POLITICAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
Woke People Embrace Shame to Avoid Being Ashamed of their Shame
The psychology of wokeness is to minimize and reframe shame by making shame a virtue
At first, it seems weird how happy “woke” people are to be put down or abused. They love being told they need to “do more work.” They love how flawed they are. White woke people love how “whiteness” is a problem. Male woke people embrace how “toxic” masculinity is. They gleefully take responsibility for horrible things such as slavery that they are arguably not really responsible for. Even after they do all that “work” you can tell them they are being crappy allies and they will eat that stuff up.
The shame mindset
Here’s my hypothesis.
Think about what it must be like to feel shame all the time. Or be prone to it and feel it much of the time. It’s going to be miserable. And (this is key) a shame-prone person is naturally going to feel shame about their recurring feelings of shame and how fucked up they are.
They naturally go into a downward “shame spiral.”
Then along comes this new life philosophy where feeling shame makes them better (“awakened”) people, and superior to others rather than flawed. It breaks the cycle.
Their response? Yay me!
This explains why woke behavior tends to be self-congratulatory, competitive, and performative as well. Key to this proposed psychology of woke is that wokeness makes people special. If they are not doing it more and better, they are not special anymore.
Shame thus becomes a badge of honor. Guilt is reframed as a sign of intellectual and moral superiority. Rather than endlessly trying to fix themselves, they can move on to the more typical (if odious) pastime of working to fix others.
Shame is pernicious
It’s critical to understand that people who feel shame can’t just shake it off. They are often stuck with it and suffer greatly. (Shame is a diagnostic marker for BPD, PTSD, anxiety disorders, and a host of other issues. Shame is no joke.)
Shame about being ashamed is natural for the chronically shameful, making the naturally persistent feeling self re-inforcing and more persistent.
Wokeness is a solution
It is therefore rather healthy to reframe one’s shame into a virtue rather than descend into a downward spiral of shame-about-shame. It makes sense that ashamed people form a religion of sorts around shame and sin.
Wokeness is not the first, and probably not the last, religion to be formed around some notion of shame or guilt. This approach works for people and it can form the basis of successful movements.
NOTE: Therapy is the real solution
If you are often ashamed, get support around these feelings. I can almost guarantee that you are pretty awesome, and are just the way you are supposed to be. Your suffering is not really about how you are, it is a misapprehension inherited from an earlier time in your life.
Use the Pyschology Today or other directory to find a qualified therapist to help: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/.
Takeaway
I don’t mean to dunk on people with emotional challenges. I think wokeness is somewhat irrational, and seek here to reconcile that irrationality with the gleeful adoption of wokeness by many people.
Just being a little nutty certainly does not make anyone a terrible person. Lots of people do great things for odd reasons. Let’s hope that wokeness works for the woke people who need it, creates some positive change in the world, and does not have too many terrible unintended consequences along the way.
Me, I doubt it. I think wokeness is toxic. But who knows?
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As always, please share this with those you think will benefit from reading it, or who may find it interesting, and I look forward to your comments and insights.
