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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   9995 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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Is wokism fundamentally the same thing as so called "slave morality?"

The way this issue came up for me is that a few threads back I claimed the following:

I think wokeness is the current name for a phenomenon which has infested Western culture for thousands of years.

So for example, consider biblical accounts of Jesus, who supposedly stood up for prostitutes and adulteresses. And proclaimed the poor are blessed, for theirs is the holy kingdom. While at the same time, stating that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

In other words, the idea of revering and exalting low status, marginalized groups while dunking on the (perceived) elites -- as a way of virtue signalling -- is an old idea. it's difficult to see it going away any time soon.

To which another individual responded as follows:

Slave morality.

I was only vaguely familiar with the concept of "slave morality" so I had to look it up. This actually seems like the sort of thing for which AI might give an intelligent answer; here's what I found:

Slave morality, a concept by Nietzsche, is a value system originating from the weak and oppressed (like early Christians) that inverts the values of the powerful "master morality" out of resentment (ressentiment), turning traits like weakness, humility, and pity into virtues while labeling the masters' strengths (power, pride, wealth) as "evil". It's a reactive morality focused on equality, fairness, and protecting the vulnerable, contrasting with master morality's affirmation of strength, nobility, and self-creation.

Key Characteristics of Slave Morality

Origin: Arises from the powerless who lack the ability to act on their own will, leading to a reactive stance against their oppressors. Core Emotion: Driven by ressentiment (resentment, envy) towards those with power and status. Value Inversion: Redefines "good" as what the weak possess (humility, patience, kindness) and "evil" as what the strong have (pride, power, aggression). Focus: Emphasizes justice, equality, pity, and the alleviation of suffering for the downtrodden. Goal: Subtly seeks to overthrow the masters by making their values seem corrupt, ultimately aiming for universal mediocrity or control through subversion, not direct strength.

This does seem to ring a bell, but I think there's an important difference. In the drama of "slave morality," there are two players, the masters and the slaves.

By contrast, wokeness follows what Lawrence Auster used to call the "liberal script"

The answer is found in the “script” of modern liberalism, into which all phenomena in liberal society are automatically fitted. As I have explained before, the liberal script has three characters: (1) the liberal, who represents the principle of goodness, defined as compassion toward and inclusion of nonwhites/non-Westerners and other victims; (2) the non-liberal, who represents the principle of evil, defined as greed, discrimination, and intolerance toward nonwhites/non-Westerners and other victims; and (3) the nonwhite/non-Westerner or other victim, who is not a moral actor in his own right or even a fully formed human being, because his very function in the script is not to do anything but rather to be the passive recipient either of the liberal’s goodness or the non-liberal’s wickedness. If the nonwhite/non-Westerner were a moral actor, then his own actions, including his bad actions, would have to be judged. But to judge him negatively would be to discriminate against him, which would be to violate the very meaning and purpose of liberalism—the elimination of all discrimination against nonwhites/non-Westerners. Therefore the nonwhite/non-Westerner cannot be seen as a moral actor—as a human being who acts and is responsible for his actions.

In other words, there is (in my opinion) a third and key set of players in the wokeness movement -- elites (or aspiring elites) who pursue self-aggrandizement by advocating on behalf of Nietzsche's "slaves."

So it might be better to call it "striver morality" as opposed to "slave morality."

Said it before, will say it again. It's not uniquely Western or even Christian. An Indian Army general echoed the same thing nearly verbatim in 1988. Psychology calls it Martyr complex. I don't think wokeness is anything that sophisticated. It only works specifically for the interests of women, blacks, muslims and LGBT over men, straights and whites. The "oppression" bit is just moral cover for that fact. The biggest beneficiaries of DEI are white women, irregardless of income brackets. Western society and IMO human nature tend to be very gynocentric, that is why we care so much about issues that affect women, and causes that they care about generally.

The biggest beneficiaries of DEI are white women, irregardless of income brackets.

I didn't see anything in that article to support that claim. Closest was this:

Affirmative Action and White Women
Research from the National Bureau of Economic Research indicates that white women have been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action in education and the workplace. While affirmative action was designed to level the playing field for racial minorities, white women have received a larger share of new job opportunities in previously male-dominated fields.

However, like most points in the article, it's uncited. Although since she as a BIPOC has other ways of knowing, perhaps I should just be quiet while a Black woman is speaking instead of Noticing her general lack of citations. And in what is basically a codified trope now when it comes to blacks writing about racial matters, she does not clarify whether she is talking about per capita or not, nor is it apparent if she understands the concept of per capita in the first place.

Naturally, upon a Googling there are quite a few NBER papers that discuss women, non-Asian minorities, and affirmative action, so it's unclear what research she has in mind. It’s also possible she doesn’t have any actual research in mind and was just regurgitating a passphrase she read elsewhere. One paper from the search results caught my eye, though.

In the context of federal contractors and subcontractors, the paper suggests the "affirmative action program [] is generally ineffective for women, although it has been effective for minorities." And by ineffective, he means "affirmative action has contributed negligibly to women's progress in the workplace." The author explains:

affirmative action under the contract compliance program appears to have played a relatively minor role in increasing employment opportunities for white females, in contrast to its demonstrated effectiveness for blacks of either sex...

In multiple regressions, black female employment share increases significantly faster in contractor than in noncontractor establishments. While the impact across specific occupations differs, the overall demand shift induced by affirmative action for black females is comparable in magnitude to that observed for black males.

Note that the paper is from 1989. It's darkly hilarious how long affirmative action has been around, when for some reason many people seem to think it started sometime in the 201Xs. I'm going to tell my children that affirmative action was invented after Saint Floyd was brutally murdered by a MAGA insurgent in 2020.

Especially within education, it doesn't pass the sniff test that white women have been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action, especially on a per capita basis. Women have similar average IQs as men (or exhibit a modest deficit if you're Hanania-pilled), but blacks have substantially lower average IQs than whites. Thus, there's a lot more ground to make-up in the latter case through affirmative action.

Indeed, Table 2 and Table 6 of this paper show that, in the 80s and 90s, the black-white coefficient (expressed as an odds ratio) was 4x larger than that of the female-male coefficient from logistic regressions modeling undergraduate admission chances at elites schools. The authors remark that "[f]emale candidates have 50 percent better odds of being admitted than their statistically equivalent male counterparts" in contrast to the 450% increase for being black instead of white. I didn’t see the analogous figure quoted for female vs. male, but the authors additionally report that being black instead of white was worth +230 points on the SAT; being black instead of Asian was worth +280 points on the SAT.

I imagine the female-male coefficient has further shrunk since then, given undergraduate females now outnumber males (thus presumably less need for pro-female affirmative action). I do believe in ${CurrentDay} there are larger affirmative action preferences given to women at the graduate level for admissions, and in hiring and promotion decisions in academia and industry (especially in sectors like tech and finance), but this would still pale in comparison to the racial preferences given to blacks.

Now back to the original article complaining that women have always been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action. It Just so Happens the proposed next steps involve transferring ever moar money and opportunities from whites towards blacks and latinos, especially black and latina women. She does some ducking and weaving in bouncing between talking about "Black and Latina women," "Black, Latina, and Indigenous women," and "Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian individuals." For the aforementioned third category, she has this to say:

Understanding who benefits most from DEI programs is essential to making them more effective and equitable. While it’s encouraging that white women have gained more access to leadership roles, true diversity means ensuring that all marginalized groups—including Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian individuals—experience similar upward mobility.

Considering racial benefits given to blacks and latinos often come at the expense of Asians, this sounds amusingly like she's threatening Asians. I came away with a similar feeling after reading that article as I did after reading OU Samantha’s Essay—namely, feeling slightly dumber.

Note that the paper is from 1989. It's darky hilarious how long affirmative action has been around, when for some reason many people seem to think it started sometime in the 201Xs.

Yes. On of my relatives was a career US military officer, and he described to me the methods through which his branch incentivized recruiters to find diverse applicants (this would have been roughly around 1989, a few years in either direction IIRC).

It seems to me like that the opinion that things just went off the rails recently is very common. I suspect there are a few reasons for this, one of them being the ability of the internet to form a coherent counter-consensus against institutional power, and one of them being that the forces of woke or whatever you want to call them really overextended in the 201Xs, using rhetoric that diverged from the more defensible "make society better for the marginalized" and veered into "make society worse for the unmarginalized." And then finally it seems to me that given the above, there is a very strong incentive for many people who see themselves in the middle to say "woah woah woah, [consequences downstream of X] are clearly too far," while glossing question of whether or not X should be removed since it caused the downstream consequences because fundamentally they support X, or something like X.

There are probably some other reasons I am not thinking of, but I find it interesting that, even though affirmative action has always been controversial, it seems like opposition to it has really been consolidating into something that might actually "stick" beyond grumbling about political correctness. It's interesting to me that this turn took about a generation, perhaps 1.5 generations ("affirmative action" dates to 1961) for the wheel to turn this far. A real reminder of both how slow and how fast society can change.

I do, however, suspect this may have happened before – with progressive overreach in the 1960s and 1970s fueling backlash leading to Nixon and Reagan. So I wonder if part of the "reason many people seem to think it started sometime in the 201Xs" is simply because a lot of younger people had grown up in an era where progressives/leftists were more chastened (Clinton) and cautious about letting their most radical members steal the microphone and run away with it. But by the time of Obama, they had grown overconfident again (and people who would have pushed for more moderation were aging and sidelined or dead or retired) so the fringes ran away with the microphone and now we're getting Nixon all over again. As one of the younger people, I'm not sure if it's different this time, but it does seem to me that, however you slice it, the question of wokeness definitely goes far back beyond 201X.

Wokeism is the opposite of slave morality. It is a tool of the elite to beat its own population. It is a way for a corrupt oligarchy to claim that their subjects are evil, undeserving and morally reprehensible. Wokeisms purpose is to invert noblesse oblige.

is a tool of the elite to beat its own population

BASED AND FACTUAL

Wokeness is slave morality because it's a Christian blank slatism with the numbers filed off, original sin replaced with racism/colonialism and no Jesus/salvation sin forgiveness figure. Thus transitively it is also slave morality as its ideological source.

Eh, "slave morality" is just a boolight. I ignore any comment that invokes it, because they are trying too hard to edgelord.

If you're objecting to the word 'slave', then it can easily be euphemized as a superior/inferior axis. The meaning does not change.

Wokeness is the emanation of the brown/LGBT/feminist ressentiment against the spectre of 'white supremacy', which has expanded from mere racism to the entirety of what we would consider to be western civilization. Jealous iconoclasm and seething historical revisionism aside, is this not a collection of inferior moralities, of 'oppressions', trying to find a common superior morality to abhor?

You may disagree with Nietzsche, you may even disagree with people who use his concepts rhetorically, but it is absolutely not a boolight. It is being used in its intended purpose.

And yet here you are... Merry Christmas

And the same to you. Just finished cooking, serving up, and eating the dinner, so am now in a turkey-and-carbs stupor and noodling around online while I digest the meal and work up an appetite later on for "filling up the corners" 🎅

One of Scott's best recent works is a deep dive on the modern embrace of slave morality and he explains a lot of social and artistic trends that have been bothering him.

Matt Yglesias Considered as the Nietzschean Superman

you may not be interested in slave morality, but slave morality is interested in you. Master morality isn’t interested in you - the masters are out achieving things and conquering places, they’re not going to take time out of their day to turn missionary and “convert” you to master morality too2. But slave moralists are obsessed with ideological purity and invested in cutting down anybody who’s less slave moralist than they are. Even if you find it easy to avoid yourself, you need to be prepared to live in a slave morality world.

...

Parts of this vibe shift still confuse me, but the zoomed-out version seems clear enough. The old pro-embiggening world was complicit in moral catastrophes - racism, colonialism, the Holocaust, the destruction of much of the natural world. At some point these atrocities caught up to and outpaced its very real accomplishments, and society stopped being proud of itself and shifted to a harm-reduction approach. Nobody comes out and says outright that harm reduction necessarily has to mean doing as little as possible and trying to make yourself smaller and less impressive and sadder and uglier until you curl up into a tiny point and disappear. But “slave morality” and “master morality” are attractors; if you select too hard for part of one, you end up with the whole package

He doesn't use the word "wokeness" in this post but you can read between the lines.

Warning: it is long, even for a Scott post.

Highly recommended. I literally didn't understand the concept of master vs. slave morality until reading this post, and then huge chunks of modern culture began to slot into place for me.

(from Scott's piece -- thanks for referencing it, it's nice to see he's still sometimes not completely pozzed -- by which I mean fully accepting of one particular form of slave morality)

Some right-wingers have responded to the piece, but their responses are mostly “but I like being bad and cruel” - which seems to prove Bulldog’s point.

I think we can do better - that it’s possible to make a case against “slave morality” that doesn’t rely on being pro-badness and cruelty.

You can't, though. Not with the slave morality definitions of badness and cruelty, which e.g. require that I bankrupt myself saving all of Pete Singer's drowning kids -- it's cruel for me to allow them to drown and bad for me to restrict them so they can't keep jumping in the lake. You either have to argue over the definitions of badness and cruelty, or yeschad.jpg. Guess which is master morality?

But also, don’t we like altruism? When we’re bestriding the Earth like colossi, working on our glorious rocket ships to colonize the universe, isn’t part of what we’re thinking “this is going to revolutionize humankind and make everybody better off?”

It becomes a lot less altruistic if you add in "...and I will be the one who did it", as the people who do that rather typically do. People with master morality will sometimes make everyone better off for their own glory. Elon Musk, yes, but also Andrew Carnegie and many others.

Not with the slave morality definitions of badness and cruelty, which e.g. require that I bankrupt myself saving all of Pete Singer's drowning kids -- it's cruel for me to allow them to drown and bad for me to restrict them so they can't keep jumping in the lake.

I don't follow. Why can't one say slave morality is stupid and disregard it and be a yeschad.jpg that tithes 10% to EA charities and selfishly spends the remaining 90% on themselves?

It becomes a lot less altruistic if you add in "...and I will be the one who did it", as the people who do that rather typically do. People with master morality will sometimes make everyone better off for their own glory. Elon Musk, yes, but also Andrew Carnegie and many others.

Getting rich while building great things and doing noble deeds for status (which can be cashed in for hedonic utilons) still seems strictly better than doing ugly things just for money to cash in for hedonic utilons. The first one is more altruistic, even if it's just as selfish at its core.

I see the point of Scott's article as an appeal to give the status to the first kind and not mistake the second kind as status worthy.

and bad for me to restrict them so they can't keep jumping in the lake.

I don't think this holds for most of Christian history. Yes, you had to fish the babies out of Roman trash heaps. I don't think Christians, once they had the power, were against using it for their own good.

It becomes a lot less altruistic if you add in "...and I will be the one who did it", as the people who do that rather typically do. People with master morality will sometimes make everyone better off for their own glory. Elon Musk, yes, but also Andrew Carnegie and many others.

This fits Alfred Nobel, who gave his money to do something to glorify his name after the invention of dynamite. But...this is slave morality too no? He already achieved something great, yet he was so guilty he needed to do something to atone. All great men possess agency, but they're not really free of slave morality either.

Bill Gates already was a great man, giving away his money to strangers merely to improve their lives (some might cynically say as a way of washing off his more unsavory reputation as Microsoft's ruthless head), hell this entire notion of billionaires handing off their money is pretty Christian (it's of dubious acceptability in Islam iirc).

I'm pretty sure Gates gives money away to strangers to control their lives. He says he "fights poverty and disease" but damnit the recipients will do it the Gates Foundation way. Nobel certainly seemed more guilt-ridden. A purer version of what I mean is those whose main business makes people's lives better; this applies to Musk and Bezos and Carnegie -- his steel business rather than his later philanthropy.

I think it depends in how strict we are with our definitions of master morality. If saving children is considered neutral, having possessions is virtuous, and losing possessions means losing virtue then yeah, you are right. But consider another perspective: You will not save every child on earth, but you will save every kid in your local community. This way you are perhaps still losing a lot of possessions. Your nice suit, the money you had in your wallet when jumping into the pond, maybe you invest in people to watch the shores and so on. But in return, you become a pillar of the community. Someone that people look up to because you embody a kind of intrinsic worth. Meanwhile, your community is enriched by the presence of young people which over time can make you more virtuous. They might buy stuff from you and make you richer. You might compete with them and win.

Same goes for the virtuous warlord. From one perspective, the virtue comes from your conquests through slaughter. From another, the virtue is in your ability to best others. In that case, the virtue is there whether you choose to fight or not. If there is no just cause for a war, then you can surely use your abilities in different ways that benefit your people and still shows how virtuous you are in that sense.

You will not save every child on earth, but you will save every kid in your local community. This way you are perhaps still losing a lot of possessions. Your nice suit, the money you had in your wallet when jumping into the pond, maybe you invest in people to watch the shores and so on. But in return, you become a pillar of the community. Someone that people look up to because you embody a kind of intrinsic worth. Meanwhile, your community is enriched by the presence of young people which over time can make you more virtuous.

What master morality has a problem with (and thus the problem that slave morality has with it) is not doing good. It's not that the master never does anything good or nice, or that he doesn't do so on even just pragmatic grounds. Even a pagan aristocrat like Caesar saw reason to be seen as liberal and generous (generosity coming out of overflowing capacity is okay).

It's the leap to "okay, but you can help everyone in your community". It's the totalizing, the flattening. There's no community, this is an idea from slave societies. We're not equals. Some people are better than others and their capacities matter more. In fact, caring about everybody denies them the aristocratic surplus they need to achieve their potential.

To use an example: let's say a Frenchman could sell the Mona Lisa to a billionaire who really wants to burn it and, in exchange a million nondescript, randomly selected people across the globe (no Frenchmen) will be saved from death. The part of him that feels this is either obviously right or not easily argued against is slave morality. The part that recoils sheds light on the impulse behind master morality. There's just something here worth more than some people's lives. And that impulse would almost certainly be called cruel if articulated, if it came down to a choice.

You are proposing a solution that ignores the tradeoffs. I cannot save the children and invest in people to watch the shores and so on, because I have limited resources. If I spend them saving the children I will never get to the point of having enough to hire other people to watch the shores. I could take something like Carnegie's view and let the kids drown until I'm rich enough to do something about it without destroying myself, but slave morality would reject that as "cruel".

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