An interesting article by Brett Stevens over at Amerika.org, linking woke with Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel, Notes from the Underground (1864). The novel is an intense Russian piece of philosophical prose, where an embittered narrator engages in a philosophical critique of Russian philosophies of the time, such as determinism (humans have no free will), and nihilism (there are no objective values and meaning to human life). Interesting as that is, Stevens draws a connection to modern day woke, or what back in the day we called political correctness. The woke embody the same fatalistic sense of historical inevitability that the Russian nihilists had, and at the end of the day, their ultimate values are nihilistic too, as they embrace destruction with nothing of any substance to replace that which they break. “The woke live lives where their malfunctioning livers produce an overabundance of the all-consuming bile of envy. To avoid self-acidification, this corrosive envy is externalized via hostility to the people and the society around them. An ANTIFA meeting consisting of a few goofy guys munching Riot Ribs and killing brewskis utterly fails until another person’s property gets set aflame. It’s never a party for the woke until something winds up just as broken as they are.”
The events of 2020 with the burning down of cities by black clad, face masked antifa, could just as easily be bomb-throwing 19th century Russian nihilists.