If we continue fighting back—for pushing back is no longer enough—intelligently and firmly against the ideology of Critical Social Justice and the Woke movement it has spawned, we will find ourselves on the road to a post-Woke world, and it is not yet clear what that might look like. 

The fight against the ideology called Wokeness is gaining ground for the first time in a decade, if not decades. People increasingly understand what it is and why it is a terrible, inhuman, and inhumane ideology that has no place governing our societies. They also increasingly and rightly see it as a puritanical religious movement built upon a perverse faith, which they are starting to reject. They also increasingly understand it to be a takeover ideology with profound roots in totalitarian, racist, and communist thought that should not be empowered and must be fought. Certainly, we have a great deal of work still to do, especially practically, to fight this ideology and its remarkable bid to take over our society and culture, but people are waking up. Though I may look a bit far down the road in saying so, now we need somewhere to go.

If we continue fighting back—for pushing back is no longer enough—intelligently and firmly against the ideology of Critical Social Justice and the Woke movement it has spawned, we will find ourselves on the road to a post-Woke world, and it is not yet clear what that might look like. It is therefore necessary now, even this early in this ideological war, to set the values that should guide us into a post-Woke era so that we might enter a new era of flourishing and prosperity after this diabolical attempt to snuff out the light of Western civilization and human freedom. These values must be comprehended and asserted starting now as we begin the next phase in the fight to leave Woke ideology behind us, hopefully in the dustbin of history. Here, I offer four cardinal values to orient ourselves toward for the establishment of a post-Woke world that’s full of promise and prosperity. These are truth, beauty, liberty, and merit.

Truth

Truth is the truth, and it is above all the first virtue and guiding light of a post-Woke world. That is, a post-Woke world must be based on the relentless and uncompromising pursuit of objective truth, external to any particular individual or affinity group or its nearest approximation. Your truth will not do; neither will my truth. These are subjective heuristics useful in your own life but meaningless beyond that, and it’s time we remembered that fact. The weight of evidence, power of reason, and process of what has been termed “liberal science” must bear on every claim upon the truth in an honest effort to keep what is of value there and discard that which is in error.

The truth is humbling, and it is liberating in the genuine sense of the word. We, as mere men, are subject to the truth of the world and the truths of our own nature as beings in this world, and we are not above them. We can understand “your truth” and “my truth” merely as suggestions—not conclusions—in a broader conversation upon which reason, evidence, and criticism must bear. The goal is understanding the world as it is, including ourselves, our place within it, and how we might best relate to one another. It is the pursuit of getting things right, knowing that any discomfort this creates will protect against greater discomforts when the lie of our folly is eventually revealed to us by the world itself. Lies may for long be sustained against people, but they cannot be sustained against the world, which merely is and doesn’t change because we hope it will or, in our smallness and fear, believe we need it to.

We have no options except to humble ourselves before that which is true or to rise in our hubris against it only to eventually be humiliated by it. By recognizing this, we can orient ourselves with that which is true—what many of faith have called God, or what the Daoists have referred to as Dao, the Way—and free ourselves from the limitations of our own short-sightedness, stupidity, and greed. The Daoists believe that when man goes with the Way—how it is, truly—then he is free and things go well. It is by asserting ourselves against the Way that we create our own catastrophes and suffer the inevitable consequences. By humbling ourselves to how the world really is, which is to the truth, we free ourselves from the suffering that always follows from the disastrous combination of ignorance and pride.

Ironically, there is little need for any individual in a society that values truth to know much truth or even to pursue it with the sort of rigor we expect out of an idealized scientist. Everyone can push their own ideas, which likely often serve their own narrow interests and spring from their own narrow understanding, so long as they are humbled before the process that, in the end, defers to truth. This process has been identified as requiring only two general principles: no one has special authority and no one gets final say. Insights must be put up against other insights in a conversation that never ends, and thus no one becomes empowered as the arbiter of truth, which would inherently be corrupting—a point the postmodernists were right about in the wrong way. Once these principles are combined with a general attitude of respect for reason and deference to evidence and methodology, we have oriented ourselves toward the truth. Thus, these values must be sacred to man, and they must serve as the basis for a post-Woke world.

The call to center truth in a post-Woke world is a call to rekindle the Enlightenment and reawaken its brightest lights, which are currently being dimmed and even snuffed out. It is the rejection of the foolish arrogance of radical subjectivity in favor of an imperfect but worthy goal of discovery. It is to understand the world as it is so that we might flourish in it as it is. To value the truth is to eschew fantasy and ideology and embrace reality, and a great lesson of history is that, though this is difficult, it is possible. Societies flourish and prosperity follows when we orient toward the truth. Valuing and desiring the truth—the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as it is said, in those places where it matters most—must therefore be the first pillar of the post-Woke world we aim to inhabit.

Beauty

A world without beauty is a dead world. A world filled with beauty that no one can appreciate is identically dead. Beauty is the second value around which a post-Woke world should be built. Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder, and that may be stated fairly enough, but beauty cannot be systematically snuffed out because others who behold it deem it problematic. No person has the right to squash the beauty beheld by another, and it is a crime against humanity to engage in such a project at the ideological scale. To dictate what is and what is not beautiful is to rob humanity of its humanity. It cannot be the basis for any healthy society.

Beauty is aspirational, and, though it may in specific be subjective, there is something in beauty that goes beyond the subjective, not into an objective realm (as does truth) but into a transcendent one that is in its own way bigger than man. The ancient Greeks referred to this aspirational ideal as arete: excellence. Christians, Jews, and Muslims see it in their transcendent God and rightly understand that it is universal through its transcendence.

Though we may all judge beauty by our own standards, we all have a sense of excellence—thus of beauty—when we see it. Excellence of form, excellence of execution, excellence of aesthetics, excellence of being. Beauty is not merely that which people believe to be pleasing to the eye or mind; it is that which exhibits arete. Beauty is that which is excellent in that which it intends to be.

Beauty is therefore a necessary virtue in a society that will flourish because it is, above all else, that which encourages and defines flourishing. Truth, by comparison, is merely necessary, but it is not sufficient. Truth is all head with no heart. Without beauty to grant inspiration and aspiration, truth is cold and even demoralizing. We may obtain right answers and thus avoid certain calamities, but we have little to live for in a perfectly orderly brutalist world. Truth is science; beauty is art, and thus beauty is humanity. Beauty is that supplemental necessity which inspires us and enables our subjectivity in a way that is not merely selfish but that, in its transcendence, lifts us up and all others with us. Beauty is what makes life worth living. It is also what makes that which is worth doing well worth doing at all. Beauty grants sufficiency to life.

The call to center beauty in a post-Woke world is a call to a Second Renaissance that pulls humanity up and out of the cynical, pessimistic mire of modernism and postmodernism. It is a call to aspire to excellence for the sake of excellence in everything that can be made excellent. Beauty—excellence—is the opportunity to elevate whatever it is we do to the highest level, and it is what reminds us that the hard slog of life is worth living, if only for the rare glimpse of that which stirs man through its beauty. Beauty is a call to be better in everything we do, build, and aspire to be. It is a cornerstone of a flourishing post-Woke world.

Liberty

No society is worth inhabiting if it is not geared to secure the liberty of its citizens. Liberty—the birthright of man—is therefore a necessary condition of any flourishing society and the chief object that any functioning state must secure for its citizens. Liberty, which Woke ideology threatens in its relentless bid for power (which it confuses with empowerment), is thus a necessary component of a post-Woke society and is its third core value.

As the Woke have successfully leveraged, and as the great Liberals of the Enlightenment realized, liberty exists in uneasy tension with two important forces: security and liberty itself. Liberty is freedom, and freedom is dangerous. When a man finds himself in dangerous circumstances, though, he is less able to be as free as he would be in safer conditions. In such situations, he is constrained to do what he must to secure his own well-being, or that of others for whom he will voluntarily sacrifice, in place of what he might otherwise do and enjoy more. He must go according to the situation—that is, recognize and act in accordance with the truth—or risk losing everything. Security is therefore productive of liberty and restrictive of it, placing them in tension. Further, my liberty and your liberty exist in a similar uneasy tension because what I choose to do in my own freedom may well restrict yours, or vice-versa. In this regard, liberty is a balancing act between many individuals who must find ways to come to agreements—called societies—that, ideally, maximize every individual’s liberties as they exist in tension with one another.

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