@dr_analog comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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omw_68 10hr ago

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."

Context

dr_analog top 1% of underdog fetishists omw_68 9hr ago · Edited 9hr ago

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.

The_Nybbler If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner. dr_analog 7hr ago

(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.

dr_analog top 1% of underdog fetishists The_Nybbler 3hr ago · Edited 3hr ago

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?

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.

The_Nybbler If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner. dr_analog 1hr ago

Because giving 10% to the enemy when you can give 0% to the enemy is stupid. Even where EA doesn't veer off to the left and go full woke, or waste money on a Berkeley Villian Lair, they miss the boat; there they were, buying mosquito nets, when they should have been put a lot more money into malaria vaccines.

Your language bakes the assumptions of slave morality into it. Building great things is ALREADY good; you don't need to take the money and do "noble" things with it.

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