Hey, everybody, it's James Lindsay, you're listening to the New Discourses podcast. And here on the podcast, we talk about woke a lot. So what is woke? That's the point of today's episode. I just want to do a casual episode where I just kind of talk about what woke means. Now, I can go off in a lot of like kind of throat clearing preamble,

talk about woke means critical consciousness, or woke means using critical theory, or woke means having a Marxist analysis, and all of that's true.

But I want to talk about woke as a mentality. This isn't the full story about what woke is,

because to develop the full picture of the philosophy will require us or would require us to

get into fields like ontology, which is a fancy philosophical word that means a philosophy of existence

or being.

What does it mean to be in the world?

Of course, as I've talked about in the past, I'm not going to really develop it here.

I think that woke has a fundamentally sociognostic ontology.

I think that it has adopted a frame of having been flung into a societal situation that it

doesn't recognize, that it didn't choose, and that it can ultimately liberate itself from.

But that's beside the point.

It's directly tied to what I'm going to say, but it's beside the point.

And so what I want to characterize woke as is kind of two things.

And they're related to one another.

Of course, I want to start by talking about how woke is rooted in a combination of entitlement and alienation.

So it is a mentality based on alienation in a particular way,

and that alienation is rooted in a sense of entitlement,

which is usually generated by other woke, we'll call them wizards out there,

who create a sense of entitlement in people,

then connect it to a sense of being alienated from the world that they feel like they should be in,

that they're entitled to be in, that then goes on to be attached to things that you're otherwise

...