By Juan Carlos Aguilera Pérez, European Conservative. (Image: public domain)
Rousseau sought to liberate humanity by restoring it to an original innocence. Woke culture pursues a remarkably similar objective through what it calls the deconstruction of inherited civilization.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not invent the idea that man is naturally good, but he was the thinker who gave it the intellectual form that would eventually transform much of modern political culture. Since then, the belief that human beings are born naturally good and are corrupted only by society has become part of the cultural mainstream. Consequently, if evil does not reside within man himself, then it must be found in institutions, traditions, the family, religion, inherited culture, or any form of authority.
Formulated in the eighteenth century, this thesis has survived revolutions, world wars, and the collapse of the great ideological systems. Today it reappears in the language of woke culture. The terminology has changed, but the underlying intellectual structure remains the same. The problem is no longer sin, human frailty, or personal responsibility, but a system of oppression said to have distorted an originally innocent human nature.
For Rousseau, natural man lives in harmony with himself. He is not virtuous because he has acquired virtue, but because he has not yet been contaminated by civilization. Property, social prestige, and institutions become the true sources of selfishness. History is thus understood as a process of degeneration.
It is one of history’s great paradoxes that a philosophy intended to liberate mankind ultimately helped inspire some of the most coercive political projects of the modern age. If the individual is naturally good and society is responsible for his corruption, then rebuilding society becomes sufficient to regenerate humanity. Politics ceases to recognize limits and assumes an almost redemptive mission.
Woke culture inherits precisely this logic. The individual is presented as the victim of invisible structures of power: patriarchy, colonialism, systemic racism, heteronormativity, privilege, and cultural supremacy. Evil no longer resides in concrete decisions or personal conduct, but in abstract systems that are said to permeate every dimension of social life.
For that reason, the language of woke ideology speaks constantly of privilege and very little of virtue; constantly of identities and very little of character; constantly of rights and almost nothing of duties.
The consequence is evident. If every form of human conduct can ultimately be explained by structural conditioning, moral responsibility inevitably loses its significance. Individuals cease to be free moral agents and become products of power relations. What matters is no longer what a person does, but where that person stands within the map of oppression.