Twentieth Century Woke—Left and Right | James Lindsay

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4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2025

⏱️ 101 minutes

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Summary

Saving American Liberty, Session 4 What does "Woke" mean? James Lindsay, founder of New Discourses, says it is an awakening to a "sociognostic" belief structure. What is that, and how does it manifest in different contexts? In this third talk from the Saving American Liberty learning seminar in Dallas, Texas, hosted by New Discourses on August 22-23, 2025, Lindsay explains the concept in considerable detail. He also applies it to the "20th century" (or, Modernist) mode of thinking to reveal that two forms of Woke sociognosticism appear in that context: Communism on the Woke Left and Fascism as a form of Reaction on the Woke Right. Further, he provides contemporary examples of how this strain of thought is making an unwanted comeback, both Left and Right, throughout the West today. Join him for this important lecture explaining the model and modes of "Woke" thinking in a historical context we already understand. The other lectures in this series can be found here: Session 1: https://youtu.be/4u2ak-DmKD4 Session 2: https://youtu.be/gUiLUmZWsc4 Session 3: https://youtu.be/WRheQNDTSOQ Latest from New Discourses Press! The Queering of the American Child: https://queeringbook.com/ Support New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/support Follow New Discourses on other platforms: https://newdiscourses.com/subscribe Follow James Lindsay: https://linktr.ee/conceptualjames © 2025 New Discourses. All rights reserved. #NewDiscourses #JamesLindsay #Woke

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, so now we're going to actually talk about the woke, the woke left and right in the 20th century,
0:21.6	which is kind of an anachronism because
0:24.6	woke is a word that did emerge in the 20th century,
0:27.6	but it didn't emerge as a term that we use for kind of a,
0:31.6	you know, social movement or whatever, until not just the 21st century,
0:35.6	but like kind of recently, quite recently.
0:40.3	You could argue that it really kind of emerged in 2013 as attached to the movement we all recognize
0:47.3	on the left as woke, which at that point the attachment was at the BLM movement in its very early days. It kind of entered the
0:55.7	popular lexicon well before that, but it kind of got a springboard in its context in 2008. But then to
1:01.7	talk about the idea of woke in the 20th century is a little bit of an anachronism. So I have to
1:07.8	qualify what I'm actually doing is I'm taking the concept of woke as we've understood it in the past few years and kind of done in archaeology to figure out where it comes from and then extended the
1:18.6	lexical range of the word backwards in time to give it continuity so that we could in fact argue I think quite persuasively that we could talk about woke in antiquity if we wanted to without losing anything.
1:34.3	Although it's certainly the case and that's the case that I've been trying to make since 2022, which by the clock on the wall is three years ago, that we should at least, at the very least, be extending
1:47.7	the concept of woke back to Jan Jacques Rousseau. You could make some pretty good arguments of some
1:54.3	people earlier than Rousseau as well, the mysticism of Yacoboma in Germany, for example.
2:01.6	But I'm going to stick with Rousseau as a benchmark for this whole movement.
2:08.6	And of course, Rousseau is in the 18th century.
2:11.6	Yes, 18th century.
2:13.6	And so we've got a little bit of playing fast and loose with time, and we're going to
2:19.7	extend this concept. So what is woke? The challenge of this talk for me is that I had a very hard
2:25.3	time figuring how to start and write this talk, as it turns out, was that I wanted to figure out how
2:30.3	to not talk about Gnosticism at all for once, and then that I wanted to describe
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