Comment by atoav
6 days ago
Wokeness is like veganism: for every person talking about being vegan you will find 10 guys who complain about vegans, typically unprompted, while eating meat. I had a work collegue who would complain every meal about vegans, although there wasn't a single vegan at the table.
Wokeness is the comparable, I teach at a liberal art university, there are probably few places more "woke" than this. Even here if I count there is probably a 10:1 ratio of "people complaining about woke" vs "people demanding a woke thing".
The feeling that others are judging you from a high horse is a very strong force, even if they aren't judging you at all. And strong forces can be used to manipulate people into making choices against their interest .
There's a key difference though: while vegans are generally proud of being vegan, it's very hard now to find anyone who will admit to being woke or even that a single one of their beliefs is woke. It was only in fashion for a brief period and is now distinctly out of fashion. It's kind of similar to being a hipster—a lot of people get called hipsters, but no one has self-identified as one since probably the early 2010s.
This makes discussions like these inherently slippery and circular. While it's clear that many people do actually hold beliefs that their critics would characterize as woke (as evidenced by real-world impact like master branches being renamed, indigenous land statements, and DEI quotas), they're never going to voluntarily accept a label that has been turned into a pejorative.
This is another observation that doesn't match with my lived reality. The vegans I got to know as such¹ mostly had one moment where they mentioned it: when someone offered them something non-vegan.
Some of them did even mention it only after a meat eater asked them why they are not eating $X.
As mentioned in my live I met only one vegan that smugly and unprompted talked about veganism. And they were the type who would talk that way about literally every topic.
I am generally careful with stories like that. "Trans bathrooms" is another one of those. My institute has non-gendered bathrooms for the past century, mainly for space reasons. And that never was a problem.
If you love meat, but understand the ethical argument behind not eating it, wouldn't it be practical if vegans were smug assholes that you don't have to listen to? That is why some people want them to fulfill that cliché — I am more interested in the truth, especially the truth that has an impact on my direct life.
¹: There ought to be a number of people everybody met, who are vegans, but you don't know they are, because they did not mention it. E.g. my bands drummer (a old punk) is vegan and it took me two years to figure that one out.
Being proud of something doesn’t mean you talk about it unprompted all the time.
I have several friends who are vegan. My point is that they don’t deny it–if you ask them, they’re happy to say “yeah, I’m vegan.”
But people who believe in things that are widely considered woke, like changing ‘master’ branches to ‘main’, usually will deny that they are woke or that they want to change the name for that reason. They’ll tell you it’s about common decency or not offending others and that it has nothing to do with wokeness.
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I agree the hipster comparison is interesting. No one really wanted to be called a hipster either, but you knew who they were. I know I quit identifying as one some time in the late 00s, before the backlash really went mainstream.
The tangent about the hipster trend is interesting. Having grown up in a rural village during the 00s I heard about hipsters long before I ever saw a person who would even remotely fit the cliché.
During that time actual cliché hipsters existed as was apparent (via the internet), but more important to my own life was another aspect: it was a kind of catchall term for people who didn't fit neatly into the usual known groups (Punks, Skaters, Metalheads, Ravers, Emos, ..) or did their own thing. I was connected to my local art scene, most of which have been called hipsters without actually being or remotely looking like hipsters.
Hipster was a degorative for: "Oh you think you're different". The thing was I didn't only think that, I was different. Probably most people on this website here were different from the average person during their teens.
You don't just eat vegan, you are a vegan. The thing to recognize is that these boxes exist to make themselves feel superior. So they put the people whose behavior and existence induces cognitive dissonance into their world view into boxes and pat themselves on their backs whenever they can convince themselves they spotted a marker that proves the person opposite is part of that box.
And before there is a misunderstanding: the boxes can work both ways. People within a box can hate on those outside of it and vice versa — and both feel superior to the other. The point is that people ascribe certain attributes to the boxes and use it to paint simplistic pictures of the world around them, precisely because it makes them feel better. Made a certain food choice? Congrats, idiots now think you're smug.
And I am not even vegan. I just try to look past the boxes as life is much more nuanced and much richer behind them.
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Because 1 in 10 (for examples) vegans are calling meat eaters as cruel murderers. And that becomes the image of vegans because they are the noisy ones.
There might be some survivorship bias at play here, as by definition you'll only get to know someone's a vegan because he's a noisy one. Those who eat in peace and leave others alone are not memorable - same goes for antivegans.
Theees a comment on the exact same subject I found interesting yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682623
> as by definition you'll only get to know someone's a vegan because he's a noisy one
You never eat lunch with colleagues? Never eat dinner with family and their significant others?
It is very hard to hide that you are a vegan.
Yeah? That is what some meaties keep telling me too — but personally I have only met one such vegan in my life and they were obviously deeply troubled by other things as well. All others merely kept to themselves and only talked about it when someone else prompted them. And that someone else was often a meaty with a: "Oh you are a vegan? Now explain THIS".
I don't know about you, but I don't give a damn about made up problems that aren't part of my life. Don't get me wrong, I can totally imagine smug vegans. I just made the observation that 99 percent of the ones I met would receive a disservice if I went under the assumption that "all vegans are smug assholes".
Similarily my assumption for meat eaters isn't that all of them are assholes. But I observed there are people who are so triggered by the mere thought of vegans existing, they can't stop talking about it or demanding from any supposed vegan that they explajn themselves — so the exact thing they claim vegans do.
(footnote: I am not vegan myself)