BY DANIEL JUPP

The reason why it is pointless for someone such as I to engage in debate with a woke person is because I am already defined as guilty by their worldview, and as a person to be dismissed without listening to.

I am to be met with laughter. All of my views are to be met with laughter. If I advance my views well enough, in a way that embarrasses or shows up the woke person in the real world, this will not cause them to question the views I have discredited or debunked in their irreal world. Instead, there will be anger.

I will have committed a violence against them by not thinking like them, and I am proof of the supreme malignancy of my category, the white straight conservative male.

Similarly, if someone from a favoured group rejects wokeness, they lose definition as a member of that favoured group. They are no longer black, or no longer female, or no longer gay. They have ‘internalised whiteness’, they are a ‘coconut’ or an Uncle Tom. They are no longer female but a Terf, and therefore lose the favoured group privilege. Any of these people can then have the categories of fascist, racist, Nazi or white supremacist applied to them, which are merely a floating set of condemnation markers for opposing wokeness rather than separate things with defined characteristics.

What then is wokeness?

In my book on the subject and on Western Civilisation I defined wokeness as a set of attitudes predicated on a complete hatred of Western identity, tradition, civilisation, inherited morality and history. This includes prejudices against much associated with, characteristic of or responsible for, Western Civilisation, whether that’s capitalism, the nuclear family, Christianity, Western nation states, or white people.

It’s the idea that Western Civilisation is more guilty, more worthless, more oppressive, eviller than every form of non-Western civilisation.

Such a viewpoint can only exist as an absurdity incapable of recognising its own nature. If a person still possesses a capacity to reason and for serious self-examination, they can’t be woke. And wokeness is not a natural phenomenon either. It’s not a position that can be reached independently all that often, because it requires so many detours around reality and so many embarrassingly false assumptions. People have to be trained in it, which is why it is most pervasive in universities and colleges – wokeists have to be protected from everyday realities which contradict it, which is why it is more prevalent in those who either receive some state stipend sustaining them (via employment or welfare) or are independently well off; protected from grim realities of real world work.

A mental self-crippling such as wokeness, which induces a profound ignorance and philistinism, which cripples the capacity of an individual to behave wisely, judge acutely, or learn and grow through the correction of their own excesses, is a disease of privilege and a consequence of idle luxury.

Older societies in which less was gifted to people would not reach woke conclusions. And even individuals within a fairly pampered society who do the ‘real jobs’, the blue-collar occupations, will be far less inclined towards it than rich kids with plenty of leisure time.

It’s for these reasons that I’ve called Woke ‘the university mind’.

Only the unnatural environment of a campus provides the perfect protection of a place where the philosophy of failures and the prejudices of those who assume they are enlightened can keep operating, irrespective of wider reality.

Only being educated in irreal ways that stunt your morality and logic allow the environment of ignorance and arrogance in which wokeness thrives.

Woke requires you to know very little, but be extremely proud of that little knowing, too. You must consider your denial of thought to be the essence of thought, your indoctrination to be your independence, and your hypocritical prejudices to be your virtues.

Then, and only then, are you truly woke.

Daniel Jupp is the author of A Gift for Treason: The Cultural Marxist Assault on Western Civilisation, which was published in 2019. He has had previous articles published by Spiked, The Spectator and Politicalite, and is a married father of two from Essex.