Understanding Woke Tactics Pt. 3: Using Jargon as a smokescreen.

It has been quite frustrating for me to watch well meaning people try to debate a woke person, only to end up upset and humiliated, with their reputation in tatters, after a getting verbally and socially outmaneuvered by a woke person in a public discussion. The thing to remember is that most of the time, the woke person is not playing by the same rules as the rest of us.

A very important thing to remember about the tactics that woke people use is that very often the woke are not trying to win an argument by using reason, superior argumentation and evidence. In many cases (if not most cases) the woke person is trying to win the argument by achieving a SOCIAL victory. That is, they are trying to win the argument by getting the upper hand in the conversation through use of social games, power plays, status jockeying, verbal gimmicks, and emotional manipulation.

To unpack this just a little further, woke activists are not trying to win the debate by showing that they are right and explaining it so that everyone understand them.  The game the woke play is to win their battles *SOCIALLY*, and one way to do that is to use social games, power plays, status jockeying, verbal gimmicks, and emotional manipulation to take social control of the conversation. They do this so they can place themselves in position of power and high status within the conversation so they can become the one who is listened to and taken seriously. By doing this the woke person seeks to ensure that the things they say carry more weight then their opposition.

To put this in the simplest terms possible, this tactic is the equivalent of the woke person placing themselves in the position of something like “teacher” withing the conversation, and placing the non-woke person in the position of something like “student.”

The goal of the woke person using this tactic is to create a social asymmetry such that they have credibility within the conversation and their ideas carry a great deal of weight, while relegating the non-woke person to a low status position with no credibility so the non-woke persons arguments and ideas carry little to no weight within the conversation. The woke person wants to place themselves in a position of prestige within the conversation so they are the person who is believed, listened to, and taken seriously, while placing the non-woke person in a low status position so the non-woke person lacks the social standing within the conversation that is needed to be taken seriously and push back effectively.

There is an old idea that says that you can win a debate intellectually, but lose the crowd. The woke often take advantage of this phenomena to win the debate by coming out on top SOCIALLY. Let’s take a look at one way they do this.

By far the most common move that the woke use to try to take control of the conversation is to use academic jargon as a sort of smokescreen. This is where someone uses excessive amounts technical wording to give the appearance of intelligence and expertise while at the same time hiding their argument under dense enough jargon that what they say goes unchallenged.

Let’s take an example of this occurring in a different context so you can see what I mean here. A rather common example of the jargon-as-smokescreen tactic is when a mechanic overcharges for his services, and when he is challenged on the bill he responds with something like:

"The head-gasket failed and we changed bushings on the wishbone and adjusted the pistons a few degrees before they (TDC) on the compression stroke."

Here the car owner has no idea what the mechanic said. The mechanics explanation looks like a good technical explanation, but the car owner has no idea what was actually done to their car, or if what the mechanic said actually makes any sense. The car owner can’t really challenge the mechanic here because the car owner doesn’t understand the jargon and thus lacks the ability to challenge the mechanics claims. In this situation, the car owner lacks the social standing to question the legitimacy of what the mechanic did. Unless the car owner has a friend with them who IS a mechanic, they have no reason to do anything but pay the large bill no matter how large it may be.

The woke version of this is when you disagree with a woke person and they say something like:

"The patriarchy is rooted in systemic racism that perpetuates white hegemony by de-legitimizing the epistemic authority of indigenous folx."

Here, like in the mechanic example, you have no idea what the woke person said. It looks like a technical explanation, but you have no idea if what the woke activist said actually makes any sense. It becomes socially difficult to challenge the woke person here because you don’t understand the technical jargon in play, and so it is easy for the woke person to make it look like they are an expert and you are just an ignorant fool who is out of his depth.

By using technical academic jargon the woke person creates the appearance of expertise while at the same time creating the impression that those who don't know the technical jargon are simply ignorant. By using this tactic the woke person can destroy whatever social standing or credibility a non-woke persons has, undercutting the ability of a non-woke person to be taken seriously within the conversation. The result is that those who are not woke look like they have no legitimate reason to be heard, listened to, or paid attention too.

This can be a very difficult tactic to deal with. If you ask the woke person to unpack and explain their jargon they can respond with something like “it isn’t my job to educate you,” or “why don’t you go read a book before arguing with me,” and those responses can be very effective in a debate.

However, the situation is not hopeless and there is a way to effectively push back. As many of you will have noticed, they way to diffuse most of these woke tactics is the expose the tactic for what it is and make people aware of the dynamic that is in play. The way around this tactic is to say something like the following:

 “I strongly suspect that your use of dense technical jargon is an attempt to win by making yourself look good and to avoid having the explain and defend your position. I think you are using technical jargon as a way to take over the conversation and make yourself look like the expert so that you can win without having to actually unpack your ideas and defend them in a way that regular people can understand and question. If you are interested in having a conversation in a way that everyone can participate in I am willing to do that, if you want to bury you ideas in dense academic jargon so that they can’t be challenged then I am going to assume that you really can’t defend your ideas.”

This response is an excellent way to diffuse the tactic and put the woke activist in the position of having to actually engage in fair and even handed conversation. The goal here is not to place yourself in the driver seat of the conversation. We don’t use woke tactics against them because using woke tactics against woke people leaves the conversation on the terms that the woke prefer. The goal here is to pull the conversation away from being a fight over credibility, social stats and “whose the expert,” and re-focus the conversation on who actually has the better argument.

In most cases the way to push back against woke tactics is to use responses that force the woke person to be clear about exactly what they are arguing. Once the view of the woke person is clear to everyone in the conversation you can go about showing why the ideas of the woke are destructive and false.

Thanks for reading

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance