Actually, I came up with a much better definition that I think fits.

"I found a paradox, that in a lot of ways wokeness is deeply, deeply conservative. There’s an orthodoxy, and all that matters is that you follow the orthodoxy. Everything outside the orthodoxy must be rejected and silenced, and anyone who isn’t strictly following orthodoxy must be rejected and silenced regardless of their alignment otherwise.

If progressivism is truly about challenging norms and fostering dialogue, then an orthodoxy should not exist. Instead, the rigidity undermines progressiveness by creating a new form of conservatism: a defense of the orthodox beliefs and existing hierarchies within the movement itself.

The foolish justification for this behavior they came up with of Popper’s paradox of tolerance relies on answering a paradox with one answer or another without realizing that the nature of a paradox is such that there is no cut and dry black and white answer.

My criticism here of paradox also applies to the paradox I recognized, by the way. You can’t change anything to resolve it in a simple black and white manner because the components that make up the paradox are required to have the thing in the first place and thus the question is complicated. Without some form of orthodoxy, progressive ideology that questions societal norms would immediately have to start questioning the societal norms it successfully installed, potentially just resulting in paralysis.

I wonder though if this framework helps explain the difference between “progressive” and “woke”. The former is a spectrum that most westerners are somewhere on, the latter is where you reach a highly dogmatic, highly self-assured spot on the spectrum.

Most people, even a supermajority of ideological conservatives, want social progress in some form. Anyone can see things aren’t perfect and want things to be better. It’s when you know exactly what needs to be done and it makes you a better person than everyone else and anyone standing in your way is the devil that it becomes (to use a bad term in context) problematic."

The dogmatic adherence to orthodoxy further fits with an analysis I did a few months ago about the movie Idiocracy. In that movie, the entire world is taken over by a form of populist, anti-intellectual idiocy. My criticism of the movie was that there are in fact multiple forms of idiocy. and today’s predominant form of idiocy is in fact elitist and pseudo-intellectual. As an example, instead of watching “ow my balls”, watching people watching “ow my balls” so you can point and laugh at the idiots watching the stupid show, as if that’s any better. Under such a form of idiocy, the dull end up using the trappings of intellect to try to act as intelligent people, similar to the cargo cults of the pacific islands. From this point of view, the strict adherence to orthodoxy is a requirement because such idiots can’t synthesize new ideas, they can only take ideas someone else created and pretend they came up with them, and any movement from that strict orthodoxy will not allow them to pretend they’re smarter than they really are.

Ironically, the phrase “anyone that says anything I don’t like is woke” is part of the orthodoxy of wokeness. It suggests that the author of the parent post won’t engage with my arguments in any real way, because they’re just reciting pieces of an orthodoxy they’ve been given.

My post didn’t call PC Gamer “Woke”, I called it “Dreck”. The problem with it isn’t necessarily that it has even performative orthodox progressive values, it’s that it has always been boring, lazy, and typically just an industry mouthpiece. I used to subscribe to PC gaming magazines, and there ere more entertaining magazines such as the legendary PC Accelerator, there were more engaging magazines that brought in industry experts like Ken Levine, there were more neutral magazines such as PC Games magazine, but virtually all of those magazines failed while PC Gamer continues on.

The fact that the article spends so much time in its introduction using orthodox buzzwords is evidence of what I’m talking about. The actual article appears to be “someone I disagree with politically is doing a thing. They are bad because I disagree with him politically.”