The Problem with Anti-Woke and Anti-Anti-Woke | TER Post Woke

Why reaction is maladaptive, and will just perpetuate the problem

Welcome to TaraElla Report Post Woke, where we consciously aim to move beyond the woke vs anti-woke culture wars, and towards a post-woke model of culture and politics.

Today, I want to talk about two movements or perspectives that have arisen as a consequence of the rise of woke culture: anti-woke, and anti-anti-woke. I believe the 'reactive' nature of these movements have ultimately meant that they have just perpetuated the problems that were started by woke culture. I will illustrate how this happens, and what we should do instead to break the vicious cycle.

From what I see, the default stance of the anti-woke is to basically do the opposite of what woke culture demands every time, believing that this is an effective way to resist woke culture. Instead of critizing wokeness where it goes wrong, anti-woke culture prefers to 'trigger' the woke, by doing the opposite of what they want. For example, whatever woke culture wants to ban people from saying, the anti-woke will deliberately say it. Whatever groups woke culture upholds as 'oppressed' and hence worthy of special consideration above others, the anti-woke will deliberately dismiss their issues. The problem with this is, woke culture's enabling of the mistreatment of people based on immutable characteristics and group membership also transfers to anti-woke culture, because of its 'equal but opposite' response to everything woke. This inevitably leads to withholding decency, compassion and fairness from people by immutable characteristics and group membership sometimes. Furthermore, over time, because of its lazy reactionary posture, anti-woke has also developed into an increasingly conformist and predictable movement, and it has become effectively as unwelcoming of independent thinking as woke culture itself. Hence, anti-woke culture has replicated the two biggest errors of woke culture, i.e. the lack of independent thinking, and the normalization of dehumanizing people based on group membership.

The problems of anti-woke culture, and its ongoing association with elements of the authoritarian right, have led some people to adopt an anti-anti-woke stance in reaction. Anti-anti-woke starts with the position that the anti-woke movement is inherently bad, and whatever points they raise are inherently invalid or even dangerous. The problem with this, however, is that it leads to deliberately ignoring the problems brought by woke culture, and hence the normalization of these problems. This means that anti-anti-woke is basically complicit in the normalization of dehumanizing people based on group membership, and the erosion of the Enlightenment values of freedom of conscience, independent thinking and objectivity. Even if there are problems with the anti-woke movement, the answer is clearly not to ignore or suppress whatever they say.

The examples of anti-woke and anti-anti-woke demonstrate how taking a reactionary or oppositional stance is ultimately counter-productive. This is why it is better to go back to the roots of where woke culture went wrong, and address those problems directly. This way, we can be constructive rather than reactive. As I previously said, woke culture basically turned the desire for social justice into its opposite, through the application of theories rooted in postmodernism and critical theory. The way to stop this happening is to prevent those passionate about social justice from embracing these theories, and we can do that by upholding what I call the core post-woke values: decency, fairness and genuineness. By emphasizing these values, we can shine a light on how postmodernism and critical theory are flawed worldviews at their core, and hence begin to undo the problems that woke culture brought.