Someone on Facebook asked, “Do you agree? Why or why not?” about the following: “The ‘woke mind virus’ is literally just empathy. That’s it. It’s empathy.”

Here’s my response:

No, I don’t agree. It’s virtue signaling; it’s people looking for problems such as racism where there aren’t any, just in order to feel morally superior or to give themselves a sense of purpose; it’s trivial word policing as if it’s actually changing the world; it’s canceling people, ruining their lives, for saying the wrong thing, doing something that has bad optics if you don’t look at it deeply or with forgiveness and tolerance, sometimes even things they said 20 years ago when times were different; etc.

I’m not saying it’s always these things; sometimes it’s real empathy, but these are the reasons I dislike wokeism. And I’m saying that as a liberal Democrat.

Oh yeah, and it’s also elevating previously oppressed classes of people to the point of making cis white heterosexual men the most hated demographic. As if I’ve done something wrong just by having been born a white male and not being gay or transgender.

And the whole forcing-people-to-use-nonsensical-pronouns thing, such as in popular CoC policies, is the epitome of the woke mentality, or at least one aspect of it: “I don’t want to feel offended, so we’re going to take away your right to offend me at any cost, such as the cost of having to face myself or reality.” I.e., we can’t even speak in accordance to our own truth for fear of treading on somebody else’s delicate and highly charged delusion. There are four lights, damnit.

And the people who still use the word “retarded” are the refreshingly real ones, with a kind of raw intelligence and self-agency. But God forbid we say it in public with the overeager social justice warriors about. It’s we who need a safe space now for the purpose of satisfactory self-expression. Does it really hurt intellectually disabled people when we use the term “retarded” in a way that in no way is actually meant to refer to people with a bona fide intellectual disability? I’m sure they have a thick skin by now, and/or can see that we’re just expressing frustration at something dumb somebody did somewhere. And even if they are offended, is that really worth taking away our freedom of speech in a practical sense? Or does using the term really help to perpetuate or further the stigma against the intellectually disabled? No, because people understand it as being a mere figure of speech, and they’re going to think of the intellectually disabled however they’re going to think of them regardless. So, this is just one of many examples of wokeists going out of their way to find “problematic” behavior and make themselves feel useful by chastising people or making a big fuss to be heard by those in power and change social policy.

If you look at how wokeism spread like wildfire and the common yet oddly specific forms it takes, it’s clearly a mind virus (and even the word “woke” is undeniably a meme, as in a viral idea); it preys on psychological weaknesses. It’s conformism to what’s popular among one’s peers, and it also serves one’s need to feel good about themselves: it gives people the self-esteem they should have had naturally but that was taken away from them by their upbringing, by making them feel like they’re “good people.” The problem is that their feeling that way requires that, conversely, they think of people who violate their woke/PC rules and ideologies as “bad people,” so they end up not being much better and more inclusive than the people they fight against. They were better, more open-minded and accepting, warmer people before they became woke.

Pure empathy isn’t the kind of thing that becomes a mind virus. It’s rare and special and can only be inherent or cultivated through personal life experience such as genuine inspiration or hardship.

And not to mention that someone wise once said something like, eventually society will become truly mature and will learn to give people the freedom to do and be what they want, and also society will naturally become more universally kind and empathetic through real growth, but in the meantime, we’ll try to force this growth through punishing those who haven’t yet fully grown, because we’re not a mature society yet and don’t know any better. And that’s why we have wokeism.

If you’re woke and look deep within yourself with an honest lens, you’ll see that the things I say are true. So please do better.