ARTICLE AD BOX
What's 'woke'? and why is it called that? Philosopher Stephen Hicks has the simple explanation:
It comes out of the Left politically. Interestingly on the Right politically too (if we can use these labels, left and right, [since they're] both problematic.) But on the Right there’s the concept of the 'red pill,' which comes from the movie 'The Matrix.' So the idea then is that in some sense one is in a coma, perhaps a chemically-induced coma. But if you take a pill, the red pill, then suddenly the coma goes away, you wake up, and you see reality as it really is. And everything is quite different.
So the Left version of this comes out of the 'False Consciousness' tradition. It says that ... we are all raised [or] conditioned into a false narrative that says that [western civilisation is great] or that America is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and justice and freedom for all and so forth. But that is a fake cover story that has been 'conditioned' into all of us. And what we need to do is to raise our consciousness—and in some cases get slapped upside the head—so that we wake up and look around and realise that we really are oppressed.
And that’s a kind of 'awakening,' to see the world as it as it really is. So woke is just a slang-y way of saying that 'I’ve woken up,' and now I can really see that this childhood naïve story about what a wonderful culture we’re living in is false, and that one has become sensitised, and now buys into the narrative of oppression and exploitation.
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English (US) ·