In my early 40s I came to realize the nature of human thought.  Thanks to Mary Douglas for her book How Institutions Think. I created a half-hour national public radio interview program on that subject called Social Thought. The program ran for nine years and remains on the Internet.

Human beings organize their thoughts and lives hierarchically. The three overarching ideas that descend step by step to our everyday lives begin with God, power and money. 

For most of my life, the past 85 years, Americans believed in God among 60% of the population and the balance were 20% each for power and money as the driving forces.

Today we have woke. Woke is derived from an overarching belief in power.  My guess is that God has dropped to 45% in the U.S. and power has grown to 35% with money still at 20% of the population. Some people confuse power and money but nearly all depend much more on one than the other.

The dominant woke thinkers are derived from Michel Foucault and include Jurgen Habermas and Theodore Adorno. In America the influences include Herbert Marcuse. The core thesis is that power drives the world of humans.

When power is viewed as the dominant force in society the sub categories used for explanation of the world can easily include colonialism, white power, and the associated anti-black racism. Thrown into wokism are also anti-male views, anti-meritocracy and lately Jew hate.

Wokism is not going away. Marxism is right on its tail as a core explanatory thesis. God is not coming back.