All The Woke's A Stage

On not playing your part

You all know I was once one of The Woke, yeah?

People who have read me for a very long time likely already know this, but since I have many, many new readers who aren’t familiar with my political history it’s probably worth re-iterating this.

For years, I was fully on the side of these cultural changes and shifts which I now critique. Not only did I support them, but I wrote quite a few essays advocating for many of these ideas, as well as engaging in a few social media crusades to cancel and punish people who questioned the rightness of Woke moral precepts.

I still feel bad about some of these things, but rather than discussing my history as a true believer in a religion that now terrifies me, I’d rather talk about how I finally realized we were not actually fighting for liberation or even anything that would make the lives of “oppressed peoples” better.

Over more recent years, I began to notice certain contradictions and unacknowledged ideological knots in what we were arguing for. I’ve mentioned a few of these here on From The Forests of Arduinna, but one important aspect has received only scant mention in my essays.

I don’t know what to call this precisely, but the word Hypocrisy seems to fit.

Hypocrisy in modern English usually just means “claiming to be something you are not,” or “demanding people act one way despite personally acting another way.” Its older meanings, derived from Greek, referred specifically to theatrics, to playing a role or acting a part in order to convince an audience.

Hypocrisy once specifically meant “to answer.” The actual usage of the word when referring to Greek theatre was to describe the act of answering another actor on stage.

To understand how we got from this original meaning to the present one, imagine a stage play. Everyone is dressed up and ready to act out their roles, while an audience waits patiently for the drama to begin.

Then, the first actor says something, calling out to another character with accusations or a question.

Imagine, then, that none of the actors answer. The words of the first actor are left hanging in the air, suspended in a place in which the collective ritual of drama remains stillborn because there is no one to carry along the fiction.

The act of answering that first actor is what actually creates the play. The moment another actor responds, even if not directly to the first person, is the moment the drama is born, the words of one carried by another, and then another, becoming a conversation that the audience witnesses as a wholly other world.

Hypocrisy—the answering of an actor by another actor—later came to mean pretense, “pretending” something was the case. Here we need to keep in mind that the sense of “make believe” that now defines the word pretend is a very new sense, one that didn’t arise until the late 1800’s. Before then, pretend meant “to lay claim to” or “make an argument for,” as in “a pretender for the throne.” That’s where the idea of pretense as a falsehood comes from: a pretender (someone who made claims to a throne, etc) who did not succeed was then seen as a false pretender, and those two senses later collapsed into just “pretend.”

Going back to the original meaning of Hypocrisy, it’s worth looking at the evolution of its direct synonym in English: answer. That word’s original meaning meant something almost identical to the original meaning of pretend. It comes from the older Germanic word swerian, meaning to speak an oath (the root of the word “swear”).

Answer originally had a kind of sacred sense to it, what we might call a sacred kind of speech that had more weight than normal words.

This is crucial to remember in our secularized modern world: ancient peoples saw certain kinds of speech as sacred, just as they saw certain types of acts as sacred. Greek drama wasn’t just for amusement: it was a kind of religious ritual. The Hypocrisy of one actor to another was crucial to the ritual itself: it was a sacred or magical act which created the drama.

Answer to Germanic peoples had the same religious dimension. It was a swearing, an oath, and thus needed to be true. Giving a false answer—a false oath—was a crime not just against people but against the entire (sacred) order of meaning itself.

All this has supposedly fallen away in our modern world, but it actually hasn’t. Consider the way a child reacts the first time their mother or father says something and yet does the opposite, or how we as adults feel when a leader, a lover, or someone we have come to trust acts in a way completely contrary to their statements.

That moment is always jarring to us, because it represents a sudden disconnect from the world we thought we were in and the actual material reality of that world. Loss of trust in others, that sense of betrayal and of being lied to, will always feel at best disorienting. In more significant moments, it can lead us to question everything we thought we knew about a person or about ourselves, creating a “crisis of faith” or a complete shattering of our ideology or worldview.

We all know the folk story written by Hans Christian Anderson, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” based off an older Spanish story. In that tale, an emperor is convinced by swindlers to wear invisible clothing which they promise are magically stunning. The emperor thus parades around completely naked. All those who see the emperor play a part in the swindle, since, when he asks them what they think of his new clothing, they all answer that they find he is wearing the finest clothing they have ever seen.

Each of those people in the story are hypocrites in the original Greek sense. The emperor is an actor calling out, and they answer him: without those answers, without their sacred participation in the drama, the swindlers would never have succeeded. They collectively pretend—lay claim to—a reality that is of course not Real yet nevertheless has all the weight and power of “truth,” at least as long as they all keep up the hypocrisy.

But then, as the story goes, a child brings the whole order of meaning crashing down on itself by blurting out that the emperor is actually naked.

As I mentioned, Anderson based his version on an older Spanish tale, which itself likely had older origins. That tale was found in a book called Libro de los enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor et de Patronio, a collection of moral stories first published in 1355. Many of these stories were retellings of the fables of Aesop, as well as Arabic tales, and some are thought to have come from India.

In the Spanish retelling of the story, the grift is quite similar except for one brilliant detail. The monarch is given “clothing” of incomparable beauty, but is warned that they will be invisible to anyone who is not actually the child of the man he believes is his father.

So, while in Andersen’s version of the story it is the emperor’s own vanity and his subject’s sycophantic desire to please him that prevents everyone from admitting the truth, in the Spanish tale it is something much more powerful. Even the monarch himself has doubts about the clothing, but he cannot admit this—to say the clothing was invisible to him would be to declare he is illegitimate.

So, too, for all those around him who of course notice immediately that the man is naked. To declare the truth would be to become a target of moral outrage, to “admit” your father isn’t actually your father and your mother was a liar.

This older version is I think the more brilliant one, and most relevant to The Woke now, though they both are useful tales. In Andersen’s retelling, everyone keeps up the hypocrisy out of fear of offending the vanity of a powerful figure; in the Spanish version, anyone who violates the newly-created truth risks becoming illegitimate, rootless, and ultimately nameless. To not pretend would make them a false pretender to their father’s name, and thus a nobody, invisible just like the clothing they claim not to see.

I can think of no better metaphor for the hypocrisy I once enacted on behalf of Woke ideology, nor for the hypocrisy I constantly noticed but ignored in so many actions and events that were really just violent abuse and collective delusions.

I could write pages and even chapters about all that I saw and what I participated in, but I’m saving most of these stories for the book I’m writing that will come out next year. Such stories are hardly rare nor in the end all that unique, as I’m sure you’ve got your own, as does probably even the most devout believer in Woke ideology.

What’s more important, I think, is the way to break that enchantment. In the Spanish telling of the magical clothing, what traps each person in the relentless hypocrisy is their fear about their own truth and own place in the world. To say “hey, this isn’t true” is to step out of a collective order of meaning which previously affirmed your own truth as well, to exile yourself, to declare yourself apostate.

As with any such situation, fear of isolation and uncertainty of the power of your own will is the unlocked jail cell we regardless remain in as prisoners. In Anderson’s version, only a child is able to step out, as he has not yet learned to fear social shunning. Now, of course, such a child would be deplatformed or cancelled, called a fascist, a racist, an enemy of progress, a reactionary, a transphobe, and every other term until one finally sticks and silences them forever.

As I said elsewhere, the easiest answer to such claims is that of negation. “That’s not true” and “no, I am not” both function as powerful spells to counter collective delusions. This is because what is really playing out is a struggle between your own will versus the sustaining hypocrisies of others, others who themselves fear the repercussions of giving up the act.

That’s how I finally escaped all this. There finally came a moment when I realised I was playing a part I didn’t want to play, answering to and for an ideology that cultivated not personal and collective power but narcissism and ressentiment. I had been afraid of admitting there was nothing actually there, that we were all just role-playing revolution rather than ever confronting the Real of the world beyond our make-believe.

Eventually, I’d had enough. I stop being a hypocrite, stop re-affirming the fantasies others demanded I help them sustain. In the end it took only an act of will, a refusal to play along. “This isn’t true” was one of the hardest things ever to say, and yet it made living an authentic and fulfilling life—no longer needing others for legitimacy—a much easier path.