Woke Doesn’t Mean Awakened

Woke and awakened are very different things, as different as being political or spiritual. However, woke or awakened, and political or religious have been conflated to the point of making both meaningless.

Initially, to be “woke” simply meant seeing the fact of historical oppression by one group over another, mainly white colonizers and capitalists over people of color wherever they live. But woke has devolved from simply meaning “alert to injustice in society, especially racism,” to being a derisive term by conservatives, tarring SJWs (social justice warriors) with a cancel culture ideology.

With regard to American political culture, which appears to have survived a fascist takeover by election deniers and liars in the midterm elections, the question is: Is a genuine awakening occurring, or as the corporate and cable media are repeating ad nauseum, simply a patriotic reassertion of traditional American democracy?

The midterm election was pivotal because, as one commentator wrote, “the Democrats are a bulwark against existential threats such as climate change and the erosion of democracy. All of our other public-policy debates, ranging from marginal tax rates to education policy, are meaningless without a planet to live on and democratic institutions that provide the rules of the game.” As of this writing, the Trump rump of a Republican Party will barely gain control of the House of Representatives, while the Democrats retain control of the Senate.

If the election signifies nothing deeper than woke vs. broke however, more dark blizzards are on the horizon. For one thing, the malevolent Trump is set to beset us with another run at the presidency. Given President Biden’s boring normalcy of the last two years, Americans have all but forgotten how emotionally and spiritually enervating a daily ingestion of The Donald’s toxic narcissism is.

This is why the question of woke vs. awakened is important, not just for Americans, but for human beings generally. Not because America is the center of the world, as many Americans still believe, or even because American culture is such a global ‘influencer,’ but because the question of whether people generally are awakening will determine the foreseeable future of humanity.

To be awakened means seeing that oppression and injustice exist and have existed throughout human history, but they and all social ills are internally generated, rather than externally derived from phenomena like institutional racism and rapacious capitalism. The structures of society flow from the consciousness of the individuals that comprise it, not vice versa.

To be awakened is to see that while opposition to an unjust system is necessary, it is never sufficient to produce radical change. Wokism, on the other hand, makes itself a target with people of a conservative mindset that accept power and uphold the religious and economic status quo.

Worldviews are existential, defining one’s essential approach to the world. Wokism, to the extent that it’s an externally oriented worldview, is an ideology. Whereas awakening, to the extent it’s genuinely occurring within the individual, is internally oriented.

In such an obsessively materialistic, outwardly oriented culture as this, to be inward looking is a derogatory term. It has the implication of navel gazing, of a person or nation turning in upon themselves and being unconcerned with the world.

Given how hollow, alienating, dystopian and divorced-from-nature and reality American culture has become however, to be inward looking is the true remedy. Awakening means non-accumulatively learning, with the realization that things can be different, and it starts within.

Contrast this core approach with not only being woke in a non-pejorative, externally oriented sense, and with cancel culture in a pejorative sense, but with the philosophy (if you can call it that) of right-wing reactionaries such as Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis has made wokism the central plank of his rotten platform for the presidency, saying, “Florida is where woke goes to die.” During his victory speech after the midterms, which he carried Florida by 20 points, DeSantis bemoaned the left’s “woke agenda” five times in less than 20 seconds. He believes it’s a winning theme in his bid to become president.

DeSantis exemplifies the conflation of religiosity and politics, and the confusion between the authentically religious mind and the political mindset, with its ineluctable will to power. Politics is inherently about power, whereas to be truly religious is to eschew power.

Politics and authentic religiosity don’t mix, not just because “the separation of church and state” has to be maintained, but because they are oil and water. Thus DeSantis is no alternative to Trump; he’s the next step down in the degeneration of mixing politics with religion.

A true awakening will yield a truly post-materialist culture of spiritually oriented people with thriving inner lives. I once heard a religious philosopher from India say that India, which had over 2000 years of inward-looking spiritual orientation, could become materialistic, while America, the product of nearly as long a history of outward-looking materialist orientation, could become genuinely spiritual.

That seems to be happening in India, which is becoming increasingly materialistic under the tribalistic Hinduism of Modi. What about America, where a Christian, consumeristic and gun-toting base “anointed” a licentious reprobate that’s about to run for president again?

Both the hypocritical religious right and the sterile secular left share an essentially materialist worldview. They are two sides of the same coin, fighting a futile culture war over a dead culture.

The awakened individual is religious without a religion, whereas woke people are usually secular without an inner life. To be genuinely religious is to eschew belief systems as much as power. It is to be learning not based on memory, and growing not based on time.

Wokism, even in the best sense, is a movement, and human history has moved beyond movements. They will never be enough to change the basic course of man and end the destruction of the Earth and humanity.

Awakening, on the other hand, is not and can never be a movement. It is a fundamental change in consciousness within the individual igniting a revolution in human consciousness as a whole. And there’s no reason inward-looking people cannot also continue to advance science and develop technology, as well be concerned about what is happening around the world.

However it’s only the individual that can bring about the radical change in human consciousness required to redirect humankind’s relationship to nature, each other, and society.

Martin LeFevre

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