What Does 'Awake' Mean?

and is it a useful term?

I have a lot of conversations with people who are searching for a word to describe other people - they usually land on ‘Awake’. As in: “You’d enjoy meeting my friend, they are ….. Awake”

Others cringe at using labels, yet they are also searching for a description of where people lie on a particular continuum. With the word already having such ‘in group/out group’ connotations does it serve any purpose other than to antagonise others or aggrandise selves?

Loosely, the continuum represents your ability to understand any events, but particularly the Covid events from a viewpoint other than that presented by an indoctrination campaign. But where on the continuum does one switch from being regular, to ‘Awake’?

Other ways of defining the term may help us narrow it down. Sometimes, ‘Awake’ means:

- Simply more tolerant of other peoples views and choices than the average person.

- Able and willing to critically think past blind faith or expert worship

- Able to receive information or opinions which would challenge one’s previous worldview

- Hasn’t received a Covid shot

- Doesn’t believe ‘official’ Covid narratives, or has an understanding of alternate narratives

- Has assumed more control over their own health, information, systems of trust and independence than an institution dependent neighbour

- Able to assimilate conspiracy facts into their worldview, conversation or baseline assumptions

- Able to speculate on reasonable conspiracy theories with intellectual honesty

- Brave enough to speak truth/opinions to power or at a social cost which goes against the prevailing herd mentality

- Better able to recognize hidden dangers than others

- Better able to assimilate complex concepts or nuanced positions than their neighbour

- Being more efficient at, or more willing to challenge one’s own biases or comfort zones

- Willing to focus a little more on community issues vs personal issues

- Respectful of personal sovereignty

- Generally cynical and skeptical disposition

- Not likely to dehumanize or persecute you

While some of the bias in those selected phrasings is my own, it is fair to say that the term is used in an almost universally positive way by those who presumably see some people as ‘asleep’ in a negative way. This leads me to suspect that the continuum people actually care about is ‘level of threat’. An ‘Awake’ person represents the lowest likelihood that someone will dehumanise you, attack you, discriminate against you, deny you access to goods and services, try to force deadly injections on you, or support your demotion to second class citizen. ‘Awake’ is likely to mean ‘Ally’.

For most people, the distinction between these groups would be better off not being important, but we cannot ignore the categorisation thrust on us by other people. In Apartheid South Africa, you might have wanted equality for all skin colours, but you really could not afford pie in the sky ideals. You needed to know if you were black or white, and if the other person was as well.

Hence, I say there is currently no more important distinction for language to serve in the western world. In a war, your most important concern is to identify friend from foe, threat from safety. In Northern Ireland, the quickest way was to ask “Catholic or Protestant”. Maybe ‘awake’ really means ‘aware that we are in a war’? Make no mistake, we are at war of some kind. The best definition of the type of war seems to be Matthew Crawford’s claim of 5th Generation Warfare.

But, I’ll update that ‘war’ definition when I become more ‘awake’ to what is going on :)