I wonder if the phenomenon of "mission creep" is related to the "definitional creep" you're highlighting here. A classic example of "mission creep" would be the March of Dimes continuing to exist after fulfilling its purpose of eradicating polio in children.
My line of thinking would be something like: Organization Anti-Xism exists to combat Xism. The level of overt Xism in society that the Organization can identify and defeat decreases to a point where the there isn't enough overt Xism around to keep all of the members of the Organization busy. Instead of scaling down its operation, the Organization has to change its target while maintaining (at least definitionally) its old mission. To save face, the new mission has to be called the same thing as the old mission even though it has expanded or completely changed course. It would be lame if they changed the mission statement from "eradicate Xism" to "eradicate way less dangerous and consequential instances of kinda-maybe Xism." Maybe the same thing happens on a smaller scale with activists whose mission becomes less necessary and who don't want to take the time and effort to identify and master a new field of activism.
(I get that the March of Dimes is not perfectly analogous, since its mission formally changed from eradicating childhood polio to promoting women's and young children's health in general. But I think it's the same species of thing.)
Perhaps this phenomenon would be akin to the phenomenon described in the classic Oscar Wilde-attributed quote, "“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” Perhaps the activism is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding activist class.
This could also be causally related to elite overproduction.
Where this gets interesting to me is when you start to think about it in terms of separating out the commanders from the mob. The commanders, your Kendis and your AOC's and such don't care about wokeness, or at least don't have to. They have high-prestige careers and lots of Twitter followers. But your average very woke person *has* to care a lot; it's where they get their prestige and value.
Woke itself is a proposition of being good relative to other people. So as you said there's a diminishing return as everybody else comes up to par; they have to start picking on smaller and smaller issues, or different less obvious issues, to stay part of the moral elite. Eventually you have someone so specialized that most of human existence is in their "things I'll call out as horrifying" bucket. Right now that's a lot of people.
The commanders, who don't care about wokeness except as a tool, are fine with this as long as it doesn't turn back on them. So occasionally they feed someone to them; there's no difficulty doing this, because any amount of highlighting will pull thousands and thousands of people out of the woodwork to destroy the target. Since anything is racist, anyone can BE a racist. Otherwise they just have to stay enough-less-bad than the right to avoid fire.
I think this is coming to an end, though. The cool kids, the keep-ahead-of-social-stuff people are already sort of abandoning wokeness. You can see it on reddit or twitter or tiktok; people are getting tired of it and moving on. Your average person who is still very woke who shows up in your feed seems much more "this is all I have that gives me value" than they used to. I have friends who argue I'm wrong, but I think there's a timer on the whole thing that will be up in the next 2-3 years.
I think (and hope) you're right on the 2-3 years thing.
On the commanders-footsoldiers piece, I saw an intriguing Twitter thread talking about this recently, here: https://twitter.com/LinManuelRwanda/status/1457796393800663045. Just passing along, not necessarily agreeing with it or promoting it. Thought it was interesting.
I wonder if the phenomenon of "mission creep" is related to the "definitional creep" you're highlighting here. A classic example of "mission creep" would be the March of Dimes continuing to exist after fulfilling its purpose of eradicating polio in children.
My line of thinking would be something like: Organization Anti-Xism exists to combat Xism. The level of overt Xism in society that the Organization can identify and defeat decreases to a point where the there isn't enough overt Xism around to keep all of the members of the Organization busy. Instead of scaling down its operation, the Organization has to change its target while maintaining (at least definitionally) its old mission. To save face, the new mission has to be called the same thing as the old mission even though it has expanded or completely changed course. It would be lame if they changed the mission statement from "eradicate Xism" to "eradicate way less dangerous and consequential instances of kinda-maybe Xism." Maybe the same thing happens on a smaller scale with activists whose mission becomes less necessary and who don't want to take the time and effort to identify and master a new field of activism.
(I get that the March of Dimes is not perfectly analogous, since its mission formally changed from eradicating childhood polio to promoting women's and young children's health in general. But I think it's the same species of thing.)
Perhaps this phenomenon would be akin to the phenomenon described in the classic Oscar Wilde-attributed quote, "“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” Perhaps the activism is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding activist class.
This could also be causally related to elite overproduction.
Where this gets interesting to me is when you start to think about it in terms of separating out the commanders from the mob. The commanders, your Kendis and your AOC's and such don't care about wokeness, or at least don't have to. They have high-prestige careers and lots of Twitter followers. But your average very woke person *has* to care a lot; it's where they get their prestige and value.
Woke itself is a proposition of being good relative to other people. So as you said there's a diminishing return as everybody else comes up to par; they have to start picking on smaller and smaller issues, or different less obvious issues, to stay part of the moral elite. Eventually you have someone so specialized that most of human existence is in their "things I'll call out as horrifying" bucket. Right now that's a lot of people.
The commanders, who don't care about wokeness except as a tool, are fine with this as long as it doesn't turn back on them. So occasionally they feed someone to them; there's no difficulty doing this, because any amount of highlighting will pull thousands and thousands of people out of the woodwork to destroy the target. Since anything is racist, anyone can BE a racist. Otherwise they just have to stay enough-less-bad than the right to avoid fire.
I think this is coming to an end, though. The cool kids, the keep-ahead-of-social-stuff people are already sort of abandoning wokeness. You can see it on reddit or twitter or tiktok; people are getting tired of it and moving on. Your average person who is still very woke who shows up in your feed seems much more "this is all I have that gives me value" than they used to. I have friends who argue I'm wrong, but I think there's a timer on the whole thing that will be up in the next 2-3 years.
I think (and hope) you're right on the 2-3 years thing.
On the commanders-footsoldiers piece, I saw an intriguing Twitter thread talking about this recently, here: https://twitter.com/LinManuelRwanda/status/1457796393800663045. Just passing along, not necessarily agreeing with it or promoting it. Thought it was interesting.
Google hits per term:
"actual racist" - 470k
"real racist" - 237k
"racist racist" - 206k
Newspeak here we come.
Thanks, RC, for your astute understanding of the "word salads" being tossed about these days.
No problem! Thank you!