Woke happened, not because it was right, smart, necessary, or inevitable, it happened because an ambivalent and/or afraid America simply allowed to happen.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about the evolution of wokeism.

At first thought, wokeism could be considered an active ideology or movement, especially given the activism, the community organizing, the government policies, the protests, riots, arson, and looting associated with it. There certainly seems to be a lot of energy behind this “movement”, assuming it can be defined as such.

I’m not so sure it is active – or even a movement.

The more I considered it, the more I have come to see it as a function of passivity and less of a movement, and more of something that was just allowed to happen due to a lack of will to even think about the reality of it.

Wokeism seems to exist due to the absence of something, rather than the presence that thing.

I apologize for putting this idea forward again, but I think wokeism is an example of a how things often happen via lack of conscious decision-making. The best example if I can think of for how “shit happens” in groups is the Abilene Paradox.

I first learned about the Abilene paradox in one of my MBA classes at the University of Utah. It was introduced by management expert Jerry B. Harvey in his article The Abilene Paradox and other Meditations on Management. The name of the phenomenon comes from this anecdote in the article which Harvey uses to express the paradox:

“On a hot afternoon visiting in Coleman, Texas, the family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch, until the father-in-law suggests that they take a trip to Abilene [53 miles north] for dinner. The wife says, “Sounds like a great idea.” The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out-of-step with the group and says, “Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go.” The mother-in-law then says, “Of course I want to go. I haven’t been to Abilene in a long time.”

The drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive at the cafeteria, the food is as bad as the drive. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted.

One of them dishonestly says, “It was a great trip, wasn’t it?” The mother-in-law says that she would rather have stayed home but went along since the other three were so enthusiastic. The husband says, “I wasn’t delighted to be doing what we were doing. I only went to satisfy the rest of you.” The wife says, “I just went along to keep you happy. I would have had to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like that.” The father-in-law then says that he only suggested it because he thought the others might be bored.

The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon.”

This paradox is a form of “group think” that results in the worst possible option being chosen and no member of the group getting anything that they want. The Abilene Paradox is an example of how, through lack of care or concern can trigger an event cascade where everybody ends up engaged in something to which they never really agreed. These situations are created through the lack of will to decide (or to just say “no”), how such a low level of concern or interest will allow things to just evolve toward some action that nobody anticipated or desires.

In short, the entirety of the woke world exists because nobody stopped it. Nobody spoke out about it because it seemed insignificant, we just didn’t care, or we were afraid to care and as the stupid grew and began to move, it dragged the rest of the uninterested and ambivalent along with it.

But like a sucking chest wound, it was never going to get well without some attention.

And like that sucking chest wound, eventually it gets serious enough to garner attention.

For want of the majority of reasonable people saying, “That is wrong and quite frankly, the dumbest damn thing I have ever heard and we’re not doing that”, an entire nation was destined to suffer under the most absurd, irrational and illogical belief system since Caligula made his horse a member of the Roman Senate.

And so, the Social Justice League of America was born.

When the stupid eventually become self-sustaining, because God knows, stupid is one thing that exists in inexhaustible supply, many people come to believe, just because it is self-sustaining, that means it is both legitimate and important.

So, they join up. They don’t really know why because they never really consider it. Power attracts membership, there is safety in numbers and the periphery migrates toward the center of power.

Unfortunately, there is power in stupid, especially in large amounts.

The damage sustained by our cities during the ANTIFA/BLM uprisings during 2020 was due to lack of action on the part of those local, state, and federal governments, not due to any action from any of those entities.

Woke happened, not because it was right, smart, necessary, or inevitable, it happened because an ambivalent and/or afraid America simply allowed to happen.

We didn’t care enough to stop it.

And now we are paying for the Woke Abilene Paradox.