Woke: Gone For Good?

The Woke Has Been Put Away, But For How Long?

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Back in the summer of 2020—the blackest of all summers—the regime was in full control and woke was riding high. The Empire had Struck Back. You were locked in your house, subhumans were lighting whole city blocks on fire, and Trump looked like he might go to jail. In the wake of this bleakness, most were horribly blackpilled, but a few men had the foresight to see that the regime’s favoured ideology would not last forever.

We at the Imperium Substack took a slightly different tack. In a series of three articles, we pointed out how wokeness structurally favours the aims of the folkish right.[1][2][3] Then in 2024, we published Ed Dutton’s book Woke Eugenics which advanced this idea from the perspective of evolutionary biology rather than politics. To a few of us, it seemed absolutely clear that wokeness was harming rather than helping the regime. However, even we underestimated the regime’s realism, and were mildly skeptical that it would get its act together and “put the woke away”.

Credit must be given to Neema Parvini for consistently repeating that it would, from quite an early time. I even went on a stream with him at one point arguing the counter-thesis, though at the time I was a bit reluctant to do so because I didn’t wholly disagree with him. Now he has released a video in which he definitively proves that woke is back in the box.

He raises the question at the end of this video: why did they try woke in the first place? This is a fair question. To any sane observer who is not contaminated by ideology, wokeness appears obviously false, obviously destabilizing, and obviously corrosive to competence on a society-wide scale. So why, then? Why would the most powerful hegemon in the history of the world hold up mental illness as the paradigm of truth and justice? The answer is very simple, but its implications are far reaching. Boomer Truth tried wokeness because wokeness is the logical consequence of liberalism. Yes, even the liberalism of your racist great-grandfather.

In order to parse this, we need to define our terms.

First, liberalism. The proximate formulation of your great-grandfather’s racist liberalism—the link between you and him—is what Parvini calls the Boomer Truth Regime. You all know this as something like “we fought the greatest evil in history and won.” For Brits, Churchill is its avatar; FDR and MLK for Americans. The axiomatic foundation of Boomer Truth is that we are not defined by our thrownness. This is itself the logical consequence of the classical liberalism of yesteryear, which attempted to decouple itself from tradition on this very same axiomatic basis. You, colonial American, are not foundationally British by birth, but American by choice. You, Ancien Régime Frenchman, are not Christian by tradition, but an individual abstracted from your context—you are radically free to evaluate and discard your cultural inheritance if it displeases you. Conscience and consent comes to replace brute facticity; it only took a few short centuries for revolutionary liberalism to work itself out into Boomer Truth. We will take this as so manifestly obvious that it need not be argued any further.¹

Second, wokeness. In our article on Bronze Age Pervert’s GNC concept we noted that wokeness is a heterogenous phenomenon with at least two elements which are somewhat in tension with each other. The first element of wokeness is the degenerate element, the straightforward heir of this Enlightenment anti-thrownness, which says “anyone can be anything”. The Boomer conservative knows it most keenly as weird trans stuff, which he still instinctually recoils from. The second element of wokeness is the ethnic element which is substantially folkish, just anti-white. This is the part of woke which was incensed when Rachel Dolezal claimed she was black, and in this it rightly rejects Enlightenment disembodiment.² However it incoherently stands on Enlightenment foundations when it lays claim to restorative justice on the basis of universalism (human rights, equality, etc.) The ethnic element in wokeness describes the world in folkish terms (“a leopard can’t change his spots”), but it prescribes outcomes based on liberal foundations (Marat: “let the wealth of the rich be confiscated for the happiness of the people”).

So just from a clear articulation of our terms, a few things become clear. Boomer Truth is not only compatible with, but logically demands wokeness. And Boomer Truth is not some innovation but a direct continuation of the past—the importance of this will become clear later. And where Boomer Truth disagrees with wokeness, it is only because wokeness disagrees with itself, and must be seen as more than one thing at its core. And now we have our answer: Boomer Truth’s attempt at wokeness was an attempt at philosophical consistency, just as Boomer Truth was the philosophically consistent development of classical liberalism.

But unlike Boomer Truth, wokeness failed to inherit the throne from its father. This is because, as the radical right has said for years and as mainstream influencers have only now cottoned on to, woke is anti-competence. One need not see that woke is hollowing out non-white populations globally to oppose it—it is clear that it is making the regime dangerously unstable. A generation of it now has produced institutional waste, fraud, and incompetence at such a scale that America could not win a proxy war against Russia, something unthinkable only 30 years ago. Philosophical consistency has been jettisoned for pragmatic purposes.

But the question is this—is woke gone for good?

Parvini often points to Pareto as paradigmatic of valid sociological analysis. And one could hardly do much better. As an heir of Machiavelli, Pareto well understands that the pragmatic lions eventually recapture institutions from the ideological foxes, who are not real sovereigns but bureaucratic managers who abstract away real sovereignty into a series of algorithmic decisions (“rule of law”, “rules-based order”) until the thing ends up in gridlock. Pareto’s concept of residues (manifestations of sentiment and instinct) and derivations (rationalizations and justification for the residues) is relevant here—the pragmatic lions tend to be guided by the residues and the ideological foxes tend to be focused on the derivations. And yet one of the most important residues is just the desire for consistency, which gives rise to the need for derivations in the first place.³

Ideology always comes back in the end. Cognitive dissonance is deeply uncomfortable and while the man in the street can live with it to some extent, the elite stratum of society cannot.⁴ Wokeness was the vanguard of liberal theory, because liberal theory had still not purged itself of its accidental elements. There was still some pro-social response left in it, still some instinctual repulsion at all that is malformed and alien, still some vestigial reactionary impulse. Wokeness was not an aberration but liberalism purified.