OnlySubs: Woke Social Snake Oil

Snake oil is fake medicine offered for a real or fake disease, and that’s exactly what the Woke ideology sells us. In this episode of my subscribers-only podcast, James Lindsay OnlySubs, I walk through the idea of snake oil and illustrate how Wokeness is, in fact, a social snake oil that manufactures a disease (systemic oppression) so that it can sell us a “cure” that only makes us sicker (Critical Theory). This designation of Wokeness as social snake oil isn’t merely an attempt to discredit the ideology, however, because it is also instructive about what we should do about it. If the disease is ginned up, we’re under no obligation to change anything substantially from what we were doing before Wokeness came on the scene. This understanding helps us avoid the fallback fertile fallacy of Wokeness, even if the main one fails, that something must be changed or Wokeness never would have been so attractive. Join me to learn more about this view of our ugly social circumstance.