We Now Live in a Post-Woke World

When I was a child, there was a loose tile lying on the backyard path of my grandparents’ house. Whenever I visited, I always loved lifting the tile by a corner to see what lay beneath—invariably a horde of woodlice, worms, millipedes, and beetles, all riled up by the sudden light and crawling in every direction.

I was reminded of this memory as I watched the reactions to the news of Charlie Kirk’s murder among Bluesky users , gathered from various places online—you’ve undoubtedly seen examples yourself. The dark corners of the internet can breed all sorts of nasty things in their damp soil. And it takes a moment like Kirk’s death to lift the metaphorical tile and bring them to light. The result is similar to what I saw all those years ago in my grandparents’ garden—although at least woodlice are only passively unpleasant, not actively malicious, writes Dr. David McGrogan .

The reaction to this event seems to point to a shift in the online left movement toward what might reasonably be called a “post-woke” discourse. The doctrines of anti-racism and “diversity, equality, and inclusion” were originally, however clumsily and misguidedly, focused on the future: there was a society their adherents wanted to build. But we seem to have moved beyond that to something far uglier and more pessimistic. The woke wanted to start over from year zero and build what they imagined to be a better world. The online Bluesky Left of 2025 seems to simply hate conservatives.

This can be seen as the logical culmination, the denouement, of a form of political reason that emerged in early modernity with Thomas Hobbes and was most powerfully and completely articulated in the mid-20th century by the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. This category of political reason justified state authority and considered the political as such, based on the inability of people to access indisputable truth. Each individual experiences the world differently. And there is no external reference point to objectively rank their differing perspectives. There is only a struggle between each individual—unless the state exists to impose order.

Hobbes offered only such a justification for the state’s authority, making it clear that he believed the state should impose order based on the necessity of security. While there may be no indisputable truth or set of shared values ​​identical for every member of society, it is true that all people are driven by similar passions and desires—particularly and universally (in Leo Strauss’s interpretation) the fear of violent death. The state, therefore, existed to enforce a social contract, entered into by all members of society, to obey its commands with that necessity in mind: the state enforces order to alleviate the fear of violent death.

For Kojève, writing 300 years after Hobbes, the fear the state alleviated was not that of violent death, but rather that of inequality. What drives the human heart is the desire to be recognized —to be treated with care and respect as an individual. Some people, the “masters,” or those imbued with aristocratic virtues, are willing to risk death for recognition. Others, the “slaves,” or those imbued with civic virtues, are not. And the state exists to transcend this difference by establishing a perfect system of equality . The state justifies its authority by achieving both formal and substantive equality, thereby homogenizing all individuals in terms of their political significance. Everyone receives equal attention and respect; everyone receives the recognition that is the deepest longing of the individual.

Whether we follow Hobbes or Kojève (or neither), the similarity is clear: both lower the horizon of human ambition, for better or for worse. They place the relationship between state and individual on a narrowly egoistic basis; they are, as it were, minimalist in their vision of what constitutes human life. People either yearn for security, or they yearn to be equal with all others, and the existence of the state is justified accordingly. In neither conception of the political is there a model of the good life to aspire to—no supernatural or sacred vision, no idealized morality or value system. There is only the minimal possible basis on which sufficient consensus can be built: everyone experiences fear. Everyone yearns not to be lower in the social hierarchy than others. And on this shallow foundation, politics rests.

What we consider “wokeness” must therefore be seen as an immature attempt to understand this bare, skeletal vision of the political. It is not, as some have suggested, a kind of quasi-religion or Christian heresy, but rather the complete antithesis of religion: it is what politics looks like when everything theistic, supernatural, or transcendent has been stripped away, leaving only the most fundamental desires of the individual and the state that promises to fulfill them. It is the political reason of modernity as such, taken to its logical conclusion, where ultimate causes have vanished, the cosmic order has collapsed, and absolutely no trace of objective morality or natural hierarchy—not even preference for family members over strangers—is allowed to remain.

The problems with this, and the reasons why woke is disappearing and being replaced by something far uglier and meaner, are not hard to understand.

The first problem is that when objective morality is stripped away and only self-interest remains, people don’t limit their desire to equality with all others. They want to be first among equals . The state may exist to ensure universal equality and respect. But that is merely a way to merge the naked self-interest of all individuals into the pursuit of being more equal than everyone else. We are all the centers of our own universes, legends during our lunch breaks, favorite sons and daughters. And we want politics to reflect this.

This, of course, manifests itself in very different ways. But it frames the relationship between the state and the individual in egocentric terms. The reason the state exists in relation to each person is to fulfill that person’s urge to be recognized. Kojève describes the state as the equalizing force that reconciles all these individual drives in a complete, orderly, and harmonious legal system—but for each of the individuals involved, it’s about me, me, me, all the way to the end.

In practice, this turns out to be less a recipe for social harmony than for bitter, resentful rivalry that never ends. As soon as an individual feels unequal in any way compared to another, their immediate reaction is to look to the state to level the playing field. The result is not exactly the end of the Hobbesian war of all against all, but a cold civil war between all living persons, who group together in intersectional alliances based primarily on shifting concepts of “identity,” all vying for the state’s attention, and all calling on the state to punish someone, directly or indirectly, for a perceived injustice.

And the second problem with “wokeness” is that it equates justice with self-interest. For Hobbes, what is just is simply what the law says as a reflection of sovereign authority; for Kojève, what is just is rather what equality achieves. But neither view can preserve social relations because it essentially abolishes them: the only relationship that ultimately matters is that between the individual and the state . The state issues commands that every individual must obey, and that, for Hobbes, is justice; for Kojève, by contrast, the state intervenes, implicitly or directly, in all social interactions to achieve the equality that justice demands. In neither case is the individual called upon to reflect politically on any external moral norm—though Hobbes at least made clear that he believed individuals would be guided by their own understanding of natural law, which was implicitly, of course, religious, when the actual law is silent.

In practice, these problems converge into the exact opposite of what Hobbes or Kojève would have intended: a form of governance that achieves neither security nor justice, but reduces politics to a zero-sum struggle over whom the state should favor at any given moment. The result is an amoral competition characterized by rivalry, feuds, and an endless struggle for position—something like the politics of the chicken coop.

And what we can now see is that this undermines even the most basic justification for state authority that Hobbes suggested, since it draws the state itself into the war of all against all. That war is on the rise again. The only difference is that the target now is the levers of the state itself—with the ultimate goal of permanently establishing itself, and the shaky alliance it has built around itself, as the most equal of all.

The state thus becomes an instrument for struggle; a prize to be won, which is then used against anyone not part of the alliance in question.

This largely explains the hatred that has descended on the extreme fringes of what was once the optimistic woke movement. The state is the instrument for securing and recognizing oneself , and by extension, those with whom one identifies and is temporarily connected. That is why it exists. As a result, politics loses its democratic character and increasingly becomes a zero-sum competition. There is nothing to negotiate, nothing to compromise on, nothing to understand—there is only winning and losing in the struggle to be the most equal of all. In the chicken coop, there is only pecking or being pecked; the goal of politics is to capture the state and use it to fulfill one’s own desires for recognition. Anyone who stands in their way must therefore be eliminated, otherwise they might achieve victory. In other words, it is not enough to win the election, and it is certainly not enough to accept electoral defeat. And where electoral politics fails to produce results, violence becomes the natural alternative.

At the same time, of course, political opponents become not only the object of hatred, but also of fear. Within the woke framework, there’s nothing stopping opponents from using the state apparatus, if they gain control of it, exactly as they intend: as a weapon. The logical consequence of associating justice with purely self-interest and rejecting any form of external morality is the loss of trust. The days when political parties traded opportunities to govern or be a “loyal opposition” are over—because any party other than the one they support themselves is, by definition, a threat. It represents the “equalization” of different identities at the expense of one’s own. And so it means only risks and no benefits—not so much a difference of opinion as an implacable rival in the struggle for power.

Wokeness, then, is no recipe for a sustainable political settlement of any kind, and we’ve already seen the results – a nasty mix of flavors that can’t be combined into an edible dish. There are too many rivalries over fundamental issues (think feminists versus trans activists), too many inconsistencies (think the nascent crisis over gay rights that will soon destroy the Islamic-Green alliances emerging across Europe), too many conflicts looming on the horizon (especially as identitarianism gains traction among the white majority population in the West). What began as idealism ends in nasty and vicious infighting. And the result is the emergence of genuine political violence as an obvious corollary – for what alternative could there be if politics itself makes no reference to objective good or moral values, insisting that justice can only be conceptualized in terms of what aligns with self-interest?

Hatred of conservatism is the natural byproduct of these circumstances. There are two simple reasons for this. The first is that conservatives reject the association of politics with self-interest and moral nihilism: there is an external moral order, knowable to humanity, that does not merely reflect individual desires and is often in conflict with them. And in doing so, they question the very premise of woke politics. The second reason is that, within the woke framework, it is easy to portray conservatism as a disguised form of identitarianism—the identitarianism of the privileged, so to speak—and thus as a competitor in the pecking order of the chicken coop. The end result is that conservatism as such represents not merely a questionable set of doctrines or preferences, but rather a political threat . If conservatives gain political power, they will use it to pursue identitarian goals, just as members of any other identity group would. This makes them a particularly damaging and dangerous threat, because that threat comes with (perceived) economic, social or cultural privileges that people with other identities reportedly do not have.

Conservatives thus problematize the woke political logic by questioning its most fundamental premise (the rejection of irrefutable truth), while simultaneously, within the political framework constructed by wokeness, they represent a clear and present danger—a particularly powerful and successful enemy. In this regard, it is no wonder that the woke movement, under its own pressures and inconsistencies, has degenerated at the edges into something resembling a neurotic hate-fest against “fascists,” especially now that wokeness itself is beginning to collapse in on itself and all its pettiness and hatefulness is coming to the fore. We can expect that Bluesky, as the murky rallying point beneath the loose tile of woke politics, will increasingly resemble a concept of “Two Minutes Hate, always and everywhere.” We can only hope that the resulting further violence will be short-lived.

https://www.frontnieuws.com/we-leven-nu-in-een-post-woke-wereld