What we contemplate, we imitate. That is, if we spend a lot of time thinking about something, we’re probably doing that something ourselves. So, if our goal is to make things better, we should contemplate better things.
That said, sometimes we must think about the bad that’s obstructing the good. That’s the case in America these days. Before we can create a better way of life, we must first get past the mindset that’s causing so much misery.
That mindset is known as “woke,” or “wokeness,” and these days it’s our society’s main impediment to happiness and health. Fortunately, a better mindset is emerging, one that promises to displace it in the years to come.
What is wokeness?
In the 1960s, postmodern values arose in the United States. Those values, which center on sensitivity, compassion, and equality, found healthy expression in the movements for civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights.
In the 1990s, those values were taken to unhealthy extremes. When they were, sensitivity turned into neurosis, compassion turned into indulgence, and equality turned into inversion.
Back then, the philosopher Ken Wilber saw these unhealthy values coalescing into a mindset. He called it “mean green,” because it combines a “green” postmodern worldview with a self-righteous mean streak. People today refer to it as “wokeness.”
It’s about neurosis, indulgence, and inversion.
It’s in the public schools that most people first encounter wokeness. It pervades them, and in them we see how its neurosis, indulgence, and inversion are manifest:
- Because wokeness involves neurosis, it normalizes the neurotic. Through Social-Emotional Learning, or SEL, students’ emotional sensitivity is obsessively cultivated. When they develop neuroses as a result, they’re medicated, and drugging kids becomes “the new normal.”
- Because wokeness involves indulgence, it entails low expectations. Many students are “shown compassion” and enrolled in special ed programs, when their minor disabilities could be overcome through simple hard work.
- Because wokeness involves inversion, it turns gender upside down. In the name of equality, boys are allowed to play on girls’ sports teams, and allowed to use girls’ bathrooms. Transgenderism becomes part of the curriculum.
Gender inversion is its hallmark.
The inversion of gender is the hallmark of wokeness. People with this mindset say they work to end gender inequality, but they don’t. Instead, they just invert gender characteristics.
In woke circles, women tend to be hard and masculine, while men are soft and feminine. Women are told to strive and struggle, while men are encouraged to prance and primp.
Wokeness takes this inversion to the extreme when it says that men can become women, and that women can become men. It even insinuates that men should become women, in keeping with the woke belief that masculinity is toxic.
It also inverts unfair discrimination.
In recent years, wokeness has evolved from a mindset into an ideology, and as an ideology it inverts more than gender—it also inverts unfair discrimination. Rather than pursuing fairness for all, the woke simply invert past unfairness, and hold that:
- Straight, not gay, people should now be persecuted.
- White, not black, people should now be oppressed.
- Men, not women, should now be disempowered.
Thus the current targets of discrimination should be straight white men.
The main tool used by the woke to marginalize straight white men is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI. For instance, it’s common in corporate DEI training videos for apparently straight white men to be cast as the “bad guys.”
Woke school administrators assume the worst about institutions outside their sphere, such as families, that straight white men have traditionally led. Consequently, they keep parents in the dark about their kids’ activities at school.
Woke judges discriminate against straight white men in the family courts, so much so that nationwide law firms have sprung up in response, making hay in the legal market by positioning themselves as “The Fathers’ Rights Attorneys.”
It’s an elitist ideology.
Ken Wilber described the moral relativism of wokeness, as well as its aversion to healthy hierarchy, but it was its elitism that concerned him the most. He wrote about it:
“It says all worldviews are arbitrary, all truth is relative… But that stance itself claims to be universally true. It is claiming everybody’s truth is relative except mine… I alone have the universal truth… This is the massive contradiction hidden in all extreme multicultural postmodern movements. And their absolute truth ends up being very ideological, very power-hungry, very elitist in the worst sense.”
That’s what we see today in the United States: woke professionals who are ideological, power-hungry, and elitist, imposing their “absolute truth” on others through the bureaucratic social systems they control.
Having gained M.D., J.D., or Ph.D. credentials, woke professionals consider themselves to be intellectually superior to the rest of us. What makes them particularly elitist is that they consider themselves to be morally superior as well.
They see themselves as the “good people,” more sensitive and compassionate than others. Because they see themselves this way, and hold their woke ideology to be a universal truth, they feel justified in imposing it upon others.
Their policies and practices produce awful outcomes, but because they consider themselves to be “the best and the brightest,” they can’t or won’t see that. Invariably, they attribute their failures to something outside their control, such as Covid.
Its adherents play the “Rescuer Game.”
Woke professionals routinely harm the people they’re paid to help. Worse, they work to prevent those people from getting help elsewhere. By doing this, they perpetuate the “Rescuer Game.”
The Rescuer Game is a game they love to play. It involves the roles of Victim, Oppressor, and Rescuer, and it’s played like this:
- The Victim is anyone whose race, gender, or sexuality has been subjected to oppression (except for the straight, white, and/or male). The Victim’s role is to suffer, be quiet, and accept the Rescuer’s help.
Normal boys get shoehorned into this role by being labeled “ADHD.” Normal girls get shoehorned into it by having their “trans identity” affirmed.
- The Oppressor is anyone who doesn’t have a woke mindset, or who’s not a member of an identity group the Rescuer considers oppressed. The Oppressor’s role is to serve as a convenient scapegoat for the Rescuer.
People who don’t want normal boys to be drugged are assigned this role, as are parents who want to stay informed about their kids’ activities at school.
- The Rescuer is anyone with a woke mindset who professes concern for the Victim’s plight. The Rescuer’s role is to feel morally superior to everyone else in the game. (Especially when everyone else is straight, white, and/or male).
Woke psychiatrists “come to the rescue” by drugging normal kids. Woke school administrators “come to the rescue” by hiding kids’ school activities from parents.
It’s poisonous and destructive.
The woke see wokeness as a source of human progress. In reality, it’s a major cause of misery. It destroys social cohesion, poisoning relationships between people wherever it’s imposed.
It undermines family relationships. Woke professionals—doctors, lawyers, counselors, etc.—seek to interpose themselves between parents and their children, and even between husbands and wives. They pursue the power to mediate all personal relationships, which dissolves bonds of intimacy and trust.
It creates hostile institutions. Woke managers hire people who share their woke mindset. As these employees become managers themselves, the organizations they run—public companies, government agencies, etc.—become increasingly hostile toward people who don’t espouse woke values.
It ruins communities. If given free rein, and a place in government, wokeness ruins entire cities and regions. One need only look at the sad decline of San Francisco, and of California as a whole, to see the damage done by woke officeholders. Under their management, formerly pleasant places become violent, crime-ridden no-go zones.
The culture war is now Woke vs. Trad.
Fortunately, wokeness is self-limiting. Most people find the products of woke culture to be odd at best, and grotesque at worst. They’re looking for a cultural alternative, a societal way forward, and that’s leading many of them to gravitate toward Trad.
Trad is shorthand for an emerging mindset that’s based on the Traditional worldview described in the Spiral Dynamics Culture Model. It values tradition, order, and faith. It’s seen among the young New Right men who like to work out, as well as the young TradCath women who wear veils in church.
The person who best exemplifies Trad is Harrison Butker, the pro athlete who gave an inspiring speech that touched on traditional values, principled faith, and natural gender roles.
The speech became controversial because it expressed Trad sensibilities, which are antithetical to those of the woke. The contrast between the two is worth drawing:
| WOKE | TRAD |
| We destroy what came before. Our ancestors were moral monsters whose works are tainted. A completely new social order should be imposed. | We build upon the past. Our ancestors bequeathed us time-tested social structures. They ground us in the past and still serve us well. |
| We assume godlike power. The world is a wholly material place that we understand through science. We can and should remake it however we like. | We’re humble before God. The world has a spiritual aspect, a divine essence that we feel through faith. We humbly serve a higher power. |
| We reduce you to a “we.” We reduce every individual person to a product, tool, or victim of a “we” race, gender, or sexual orientation. | We respect you as a “me.” We respect every individual person as a unique, self-directed “me” who exercises his or her own free will. |
| We cause cultural conflict. We see our culture as just one of many, so we carelessly mix and match them. This causes confusion and conflict. | We protect traditional culture. We prize the stability of traditional culture, so we protect and support it. This fosters harmony and cohesion. |
The Trad moves us past the Woke.
Trad represents a new kind of counterculture. It’s based on traditional values, but not limited to them. It’s not hip, but it’s not square, either. It’s as if young people, done with 2020s mainstream culture, went looking for fun in 1950s Mayberry, and there they found zydeco music, couples twirling on the dance floor, and great soul food at the church catfish fry.
Trad tips its hat to what is classic and enduring. It’s about old scotch and young hearts, high mass and low heels. In places where it prevails, you don’t see the ugliness and sickness engendered by wokeness. Instead, you see pretty moms, healthy kids, and confident dads.
With Trad, not only do you see strong families, you hear funny jokes. Good humor is characteristic of vibrant cultures, and the Trad-minded satirical site Babylon Bee has it in spades. So do other Trad-oriented comedy/social commentary sites such as The Critical Drinker and Paul Joseph Watson.
Trad incorporates three rules of human thriving: Connect with the Divine, Tell Canonical Stories, and Take Natural Gender Roles. Favoring community over bureaucracy, it also leans toward a fourth: Create Real Communities. Because it fosters human thriving in interesting ways, Trad will be a cultural force in the years to come.
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