It’s so annoying when woke friends are right

I’ve been brooding for a while over a mutual friend/acquaintance. Every time I run into them, they manage to effortlessly point out how the minutiae of my life causes impending catastrophe. The last time we had lunch they looked at my carrot salad and gasped, ‘‘but don’t you know how bad carrots are for the environment?’’ They stared down at my wilted orange shavings as though these root vegetables had personally rampaged through the Arctic Circle impaling themselves into polar bears.

I saw this person the other week and they asked me airily if I still drank cow milk. No, I replied smugly, I drink almond milk now.

They looked at me as though the almonds had joined the carrot massacre. ‘‘Almond milk? But don’t you know how bad that is for the bees?’’

Now at this point I was so grumpy about this person’s seeing everything I did as hastening the apocalypse, that all I said was ‘‘Oh f... off, it’s fine.’’

Then I left and spent a good few more weeks spitefully drinking almond milk.

Eventually I caved in, googled it, asked around and realised with a grim heart that the carrotshamer was right. The almond milk industry killed 500 billion bees last year. Yep, 500 billion. Bee experts were likening almond milk farming to sending bees into battle in the trenches. Great.

The experience reminded me of two things. One, always do your research into milk alternatives (hellooooo oat milk!). Two, I’ve had a nagging feeling for a while that the wokeness movement is broken.

Sometimes you can feel it when a word, and the world it encompasses, has died. You know, when it tips over from being something fun and fizzy on your tongue to being something that tastes like licking the underside of a sofa cushion.

Like the word influencer. Back in 2017, if someone called you an influencer you’d laugh with the kind of thin modesty that conveys absolute delight and say, ‘‘Oh no, I’m not an influencer! I just share my journey.’’

Now, if someone calls you an influencer, you’d protest, ‘‘Oh no! I’m not an influencer! I just . . . I just . . . share my journey!’’

It’s happened with ‘‘woke’’. Like many things that started out as powerful and edgy, gentrification has strangled it.

The phrase ‘‘stay woke’’ comes from the 1970s African-American protest movement, and rose to prominence in the late 2000s with Black Lives Matter. But in the decade since, it’s broadened out into an ideology that has largely come to be associated with middle-class white people showing off how morally enlightened they are. (And how regressive everyone else is.)

Research from the US shows that ‘‘progressive activists’’, aka ‘‘The Woke’’, comprise overwhelmingly richer, highly educated white people. They account for only about 8 per cent of the general public, who largely see them as supercilious elites.

The big problem with modern wokeness, and its fondness for publicly correcting people, is that it evokes Head Prefect syndrome. When you’re told off for some moral flaw, you’re taken right back to high school. You’re 14 again, being told off by the head prefect, who’s that symbol of pristine, sycophantic purity. The one chosen by the powersthat-be to keep moral discipline over the snotty masses of kids like you.

If you want people to look at their own flaws, you need to be smart in the way you ask them.

And no-one likes the head prefect, or being told off by them. You get mad, and bitch about them on the bus. Which is what I did when I was first told almond milk is bazooka-ing bees. I kept drinking it spitefully because I was embarrassed at being told off.

So the woke are very bad at converting people to their cause. They can’t recruit anyone who’s aware that they’ve got flaws meriting a telling off . . . which is, well, a lot of people.

Of course the real real problem is that woke people are actually often right, as with the bees. But the truth has never been easy to accept when it involves looking at how much of a failure you are.

And ironically, being right about something is dangerous, because it tips you into the moral outrage that fuels public telling-offs. But again, moral outrage is incredibly unpalatable. Unless you’re on Twitter, or Harrison Ford playing a lonecop-that’s-always-called-Jack.

So the approach may be morally right. But it’s just not clever enough. If you want people to look at their own flaws, you need to be smart in the way you ask them.

Of course, theoretically you shouldn’t have to dress up the truth in order to get people to listen. But realistically, you need to. Most people really hate honest self-reflection and need more than a bollocking to make them do it.