The term Woke feels new and as confusing as it is overpowering. It is presented by those with an agenda to push it as being the unescapable zeitgeist.
It is not. But that isn’t to say it doesn’t feel that way. Especially as there is so much going on across society and politics in particular, which is aligned with arguably the same thinking, ending up with impacts and consequences for us all in a surprising number of very similar ways.
If you took the time to ask everyone how they would like their lives to be and how they would like to experience the world, you would get as many answers back as the number of people that you ask.
In the majority of cases however, what they would have in common would be that they are based on idealism, rather than using life experience as the basis of making an informed choice.
This is how society increasingly thinks about everything today. If you were able to jump into a time machine and talk to people of the same ages and from the same kinds of backgrounds in the years that followed the end of the Second World War, answers would reflect a very different kind of choice. It would be informed from the experience that life can really be dark and terrifyingly hard. Many would have been very practical in their reflections, and the common message would simply be ‘it is great to be alive’.
Hardship is a reliable teacher for those who think they have nothing to learn. And as we approach nearly 8 decades passed since the end of that horrific war, it is a regrettable reality that many from within our younger generations are now obsessed not with what they have, but with how they believe their lives should be – without any respect for the rather large gap that sits between.
To be fair, idealism is a very powerful and passionate motivator, and the real reason why so many of the younger generations are left leaning or more socialist in their outlook. People become more right-wing or conservative in their ideas as they gain more experienced of the real world and adult life.
Today, things have gone much further than that. Many simply do not reflect upon what they have already got, overlooking a vital part of the process that helps us to become self-aware, instead focusing ever outwards for the answers to the questions about life that they have, whilst failing to understand how other people think, because they don’t even look at themselves.
People literally don’t live in the present, but have their thoughts focused in a semi-permanent state of anticipation about where things could be or should be, then falling into the trap of thinking that the desired state or experience is something that can simply be ‘imposed’ either by telling, or coercing people to live or behave this certain way, using rules or peer pressure to see the desired result imposed.
As time has passed since the 1940’s, the mindset that is the approach of dealing with life how it is with practical appreciation and understanding of how it works has been left behind and replaced with the approach of everything can be as it should be, simply because we say that it is – and what happened before doesn’t matter, because this is how its going to be right now.
The switch between the two was for a long time very subtle. It quickly began to affect decision making right at the top, but it wasn’t until the practical realities of decades of public policy being based on impractical idealism rather than practical reality was going to bite back, especially as we reach a point where those pushing this thinking hardest are literally punishing people with a different outlook for simply being who they are.
Even today, some 5 years since the European Referendum where ‘Brexit’ was ‘won’, even the political class itself cannot recognise that the whole European Union ‘project’ was based on a collective of ideas aimed at creating the ideal model of a European Superstate, with systems, procedures and governance not built upon the foundations of how life is for the communities, cultures and whole different Countries that the Bloc is made up of, but literally wiping that all away under the premise of how life should be with the only concession being a slow process of deliberate mission creep that hides the practical reality that imposing impractical reality was the strategy all along.
Brexit was won by the votes of people who have a clear understanding and experience of how life really is, as opposed to the alternative, which was always about endorsing a process which was always going to have serious consequences for the unnamed and unrecognised majority, because you cannot run an entire continent on the basis of how things should be.
At a time when the Government response to the Covid Pandemic is speeding up the arrival of a perfect storm of problems that have been in the making for decades, we are being forced into a culture war between what is and what should be, with seemingly no room left in-between.
Somewhat ironically, it is because we have had so many decades of everything being so good, that the impractical idealists championing woke thinking are able to behave as dangerously as they are doing so. The problem is that without respect for the practical realities of life and how the world really works, we are being set up for a massive fall, just as soon as the bubble bursts, and young people and those who are not appreciative of a more practical way of thinking are going to find the impact of the drop and the changes that it will require particularly hard.
There is nothing wrong with wanting life to be good, fair and the same for all. But the idea that this can be achieved by erasing history and anything distasteful, then making every part of life exactly the same for everyone is a recipe for disaster being cooked up and sent into a hurricane on a ship of fools.
We cannot escape the reality that we are living and experiencing – no matter how hard we might pretend otherwise. Changing it all for the better can only be achieved by looking at it, interpreting it and approaching it all differently. We will not do this by looking outwards and by hiding behind what should be. We have to look at ourselves, our history and the lives that we all live and move forward accordingly. It is we that must be the change.
Adam Tugwell 