Way back in 2006, I noted that when there’s a concept out there that’s socially uncomfortable, whatever word we use to refer to it soon becomes freighted with the underlying awkwardness of the thing itself, so we have to discard that word and replace it with a new one. Before long the new word becomes similarly attainted — because the thing it describes is as uncomfortable as it ever was — and so it in turn has to be replaced. (In my original post I noted that this process is conceptually related to the geology of Hawaii.) The result is an ultimately useless conveyor-belt of approved terms.
The same thing has now happened to the term “woke”. It used to be what SJWs proudly described themselves as, but now we are hearing in the media that the word has taken on negative connotations in right-wing media, so we shouldn’t be using it any more. The problem, of course, is that the referent of the term is what is objectionable to so many people, but as always it’s the word that gets the attention, as if that will make the issue go away. (One is, of course, no less afflicted by being “crippled” than “differently abled” — you still can’t get up the stairs, either way — but somehow changing the word is supposed to make everything better.)
Here, then, is a sharp little post from Freddie deBoer, asking just what expression the Left would like us to use to describe their secular religion, and its ongoing jihad, if we can no longer call it “woke”.
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The “woke wars have begun”.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/396379.php
For our part, we egg them on. Keep the heat on. This is the ‘crisis we shouldn’t let go to waste’.
I do not want to use whatever term they misappropriate for their libido dominandi. They will call it justice or equity or some other lie. As I quoted Moldbug (Yarvin) recently, “If institutional mendacity is its stock in trade, why on earth should refutation bother it?” They take the rainbow and pervert its meaning, just as they take any and every other symbol subject to reframing (justice, marriage, equity, racism, democracy, etc.) and redefine it to deconstructed post-modern nihilistic ends. Woke is so 90’s. Or earlier. That’s why Sandy is dismissing it: “Only old people use that word”. It used to have an intended meta-meaning, deriving probably from the 60’s or even 50’s. But in the 21st century it is hopelessly mainstream. In high school we used to say ‘wicked’ for the latest and greatest thing. Then it was ‘bad’ then ‘sick’ then ‘dope’. Maybe it’ll be ‘shit’ as in ‘everything woke turns to shit’. That could work. “This is some good shit!’
It’s an interesting question, and one that goes back as least as far as Confucius: if you cannot name a thing, does that make it harder to fight?
The answer is, almost certainly, yes. And that is why we see the Enemy doing this little word-dance.