The Hobgoblin of “Woke”

I asked AI to il­lus­trate the ef­fect of “woke” on a woman. This is the pic­ture I got. It is ex­act­ly what I asked for. The woman in the pic­ture is awake and so she is there­fore “woke.”

Ron­ny from Flor­ida has sug­gest­ed that this AI cre­ation go to Flor­ida to die. It kind of makes me stop and say, “Whoa!” It seems as though every GOP po­lit­i­cal hack is cur­rent­ly clam­or­ing for rolling back “woke” in all its forms. Folks, is it just me, or is this whole hul­la­baloo over be­ing aware of po­lit­i­cal ac­tion and non-ac­tion the stu­pidest ar­gu­ment you’ve ever heard? I guess I didn’t get the memo that announced stu­pid­i­ty as be­ing a de­sir­able state of po­lit­i­cal life.

Re­mem­ber that the de­f­i­n­i­tion of stu­pid which I use in this blog is “some­one who de­stroys anything while re­al­iz­ing no gain at all for him­self.” Re­fus­ing to acknowl­edge the im­port of the so­cial mean­ing of the word woke is, by this de­f­i­n­i­tion, stu­pid. It is also a non-is­sue. How could a fan­ta­sy about a word be an is­sue, af­ter all? Don’t we have enough po­lit­i­cal fan­ta­sy oc­cur­ring at the mo­ment? We al­ready have Jim­my from Ohio bring­ing con-artists who were once em­ployed by Twit­ter to a con­gres­sion­al hear­ing to try to ac­cuse the Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion of weaponiz­ing the Jus­tice De­part­ment. We al­ready have the Big Or­ange Kahu­na claim­ing victory in an election he clear­ly lost. We al­ready have the Lit­tle Lake Lassie from Ari­zona claim­ing she won an elec­tion she clear­ly lost. We al­ready have politi­cians who want to “protect” kids from drag shows but ex­pose them to gun vi­o­lence in their class­rooms. We al­ready have Margie fo­ment­ing for a na­tion­al di­vorce. Not one of these is­sues quali­fies as well con­sid­ered.

But then we are a na­tion which fears words. We’re afraid of the word “so­cial­ism”, for ex­am­ple. When pressed, we have no idea what that word means or what it points at in the world. We use it like a ma­chete to hack away at sup­posed evils should some part of our na­tion­al so­cial safe­ty net is deemed to be so­cial-is­tic. I’ve even heard Con­gress peo­ple try to equate so­cial­ism with com­mu­nism re­cent­ly. It’s re­al­ly hard to imag­ine some­one who is deemed as a rep­resen­ta­tive of a pop­u­la­tion which lives in the US as be­ing so bad­ly in­formed. There are ap­par­ent­ly broad swaths of the Amer­i­can pub­lic who have no idea what lib­er­al­ism is or even what con­ser­vatism is. This swath of peo­ple are cer­tain­ly not stu­pid, but they blind­ly par­rot words with­out seem­ing to un­der­stand the im­port of those words. These folks seem to con­fuse the word with the thing. A word is, at best, a mark­er for an idea or thing. For ex­am­ple, we all know what the word car signifies, but an actual car is much larg­er and much more com­plex than the word. The word only points at the thing in the dri­ve­way. But it is not the thing. How much more con­fus­ing are things which are ab­stract and not real in the sense that they stand alone in the world as a def­i­nite thing?

We can point at a car, get in it and even drive it around. But it is just not possible to have such a re­la­tion­ship with an ab­stract con­cept such as “woke” for ex­ample. We have a great num­ber of ab­stract con­cepts in lan­guage. “Chris­t­ian” is an exam­ple of an ab­stract con­cept. In the­o­ry, we mark the mo­ment of be­com­ing a Christ­ian as the mo­ment we ac­knowl­edge Je­sus as a Sav­ior of mankind. But noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar changes for us at that mo­ment. We are still in the same body with the same pro­gram­ming. But according to the abstraction of “Christian”, we are some­how changed by that ac­knowl­edge­ment. With the ab­stract idea of being a Re­pub­li­can, we do not have such a mark­er. Even for those who be­long to the Trumpy side of life, it is not pos­si­ble to mark the mo­ment they be­came ob­sessed with blind trust in the man. It just isn’t pos­si­ble to mark a fan­ta­sy re­la­tion­ship with any­thing real. It’s kind of like fall­ing in love in your mid­dle school years. It’s fun, and prob­a­bly nec­es­sary, but ul­ti­mate­ly mean­ing­less.

I could go on with abstract con­cepts like MAGA, “trick­le down eco­nomics”, “pro­gres­sive”ideas, glob­al warm­ing and so on. But in the end, all of these con­cepts merely point at some­thing real, maybe, but are them­selves not real. They are ab­stract con­cepts, just as words are. In oth­er words, even though these con­cepts rep­re­sent re­al­i­ty, they are manmade con­cepts which al­low us to com­mu­ni­cate in­for­ma­tion. Com­mu­ni­cat­ing in­for­ma­tion means that when we com­mu­ni­cate we have to know how we know what we are say­ing is true. Hunch­es, feel­ings, dreams and the like are not re­li­able forms of gath­er­ing in­for­ma­tion, no mat­ter how re­li­able they may seem to be. But by their very na­ture, ab­stract ideas such as “gut feel­ings” are self-in­flict­ed. How much more so is an abstract con­cept such as Re­pub­li­can or De­mo­c­rat? I don’t know many peo­ple who can tell you why they are of one po­lit­i­cal per­sua­sion or an­oth­er. “I’ve al­ways been such and such” is not a rea­son for why you are any­thing. It may be true, but truth of the ex­is­tence of a con­cept is not a rea­son for why it ex­ists. There are very few peo­ple I’ve ever met who could ac­cept that they sim­ply de­cid­ed to be­lieve one way or an­oth­er. They al­ways claim a log­i­cal process was in­volved. But that is rarely the case.

There are politi­cians in the House and Sen­ate of the Unit­ed States who hold de­grees from pres­ti­gious in­sti­tu­tions such as Yale and Har­vard who seem to not un­der­stand the force of their state­ments on those who were less for­tu­nate in their ed­u­ca­tion­al op­por­tu­ni­ties. I know of but one rem­e­dy for mea­sur­ing the lev­el of stupid­i­ty in any giv­en in­di­vid­ual. Sim­ply lis­ten to his words and then watch his ac­tions. If what he is say­ing does not re­flect in what he does, he is be­ing de­struc­tive for no per­son­al gain. The cur­rent ex­am­ple of the day is Georgie Porgie from up there in New York. Georgie can’t help but tell lies whenever he says any­thing. It is not pos­si­ble for the man to do what he says, there­fore.

I re­al­ly do not see any dif­fer­ence with Ron­ny from down there in Flor­ida. He says he’s go­ing to take away all the priv­i­leges that the Dis­ney cor­po­ra­tion en­joys down in Flor­ida. The Re­pub­li­can Rep­re­sen­tatives went along be­cause Ron­ny is named a Re­pub­li­can and birds of a feath­er stick to­geth­er. Won­der how Ron­ny would fare with a US House of Representatives that was made up of most­ly De­moc­rats and a US Sen­ate with the same de­mo­graph­ic? Would he get the same agree­ments as he has got­ten in Flor­ida? Would he whine about not get­ting to 270 the same as The Big Or­ange Kahu­na? I have to won­der if Ron­ny has nev­er consid­ered that “woke” could be a way to talk about a dire wolf in the po­lit­i­cal are­na? Prob­a­bly not, sim­ply be­cause Ron­ny is pret­ty sure that he knows and does not seem to ques­tion his own knowl­edge, much less where that knowl­edge orig­i­nat­ed. Prob­a­bly not all that im­por­tant to some­one as woke as Ron­ny, huh?

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