Contra Paul Graham on Wokeness

PG focuses on the stylistic difference and misses the substantive one

PG misses the mark in his recent essay explaining wokeness, thinking it’s more of a stylistic difference rather than a substance one.

He defines wokeness as “An aggressively performative focus on social justice.” By doing this, he concedes that the woke are correct (implying that differences between groups are a problem worth solving), but just thinks the way they’re going about it is the problem.

I prefer a different definition of wokeness, one that gets at the heart of the substantive difference: Wokeness prioritizing the reduction of outcome-disparities (i.e. equity) ahead of equal treatment under the law (i.e. liberty) Put differently, wokeness is believing that inequality between groups of people is a problem that we should try to solve. Or that government should try to bring about equality of opportunity.

"The woke movement had some good points, they just took it too far" is a line of thinking which enabled wokeness in the first place. Because they just responded with something like the below:

"If you care about X, why can’t you care even more? Oh, you don’t care that much? Well then you must be a hypocrite.”

Or: "How can you say you care about equality if you don't have equal outcomes at all levels of the organization? How can you have equality of opportunity if parents have different wealth and thus opportunities to provide to their children….Do you care about equality of opportunity or not?" This is how people took a concept like equality of opportunity and turned it into a mutated form of communism.

Think about it. At what point would people say "we accomplished our goal, we don’t need more progress?”.

When racial/biological groups are equal economically.

But they’d reply “We won’t get equality of outcome, we’ll get fair, equality of opportunity capitalism, which we’ve never had”.

Motte and bailey. 'Equality' is of course 'equity' in practice.

They’d say they do *not* believe in equality of outcome, but they *do* believe in equality of opportunity. But if you think about it for five minutes, equality of opportunity and equality of outcome lead to the same exact thing. Meaning: when the goal is *equal* opportunity there's no morally acceptable line until you get to total equality of outcome. You don't just stop & say "OK, we have equal opportunity now". There’s always more work to be done. The work is only competed when everything is equal, otherwise there’s still more progress to make. That’s what progress *is* for them, otherwise they wouldn’t talk about reducing disparities in the first place. There is no acceptable disparity these people have given. Zero disparity is the goal.

Of course, you can’t have equality of opportunity without equality of outcome in every dimension. People don’t have the same parents, the same cultures, the same places of birth. If people have different outcomes, they have different opportunities. You can’t equalize opportunity without equalizing outcomes. You can give more opportunities by putting more resources on education, healthcare, poverty reduction etc, but that will never *equalize* opportunity. If people mean *sufficient opportunity*, not *equal*, use that term! But they don't, so the motte and bailey persists.

They deny the connection of course because equality of outcome is politically unfeasible. To be fair to them, they genuinely don't believe they are advocating for it in the first place. In practice it's: "I would never advocate for wokeness, I just advocate for all of the policies that would create and enforce wokeness."

Which is why there's no such thing as anti-woke, pro-equality of opportunity. Because the only way to equalize opportunity (aka outcomes) is a massive expansion of state power as well as a cultural movement around censorship and discrimination (DEI). Otherwise, you're not really prioritizing equality of opportunity.

In order to not be woke, you have to say, we're *not* striving for *equal* opportunity anymore, we're *not* trying to use the government to *reduce* inequality between biological groups. We're not using the government to address historical wrongs.

Equality under the law is the only true equality, and of course it leads to inequality in practice, since inequality is the natural state of the world. We can focus on raising the floor without reducing the ceiling — even if that means increasing inequality.

Wokeness isn't over when we stop having tampons in the bathroom or struggle sessions in companies. Wokeness is over when the government stops trying to socially engineer economic outcomes based on biological characteristics. Wokeness is over when we stop tracking those characteristics (and the differential outcomes between them) in the first place.

PG is so close to understanding this — he actually wrote a great essay years ago about how inequality is a necessary byproduct of societal flourishing and got a ton of flak for it but he was right. Now he just needs to abstract the same logic to inequality between groups. His original post on inequality significantly improved the discourse at the time and moved us all closer to truth. Hopefully the feedback to his post on wokeness returns the favor.