Where Woke Was Wonderful

A Habermasian take on Burn Culture

Namaste Fellow Humans,

In my forthcoming book I use Jürgen Habermas’s distinction between The Lifeworld (the messy, day to day reality of personal lives) and The System (the bureaucratic structures that and institutions that coldly govern our behaviors with rewards and punishments). While I spend a lot of energy fighting leftwing and rightwing authoritarianism (mainly leftwing authoritarianism as expressed by academia’s bureaucracy), I was recently invited to spend 4 days with an almost exclusively left-leaning tribe at a regional Burn, and I was reminded why I refuse to condemn any given political tribe, even if I disagree with them, because our shared humanity and the embracing of the individual is always the most important way to orient one’s self towards social reality.

You couldn’t waterboard me into saying a single bad word about any of the people I met at the Burn. I’ve never felt so completely loved and accepted, and one special person in particular was so incredible that she made me howl with her massage technique (at 5 o’clock in the morning) such that my new Hippie/Burn name is now ‘Coyote.’

I didn’t gather anyone’s consent from the Burn I attended, so here’s a publicly available image of a similar event.

Whereas when Systemic Wokeness enforces Critical Theory-based DEI rules and protocols (e.g., Human Resource training manuals, “education” materials, speech codes, etc.) it makes me resentful (and rebellious) AF at the attempt to non-consensually dominate my mind and person, being willingly welcomed into a culture of Lifeworld Wokeness, where those exact same values are consensually and voluntarily upheld by everyone participating was amazingly healthy for me at every possible level.

Systemic Wokeness is terrible because it’s upheld by the fear of losing one’s job, and possibly one’s entire career (note - I’m also co-authoring an in-progress book on whatever happened for those of us who got cancelled for Wrongthink in academia), but the enforcement of social norms in Lifeworld Wokeness is through shared social norms, not unlike the social rules of not swearing in church in front of children. Sure, you -could- refuse to use someone’s pronouns at a Burn, just like you -could- use the f-word in front of someone’s kids at a church, and the consequences would be the same: People would kind of just think you’re a jerk and try to prompt you to better conform to that group’s linguistic norms.

Experiencing Leftwing culture in a setting where it’s voluntarily upheld, I re-remembered that I don’t hate actually hate ‘wokeness’ per se; I hate authoritarianism. I completely despise being -told- to do the whole pronoun thing (as do a number of transpeople I know), but I actually really like and enjoy the company of lots of trans, non-binary people, and intersex people. Granted, the activists are infuriating to deal with and they make all kinds of unreasonable demands of people far outside of their culture, but the flesh and blood people I spend time with in the real world are actually great company. I know my using their preferred names and pronouns makes them happy, and because I like making them happy I love using those words and seeing the joy in their faces. Making someone I care about happy in the Lifeworld is a -fundamentally- a different kind of thing than having to do it under threat in the System.

When the culture of Wokeness is voluntarily consented to, as it was at the Burn, every single human-to-human encounter I had was joyful, loving, kind, empathetic, wonderful, embracing, and down right fucking magickal. 1,500+ people, all determined to be as cool as possible to everyone they were going to meet. Everyone there was celebrated for getting as crazy as possible within the bounds of consent, just like all of the other counter-cultures I’ve been grateful to be a part of throughout my life (punk was the first place I ever found my real self) and every single last sub-culture that I’ve explored since those days has provided an incredible opportunity for self-expression and self-understanding, with many of them being Left-coded.

Oh to be young again. My bio can be found here.

So I understand the instinct to take that magical, transformative energy and apply it to the whole wide world - There are none so pious as the newly converted, after all. So while I continue to fight with all of my strength against the imposition of this energy against the general population against their will, especially within a profit-based neoliberal-driven context, I must concede that this way of life they want to forcefully impose on all of us is, within appropriate boundaries, is actually pretty fucking cool.

Mad love to all my new hippy brothers, sisters, and gender explorers. We may not agree on everything, but that doesn’t mean, and never will mean, that I don’t love y’all. As my favorite Yoga Instructor likes to say, “May Your Thoughts Filter Through Your Heart As You Speak Your Truth.”