Summary: Wokeness is a more intense form of political correctness that emerged in the late 1980s, faded in the late 1990s, and resurged strongly in the early 2010s. It focuses on enforcing social justice through public shaming and cancel culture, often driven by social media. This movement highlights a shift from academic ideals to aggressive moral enforcement, raising concerns about its impact on genuine discourse and pluralism.
Whenever a society has a concept of heresy and orthodoxy, orthodoxy becomes a substitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the world, but as long as you're orthodox you're better than everyone who isn't. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to bad people. (View Highlight)
Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against priggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless, can't respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian prudishness, and by 2000 it seemed to have done the same thing to political correctness. (View Highlight)
This tilt toward outrage wasn't due to wokeness. It's an inherent feature of social media, or at least this generation of it. But it did make social media the perfect mechanism for fanning the flames of wokeness. [7] (View Highlight)
If you hire people to keep watch for a particular type of problem, they're going to find it, because otherwise there's no justification for their existence. [11] (View Highlight)