Woke activists frequently use fear-inducing terms such as protection, help, danger, and safety. Protection and safety are essential needs for all people. The more neurotic people are, the more important safety is to them. In the USA, the term “safetyism” has become established for the phenomenon of extreme protection and need for help. Safetyism is described by the authors Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff as follows:
“Confronted with words, ideas, or decisions they dislike, more and more people claim to be in danger of suffering psychological or even physical harm. Safetyism as a cult of protection involves an obsession with eliminating (real or imagined) threats. This is done to the point that people are unwilling to make reasonable compromises for other concerns. Safetyism denies young people important experiences that their antifragile minds need. Safetyism makes them more fragile and anxious. They become more prone to seeing themselves as victims.” 384
Woke activists demand a right to protection, especially for marginalised persons (see Safe Spaces). In many cases, freedom of speech is restricted for this, as free debates and open exchange of opinions allegedly reproduce oppression. Opinions are labelled dangerous if they displease woke activists (see Hate Speech). Non-woke opinions are to be excluded by fomenting paranoia about allegedly dangerous opinions (see Cancel Culture).385
Fragility, outrage, and panic at allegedly dangerous opinions are not always merely feigned. In part, anti-woke opinions are actually feared, because wokeness conveys a strong emotional identity as an activist.386
The alleged protection that is to be guaranteed by woke discourse guardians usually goes hand in hand with (self-)censorship. The strategies with which woke activists want to determine the rules of the discourse are diverse. Non-woke viewpoints are to be branded as unscientific, conspiracy-theoretical, outdated, traumatising, discriminatory, or immoral (see Deconstruction, Epistemic Violence, and Hate Speech). There are now even “sensitivity readers” who are to scan books for problematic thoughts before publication.
To protect a liberal debate culture against woke intolerance, numerous intellectuals have written the Harper’s Appeal for free debate spaces.387