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How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

economist.com

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Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> libertarianism, which is literally to let everyone be themselves No, it isn't. Its core is to enforce private property rights? That will very likely not translate into "letting everyone be themselves".

AFAIK The core is freedom, i.e. a lack of coercion of any kind. If, to be yourself, you need to claim someone else property, then Libertrarians would say it goes against the core principles of liberty, because to execute this claim you exercise coertion. But as long as you do not exert coercion on no one else, you're free to be yourself anyway you like.

Property rights themselves depends on the use of coercion to deny others access and use.

It's a core inconsistency of right-libertarianism that the artificial creation of property rights are taken as an exception that is elevated to something almost holy.

But because of the coercive nature of property rights, there isn't a country on earth that doesn't have huge carveouts to reduce their applicability. Ranging from zoning, to regulations of what you can do on your land to access rights and easements.

Some more than others. E.g. in Norway where I grew up, a private property owner can't deny you access to walk through forests or other non-urban land, nor can they deny you the right to forage or camp, as long as you're a certain distance from dwellings, as such restrictions have always been seen as undue restrictions on the liberties of the public to the point where it was for a long time the only uncodified area of Norwegian law, as it was seen as so inherently obvious it didn't need to be. Sweden has similar rights in their constitution.

But left-libertarians reject property rights entirely because they see it as entirely incompatible with liberty to apply coercion to exercise a claim of land at all by denying others access.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#852

Our political and cultural institutions are dominated by people who attended those elite schools. This is the next batch of folks who will be doing your IPO paperwork: https://freebeacon.com/campus/northwestern-law-administrator... Now it’s making the jump to K-12. My second grader is apparently learning how to develop an “identity” around her “skin tone” (according to an email from her teacher). This has had the pre…

I went to a decently progressive elementary school, and the kids were absolutely racist by second grade. It'd be nice if we could just ignore race, but that's not reality yet.

Second graders aren’t “racist.” They see color differences, just like they can see if kids are short or tall or skinny or whatever. They are either taught or learn by observation to associate color with other things.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#853
post #831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right wing libertarianism obsesses over property rights. The original left wing libertarianism rejects property rights as incompatible with maximising liberty. Dejacque, the father or libertarianism criticised Proudhon, the father of anarchism for being a "moderate anarchist, liberal but not libertarian", but strongly supported his infamous "property is theft".

yup, exactly. Unfortunately the original meaning is almost never what's meant by libertarianism.

It's part of why I like to bring it up. It's a toss-up whether it makes people really upset, make them refuse to accept it, or get them to learn something new, but occasionally it makes people think critically about how property rights relate to liberty.

Incidentally I think everyone should read Dejacque's open letter to Proudhon [1], irrespective of their political views - it's just one of the most poetically written political texts I've read (and his first use of the term libertarianism). Also somewhat relevant to the discussion here as an early example of a form of wokeness - Dejacque criticising an ally on the left for not going far enough in throwing off the social order Proudhon was ostensibly challenging by failing to stand up equally for women.

[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-t...

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wokeness is essentially a New England Puritan movement with some minor modifications. Even the sources (Ivy Leagues) are the same. If you view it through this lens, the lack of tolerance and crusader zeal becomes very apparent. It is perhaps the exact opposite of libertarianism. Edit: some Puritan libertarians do not like this comment :)

"Wokeness" (liberal universalism) is actually closely related to libertarianism. It's really just the same Western, individualistic, idealistic, Christian worldview and values applied at different societal scales, generating different conclusions. Small scale rural (or elite)? These values manifest as libertarianism. Big scale urban? These values manifest as liberal universalism, or "wokeness".

Not at all. The woke thing is not liberal universalism, because it is actively hostile to any competing ideologies or definitions. That makes it explicitly anti-libertarian.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#856

I think people are over-analysing this issue here at HN. It is far better for upper class to ensure that people discuss and focus on issues like gender and skin colour than the class differences. Hence, they ensured that this is the issue plebs would hear all over on the media and shift their attention from class divides to gender and skin colour.

It’s convenient that under wokeness, the real bad guys are my white in laws in rural Oregon and not the white people “doing the work” in Wall Street and SV.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#857
post #507

I think "wokeness" comes not so much from "safetyism" but from a generation who were educated to be critical of their own society. They were raised and educated by ex-hippies, who had successfully critiqued the post-war US. I think this was a pedagogical crime (raising children to be critical). Every generation is supposed to critique its predecessor but teaching critique to children from a young age robbed them of t…

> This is why "wokeness" strikes so many as performative I think part of the reason is many of the talking points I would call "ominous". Take for example the Civil Rights movement or Women's Suffrage. Looking back at them, they had clear goals and clear talking points, you could read their message and see where they were trying to go, what their ultimate goal was. Wokeness on the other hand does not seem to have the…

It's funny, because when it came to women's suffrage and the later waves of feminism, people would write the exact same thing you did when referring to the patriarchy - willfully misunderstanding, or not even bothering to understand what was being talked about, to ridicule it as "too nebulous" to deal with, or some sort of conspiracy that people were deliberately participating to, in an attempt to dismiss it out of hand as an "attack" - and someone commented as much in this same thread.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#858
post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ibram X. Kendi: Any disparity in group outcomes is proof of a deeply flawed and malicious system. The darling of American academia and corporate. You can either have equality of opportunity and accept that the outcomes will be disparate, or have equality of (group) outcome. You can't have both. Your friends have not thought through the consequences of the current dominant ideology. > 'When I See Racial Disparities, I…

Arguing against disparity of group outcomes is not arguing for equality of outcome at the individual level. It is arguing that there are no differences between groups that justifies disparities unless there are biases or oppression. Even if he is wrong, this still does not become an argument for individual equality of outcome.

Can equality of opportunity at individual level coexist with equality or outcome at group level? This is indeed a reasonable question to ask. Upvoted.

We might imagine that humans are akin to gas molecules and human groups are ideal gases, thus an ideal gas law of sorts holds for humans, PV = nRT. There is brownian motion at individual level, but we expect that, statistically, all ideal gases / human groups to have the exact same macro properties. And perhaps if we hard subscribe to rational choice theory (a popular theory among American economists with deep roots in The Enlightenment) we might imagine that indeed humans are atomized undistinguishable gas molecules, pushed around randomly by the vagaries of fate and character.

Alas, there are other ways for matter to organize. Witness the bewildering diversity of minerals out there. 'The Smithsonian's mineral and gem collection [...] consists of approximately 350,000 mineral specimens and 10,000 gems'. As soon as we allow for some degree of matter / social cohesion, the ideal gas / human group law is blown to the smithereens.

I'll let you ponder whether hard atomized rational choice theory is a reasonable assumption when it comes to human groups. Or whether it is a reasonable goal to aspire to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory

https://www.si.edu/spotlight/geogallery

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory#Critici....

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Wokeness" (liberal universalism) is actually closely related to libertarianism. It's really just the same Western, individualistic, idealistic, Christian worldview and values applied at different societal scales, generating different conclusions. Small scale rural (or elite)? These values manifest as libertarianism. Big scale urban? These values manifest as liberal universalism, or "wokeness".

Not at all. The woke thing is not liberal universalism, because it is actively hostile to any competing ideologies or definitions. That makes it explicitly anti-libertarian.

That's where the "universalism" piece comes from. It's the belief that deep down everyone on the planet is a liberal, and is therefore hostile to other ways of thinking.

Yes, superficially it is very different to libertarianism. But stick a libertarian in a big city for a few years and they will realize how silly libertarianism is (there's too many people for it) and transition into a liberal universalist.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#860
post #7

I'm glad that the Economist points out at the end that 'wokeness' has become a favorite of business, and the reason is pretty obvious, as a movement it's self-defeating because all identitarian politics eventually ends in infighting, with its subjective, choice and preference based worldview it's actually ill-equipped to move anything. It might exist in academia or PR departments or journalism or facebook pages and t…

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