Classical #Liberalism gets mocked a lot but it's a very powerful and valuable idea and generalizes beyond human beings.

A bunch of agents with come together and create an agreement to follow rules which move them out of bad Nash Equilibria, but with some remaining freedom.

A "Bad Nash Equilibrium" is a solution to a game where everyone does what is personally best for them, but the overall result is extremely bad for everyone. Rules/Laws are typically designed to get us out of these traps.

In the past, societies often took extreme measures to keep people out of bad Nash Equilibria, such as cutting people's hands off for stealing, or stoning adulterers to death.

It is good that we don't brutalize people to fix collective games. Classical #Liberalism is good!

But something has clearly gone wrong. The #Liberal order in The West is being replaced by the #Woke.

What exactly is #Woke, in terms of game theory? That's more complicated.

Classical #Liberalism is something like this:

"Apply the minimum amount of coercion necessary to get society out of bad Nash Equilibria"

What is #Woke? Woke is fundamentally a parasite on Liberalism.

Woke could not exist without a society made safe and comfortable by Liberalism.

Imagine trying to sell #BlackLivesMatter to white people who had just been enslaved by Barbary Corsairs;

"No, you see they're just helping you to lose your #whiteprivilege! This is good actually!"

So what is the game-theoretic definition of #Woke?

It's something like:

"Get people to politically support collective actions where that support maximally correlates with morally positive individual traits"

In other words, #VirtueSignalling.

If you have a safe, prosperous liberal world with democratic politics and a free marketplace of ideas, you are inviting an invasion of Wokeness/virtue signalling. It makes sense if you look at the game theory from an individual point of view.

If you're an individual woman in a safe world, there's almost no personal cost to supporting arbitrarily insane policies, but you personally benefit from the aura of virtue and kindness that you generate for yourself.

#Woke is the second round of escalation of this. The first round was the late 20th century Liberal white-lies and political correctness.