alleviating the Endless sense of Western Guilt

I am a guilt-ridden person. I do not focus on it so much these days. But I have in the past felt vast amounts of guilt and at times still do. I have felt guilty about having money, in a world where many people don’t. I have felt guilty about being more white than Asian (I’m mixed race). I have felt guilty for enjoying the benefits of Western consumer culture, which other races seem to have been enslaved to provide. I have felt guilty for wanting to travel in a world being devastated by climate change. I have perceived myself as a person of priviledge in a world where such people are few and invariably white and middle-class.

Guilt is a powerful force. Guilt can make me feel like I’m a “bad” person.

I do not believe that I am alone in this underlying sense of guiltiness. It seems to me to be pretty much ubiquitous, at least in the Western world. And nobody really wants to feel like they are a “bad” person.

The only thing that I have personally found that can assuage my underlying sense of guilt is being incredibly present in the moment. In those times, I can see that in presence we are all the same. No one is better or worse off than anyone else in presence. No matter their age, their skin colour, their health, their gender or their relative state of wealth or poverty. We are all equal in that state and it is self-evident.

But such a state has been hard for me to achieve. And even now, after years of therapy and self-investigation, it is often fleeting.

Wokeness says, what if there’s a hack to getting rid of guilt? What if we label all those behaviours that make us feel guilty as “bad” and apply condemnation to the people who do them? By doing that. surely we will become the “good” ones?

I have never been so much into wokeness myself. But my perception is that those who engage in it do experience themselves as “good,” at least for a while. So I think, purely as a behaviour to avoid feeling guilty, it has something to offer. But I also have concerns.

One thing is that you are only achieving the alleviation of guilt, and the sense of being a “good” person, at the expense of those who you are labelling as “bad.” This seems sub-ideal to me. And what would happen if, say, everyone adopted the “good” behaviours and rejected the “bad” ones? Would guilt then be finally beaten? I don’t know the answer to that but I am sceptical that it would be. If everyone had the same amount of money and thus there was no more priviledge; if all skin colours, genders and sexual orientations were regarded as being of equal value - would we then have finally vanquished guilt? I think it more likely that we would simply find something else to feel guilty about.

A second concern I have relates to the specific cultural group who are deciding which values should be labelled “good,” and which “bad.” That group are, to my perception, pretty much exclusively Western. What about other cultural groups and how they might believe “good” and “bad” should be used as labels? Surely they have rights too? Might there be an aspect to wokeness which is actually simply Western colonialism?

My final concern relates to the only way that I have personally found to overcome guilt, which I mentioned above. If we focus only on material values, and trying to equilibrate them, is it possible that we reduce our actual capacity to go deeper within ourselves and alleviate the issue at source? Might it be better to encourage people to embark on an inner journey, rather than to stand up for their right to share our Western value system?

Conclusion

I still wrestle with woke and my own mental reactions to it. And, as with other things I’m busy with, I have found that sitting down to write out my thoughts on the topic helps me to process my own inner world. I hope you have found value in this piece too.