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Jeff Rigsby's avatar

I have a slightly reductive view of wokeness/political correctness that I think is worth considering. It's not a complete explanation but I think it might be a partial one.

It strikes me that a significant motivation for wokeness is *not being confident in one's own first-order abilities*. When a college student in a poetry class puts his hand up and says "I think the metaphor in the second stanza is sexist", it's sometimes because the student doesn't have anything interesting to say about meter or imagery or the other things the professor might have hoped to hear about. Critiquing injustice is almost always *easier* than whatever it is a group of people is supposed to be doing at any given time.

I think Matt is right that white leftists are more likely than white conservatives to prefer doing collaborative work in a non-hierarchical way, but that isn't necessarily a problem if they're good at what they're doing. The more serious risk is that woke-ifying all human activities serves the vested interests of people who aren't very good at doing actual things.

I also think David Graeber's theory of "bullshit jobs" is relevant here. A larger and larger share of white-collar professional employment seems to consist of positions that are essentially bureaucratic: people who get paid to monitor and surveil the people doing the first-order work. (Insert gif of guy digging hole with people standing around watching.)

I think Graeber's book is amazingly important and raises serious questions about whether neoclassical economists understand anything at all about how labor markets work. But it's also worth considering whether the "bullshit jobs" phenomenon might be a major cause of workplace wokeness. For whatever reason, the phase of capitalism we're currently in has produced an enormous class of people who don't need to be good at any useful first-order activity, and who have a strong vested interest in developing new reasons for everyone else to be monitored and surveilled.

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yellojkt's avatar

The best part of all far reaching theses of the variety "X is not limited to Y, but also includes Z because X permeates everything" is that they are totally non-refutable, thus incorporating all the features of a good conspiracy theory.

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