Anna Krylov called my attention to this articl at the site The Gadfly, which appears to be run by Frederick Alexander—someone I’ve never run across before. His article gives ten phrases associated with wokeness, four of which I really detest. I’ll put them all below the screenshot (click it to read the article), and perhaps you can guess which four curl the soles of my shoes.

Alexander’s phrases are in bold, and all of his words are indented. My few comments are flush left. He begins with an introduction about how the burgeoning of DEI after George Floyd’s death in 2020 has led to embedding certain phrases in woke language. Some of them are well familiar to me, while others are not.

Part of the intro:

It’s tempting to look back on those events as if they were a curious aberration, a moment of hysteria brought about by lockdown cabin fever. Today, it’s common to hear that “woke is dead” – and it’s true that many DEI programmes have been shut down or rebranded. The finger-wagging sanctimony has been toned down a few notches, too.

But what remains is the language: a distinct and unmistakable lexicon with a long half-life. This is the fallout from a blast we thought was long behind us. DEI no longer marches through institutions with a fanfare, but it operates as background radiation. Wave the Geiger counter over policy small print or the latest HR initiative, and you’ll hear the familiar crackling of progressive orthodoxy.

The language has insinuated itself into corporations and public bodies across the Western world, becoming almost invisible through constant repetition. Phrases that sound benign on the surface mask a cold system of enforcement that continues to reward fluency in Newspeak while punishing dissent. Taken together, they form a closed moral system – one that begins with empathy and ends with coercion.

Here are a few phrases you’ve probably heard before.

You can read Alexander’s full explication at the site; I’ll give just a sentence or three that he says about each one. And I’ll add my own short take:

1.) “We’re on a journey.”  The world’s most overused corporate metaphor is also a favourite of institutions haemorrhaging money on failed DEI initiatives. Bud Light went on a journey with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in April 2023 and ended up in corporate hell. The brand lost its spot as America’s top-selling beer, two marketing executives were put on leave, and the whole debacle cost a billion dollars in lost sales

That one I’m not familiar with, nor am I familiar with #2:

2.)  “Bringing your whole self to work”. Silicon Valley invented this one. The idea was that workers would bring their creativity and passion to the job. Instead, they brought their politics and personal grievances.

It turns out there’s only really a problem if your “whole self” doesn’t align with “correct thinking”. Don’t bring your whole Christian self to work – the one who opposes abortion or thinks polygamy is a bad idea. That won’t go down too well. Think national borders might be a good thing? That whole self had better stay away, too. A gender-critical whole self? Don’t be silly. Best put all those whole selves back in their box, or wave your career goodbye.

3.) “Brave conversations. . . We’re talking about “courageous dialogue” with your line manager following an apparent “microaggression”. Turns out you need more training in how to think and when to declare your pronouns.

These conversations tend to begin with an admission of privilege, followed by an acknowledgement of harm, and conclude with a commitment to growth. Actual conversation – the kind where people disagree and minds change – never happens. That’s the wrong sort of bravery. The proper kind is where you confess to thought crimes you didn’t know existed.

I haven’t heard that one, either. Where have I been? After all, I’ve been on campus for decades.

4.) “Educate yourself”.  This is a phrase professional activists and scolds deploy when they can’t defend their position. It’s the go-to for transforming intellectual laziness into moral superiority.

What “educate yourself” really means is this: read the approved texts so as to arrive at the conclusions I agree with – what we used to call indoctrination. Any other outcome is seen as proof of moral and intellectual deficiency.

I’ve used #4 myself, but only when faced with obtuse commenters who make arrant misstatements, usually about evolution. And I don’t use it too often, though of course all of us in academia have heard it used in exactly the sense that Alexander means.

5.) “Psychological safety.” Today, it means an environment where nobody can disagree with progressive orthodoxy without being invited to an HR struggle session. The safest spaces, it turns out, are wherever difficult questions are never asked. Feeling “unsafe” is now what happens when we challenge someone’s views on immigration or question whether men can become pregnant. JK Rowling has spent years being told her defence of women’s spaces makes trans people “unsafe”.

Of course we’ve all heard of “safe spaces,” which is apparently what “psychological safety” means. I’ve never heard that term used, though.

6.) “Lived experience.”  This one refuses to die, which is a tragedy because few ideas on this list have wrought so much chaos and misery as the idea of “lived experience”. A phrase that transforms subjective feelings into unassailable truth, lived experience is invoked again and again to shut down “problematic” questions like “why are you trialling experimental puberty blockers on children as young as 10?”

This is how clinicians at Tavistock were silenced when they raised concerns about rushing children into medical transition. They were told they were “invalidating young people’s lived experience” of gender identity. Evidence-based medicine lost to feelings-based ideology. The Cass Review finally reintroduced rigour, but only after a decade of children used as test subjects.

Or consider Iranian women protesting forced veiling. Western feminists have dismissed them while deferring to the “lived experience” of those women who defend the hijab as empowerment. When evidence becomes inconvenient, personal testimony is invoked as epistemological authority, leaving empirical reasoning nowhere to go.

Several times this one has appeared on my “words and phrases I detest” posts (I need to make more of these). First of all, it’s redundant, since all experience is lived. (Is there such a thing as “unlived experience”?) But, more important, it suggests an alternative form of personal truth, a form that is fundamental to wokeness, is derived from postmodernism, and is explicitly antiempirical.

7.) “Equity, not equality”. Equity used to refer to the value of shares issued by a company. Now it refers to equalising outcomes rather than opportunities. The switch transformed Martin Luther King’s dream into its nightmare opposite.

That’s a terse entry but a true one.  One has to be careful not to mistake the terms.  The problem with ensuring equity is that different groups may have different preferences, which will create inequities despite equal opportunities. Therefore, if you see uneqaual representation of groups, you have to suss out the causes before you start mentioning bigotry, misogyny, and other causes based on prejudice.

8.) “Decolonizing the curriculum.” “Decolonising the curriculum” is largely about treating Western knowledge as inherently suspect because it’s Western. Ideas are judged not by whether they’re true but in terms of their provenance. Plato or Locke are “problematised” rather than argued with. Rejecting classical liberal principles in favour of progressive ones is “challenging power”.

In short, “decolonising the curriculum” is a licence to swap scholarship for grievance. It tells students what they’re meant to feel about the civilisation that built the university they’re attending.

That’s a strong statement, but again largely true.  Certainly non-Western material is unduly neglected in some courses, more often in the humanities than the sciences, but beware of calls to “decolonize” an entire curriculum, particularly in STEMM.

9.) “Be an ally.” Allyship used to mean supporting a cause. Now it means performing endless penance for demographic characteristics you can’t change. The progressive ally must publicly confess privilege, declare solidarity, and accept instruction from activists without question.

It’s the “without question” part that bothers me. I am in agreement with the aims of many “progressive” causes, but don’t necessarily buy into the whole ideology or bag of tactics that go along with them. I prefer just to state where I agree or disagree rather than saying, “I’m an ally” or telling someone else to be one.

10.) “Impact over intent.” A lesser-known phrase, these words ensure your guilt is inescapable. It doesn’t matter what your intentions are; only how others feel about your actions. What’s that you say? You meant no harm? Irrelevant. Someone felt harmed, and that’s all that counts.

I’ve not heard that exact phrase before, but I’m well familiar with what it means and how it would be used. Two examples are the suspension of Professor Greg Patton for saying a Chinese word that sounded superficially like a racial slur, and the firing of an art-history professor at Hamline University who showed her students (with warnings) two famous Muslim paintings that depicted the visage of Muhammad.

I don’t have much to add to what Alexander and I have said above, but wanted to add Alexander’s pessimistic ending, noting first Alexander’s arguable claim that the phrases are the provenance mostly of the privileged.

. . . . much of the language persists because the people who use it pay no price for the harm it causes. HR directors still have jobs and diversity consultants still bill by the hour. The costs are absorbed by those with the least ability to navigate the new moral codes.

A decade from now, these phrases will sound dated, and eventually they’ll fade away. But others will take their place – a vocabulary already incubating in universities and carrying the same assumptions.

This is how ideology colonises institutions in a post-religious age: through a moral language that redefines virtue, reshapes norms, and renders dissent unspeakable long before it becomes the object of cancellation.

Note the emphasis on the moral certainty of the progressive ideologues, something we’ve talked about recently.