In development and growth there is a metaphor of being awake or asleep. Through our personal, or as Carl Young might say, transpersonal development, we will go through stages of waking to what we were past asleep to. Plato's Cave, as well as the Matrix films, which we may or may not have worked on, are allegories for this. On a less philosophical and more Western societal level there has been a history of turning awake into "woke". Which originally emerged within African American Vernacular English in the early 1900s. It simply meant being awake to systemic racism affecting primarily but not exclusively Black Americans. In 1938, singer Lead Belly used "stay woke" in reference to staying alert to racial violence, particularly lynching. During the Civil Rights Movement, "woke" became more deeply associated with social and political awareness. It signified being conscious of racial injustice, police brutality, and civil rights struggles. The term resurfaced in the early 2000s due to everyone and their grandmother having cell phones and thus HD cameras in their pants, after recorded and thus widely seen police killing incidents, "stay woke" was a call to remain alert to systemic oppression and violence. In contemporary culture, over time, "woke" has been politicized and weaponized in discourse. The word turned from a badge of awareness into a culture war battleground, stripped from its original racial justice context with regressives flipping it pejoratively to describe what they saw as performative activism, cancel culture, or overzealous political correctness and frankly also mostly anything entailing an evolving society.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a problem to the American Empire not when speaking on behalf of only African Americans, because they only made up around 10% of the population during his lifetime. He became a real problem and thus eventually a martyr, because he realized that systemic inequality was the real underlying problem and started to speak as such, and because of also looping in poor brown, and white folks into the civil rights movement, as there were and still are more poor white people than any other demographic, thus gaining a critical mass of the population, then the dark sorcerers knew he had to go.
The way this dark occult sorcery has played out, is that ever since money has existed, for thousands of years, all of history has been a story of the struggle of economic and thus social classes. In recent times, in ancient Rome it was patricians, plebeians, and slaves. In the medieval era, it was between lords, their knights and the serfs who work their fields. In the Robber Baron era, it was bourgeoisie factory owners, and professional classes, and the growing proletarian of new immigrant workers. Splitting the working class into different camps, via race issues or now culture war issues, has always been by design to benefit the godzillionair oligarchic robber baron cutthroat post truth capital class, and they've been doing it for thousands of years. It goes back as long as commerce and money. Pharos, Nobels, Kings, were able to enact more control over the populace by always reinforcing a different type of person just over the hill. Sound familiar?
Without being twisted, from a true origin MLK standpoint, within the political lexicon, "woke" describes a state of social and political awareness to this darkness, especially regarding injustice and, by far most crucially, economic inequality. To be truly modern awake is to recognize that structures of power do not naturally produce fairness for economic underclasses and that democracy, a human enactment of a spiritual concept, must be actively protected through continuous, active engagement - not passive trust in elites or institutions. It is about understanding that economic justice is democracy’s lifeblood. Without broadly shared prosperity and meaningful participation, superior democracy shrivels into inferior plutocracy—rule by the wealthy, for the wealthy. To be awake is to recognize that: Freedom must be defended both politically and economically. To know concentrated wealth inevitably seeks to concentrate power.
American intellectuals have long spoken of the un-educated financially often lower class voter who votes against their own interests. This is because they are trapped in a series of cults, starting with dark imperial primitive religion vertical morality, which has blind allegiance to authority. Those who have conservatively religious operating systems installed, shepard the belief that royals rule the lower classes because those are their stations in life. So the very robber barons who screw them they vote for. This is a poster child of why the Empire does not want you to be educated, (and that can be as an autodidact - meaning self taught) let alone starting to more spiritually develop. As the beginning of something more advanced like mysticism could be said to be the end of reading.
As this linguistic contrast mirrors ancient and philosophical themes, across traditions, to be "awake" is to be enlightened; to be "asleep" is to be lost in illusion. Thus, "waking" and "sleeping" are by no means simply geopolitical labels, but markers of states of consciousness. And the latter is a self-chosen refusal to awaken - even when the opportunity to become aware is present. True "Class consciousness" realizes that 99% of people need to unite together against the oligarchs. So all working people throughout the world should unite against far wrong Elon Musk fasistic Natzi'sm glbally. Yet, there are far too many people across the world who do the opposite. This willfully conscious sticking of one's head in the sand describes a state of passive or willful ignorance, especially toward the growing maldistribution of morbid wealth that threatens the very foundation of liberal democracy. Meaning liberty and justice for all. As Oligarchy is the problem and its very existence is the sign of a mentally ill society. If someone has 30 million to 50 million bucks fine. Good on them and we hope they find the value in compassionate giving. Yet, there are degrees of wealth, getting up towards the hundreds of billions mark, that make people compassionless psychopaths. They have convinced themselves they are devinly special and unique and were meant to be that way. Yet, they have frankly achieved that not through providing a proportionate amount of value for what their companies have created, but instead via white collar crook criminality, rigging the system to parasitize off of it. This is what the 2008 economic crash showed, revealing the criminal behavior of Goldman Sachs, Countrywide, Lehman Brothers, AIG, and even the rating agencies. Little to none of which went to jail because they long ago bought every red and many blue politicians. And then sleeping people vote for these very politicians. Such as rural farmers who vote for a robber baron that names his son Baron. As George Carlin said, "people keep electing these ultra rich cocksuckers who dont give a fuck about them". When evolving minds recognize that extreme economic inequality destabilizes free societies, sleeping individuals ignore or deny this reality. They accept the concentration of wealth into the hands of a few as normal, inevitable, or even virtuous. They don't have the capacity to grasp that freedom without economic justice is hollow - and that without vigilance, faux democracies become an empty ritual serving only the powerful.
History offers stark warnings about what happens when societies become asleep in the face of wealth concentration: Ancient Athens saw its democracy corrode when an elite class of oligarchs consolidated economic and military power, hollowing out participation by ordinary citizens. The Roman Republic fell, in part, due to massive inequalities between the rural poor and the landed elite, paving the way for authoritarian rule under emperors. Gilded Age America was characterized by tycoons and monopolists who amassed extraordinary fortunes while corrupting public institutions - until grassroots movements forced reforms like antitrust laws and labor protections. Each time, a failure to address economic injustice weakened the social fabric, making societies vulnerable to authoritarian takeovers or violent upheaval.
So our current official definition, which we'll likely continue to refine in the future, and we encourage you to go to this website's sponsor (www.lcurve.org joke) to see a visual representation of this... without being twisted, from our personal true origin standpoint, within the political lexicon, being "Slep" is "the non-realization or conscious refusal to see the extreme degree of morbid wealth which exists in countries without sensible tax policies and how such oligarchic wealth has always and will always take power from "We The People" by degrading democracy."
It's also...
To not know that oligarchy is the problem.
It's to not get that strong educated middle class = democracy.
It's to not realize what the whole game really is. That it's the .01% vs the 99.9%.
It's to not know there is a balance to capital and social.
It's not realizing that the largest criminals come from the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy, not the bottom.
It's to not grasp that anyone who has denigrated the word socialism secretly loves privatizing gains and socializing losses.
It's to not know tax cuts are coded re-distributions of wealth from the lower and middle classes, and even some of the upper class, to already morbidly wealthy godzillionaires.
It's to overlook how corporate lobbying, campaign finance, and media ownership erode genuine political choice.
It's to not realize that the 1930's in the US brought a social contract to the people, helping to lift them up out of poverty, and the 1980's was an attempt to break it.
It's about sleepwalking through structural inequality which tries to enable a slow-motion coup against democratic ideals.
It's to be a discontent member of the working class, while voting for the very people who screw you economically. Which in the red, withe, and blue would be 100% of the red of the and over 50% of the blue.
It's to not acknowledge the government is going to be there, and it will either work on behalf of the working class or the ultra rich, so the trick is to make you not like it.
It's to accept massive disparities in income and opportunity as "normal" or "deserved". Trusting that "the market" alone ensures fairness without governmental intervention. Basically... play the game without referees.
It's to never endingly fear the equality of opportunity communist boogie man is designed to just keep them locked in a never ending polarized extreme of SLEPville. Population them.
On the communism subject... India, China, Russia, and the USA are the largest countries by population... China has some good things and some certainly not good things. Let me restate that second part... they certainly have some not good things. But in the last 40+ years has been doing something extremely eyebrow raising by embracing a more healthy balance of capital and social. And if you don't know what we're saying there, it's "socialism" mixed with "capitalism" and if one completely ignores one of those two things, not realizing, like a DNA helix, they will always be intimately intertwined, we can't have an honest conversation and it's back to sleep. Not only is China's infrastructure now some of the most modernized in the world, already surpassing the USA as a global superpower, it is on track to be a more superior country to all three of the other's combined. Why? Because of its social aspect, while allowing its rich people to get rich, its government has also been growing its middle class like a weed, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, but does not allow their godzillionair class to steer public policy thus becoming independent power brokers who operate parallel to the state. While India, Russia, and the US, very still much do. Time to change that.