Taoism: 'Woke' in the Warring States Period

Taoism and the Overproduction of Elites: A Prehistory of Woke

Taoism is often presented as a kind of mystical naturalism: a contemplative retreat from the world into the ineffable flow of Dao, the Way. At its core, it seems to reject ambition, planning, and even language itself. The true sage, we are told, "does nothing—and yet everything is done." It is the philosophy of the mountain recluse, the poet-hermit, the fisherman-philosopher.

But this metaphysical hush, from a historical materialist point of view, is not merely a spiritual choice. It is an ideological response to very specific social conditions: the breakdown and over-centralisation of the imperial Chinese state during the Warring States period (475–221 BCE), and the rise of a large class of educated men with nowhere to go. In other words, Taoism is what happens when too many elites chase too few elite roles.

If that sounds familiar, it should.

The Historical Structure: The Asiatic Mode of Production

China in the late first millennium BCE was a bureaucratic civilisation par excellence. Its centralised states depended on irrigation, taxation, corvée labour and local village collectivism. This is what Marx once called the "Asiatic mode of production"—a model in which the state sits like a parasitic spider over a communal peasantry, extracting surplus through coercive administration (rather than capitalist accumulation).

In this setting, Confucianism became the house ideology of the bureaucratic class: a system of social ethics justifying hierarchy, filial piety, and loyal service to the emperor. It was a philosophy built for mandarins.

But by the time Taoism emerged, the system was in chaos. Competing states devoured one another. The Confucian promise of harmony through order rang hollow. Meanwhile, more and more literate young men, educated in the classics, found themselves unable to gain entry into an overstretched and corrupt bureaucracy. The elite credential pipeline was glutted.

And so a new ideology emerged, not from the peasants below, but from the disappointed aspirants of the elite: Taoism.

The Taoist Move: Withdrawal as Critique

The Tao Te Ching is not an activist tract. It is a manual for surviving a world gone mad by refusing to engage on its terms. Don't compete. Don’t strive. Don’t try to manage the empire. The more you act, the more you disrupt the natural order. The true sage flows with the current. He is indifferent to rank, untouched by politics, unmoved by moral certainties.

This is not reactionary conservatism, nor revolutionary fervour. It is what we might call structural quietism—a metaphysics forged in the psychic pressure cooker of elite overproduction. If there are no jobs at court, and the system is corrupt and collapsing, then the only rational move is to define success as withdrawal.

The Taoist sage is, in a sense, a dropout with cosmic justification.

The Modern Echo: Progressive Ideology and the Credentialled Left

Peter Turchin has coined a useful term for the modern West’s malaise: elite overproduction. Our societies churn out vast numbers of educated young people with degrees, ambition, and political awareness—but without commensurate openings in the professional-managerial class. The result? Frustration, status anxiety, and the invention of new moral frameworks to explain exclusion.

Contemporary progressive ideology—what critics call "wokeness"—is not so different from ancient Taoism in structural origin. It is the product of a class with cultural capital but no route to power. Like the Taoists, today’s frustrated aspirants are not able to seize the existing structures; so they redefine them. They claim moral authority not through office, but through identity. Oppression becomes a kind of inverted credential.

Where Taoism says "do nothing," progressivism says "speak your truth." But both are responses to blocked advancement. Taoism universalises marginalisation as a cosmic principle. Woke politics moralises it as a structural injustice. One withdraws to the mountain. The other tweets furiously from Brooklyn.

Cosmic Absolutes and Sacred Abstractions

Both Taoism and progressivism share a tendency to reify principle in response to social instability. The Dao becomes an ungraspable metaphysical constant, beyond rational critique, the source of all true order. Likewise, the modern ideologue invokes justice, equity, lived experience—terms which function not descriptively, but sacrally. To question them is heresy.

This is not a coincidence. When the real levers of power are inaccessible, meaning retreats into the symbolic. The state cannot be controlled, but the narrative can be rescripted. The institution resists reform, but ideology is more malleable.

The Ideology of the Disappointed

Taoism was never the philosophy of peasants. It was the philosophy of ex-bureaucrats, failed courtiers, and hermit-scholars who found the system both morally compromised and structurally closed.

Today’s cultural left is not the voice of the truly dispossessed; it is the ideology of the overproduced intellectual class—educated, moralising, disillusioned, and increasingly metaphysical.

This stratum projects its own sense of victimhood onto the truly dispossessed, then lobbies for remunerative jobs in the 'benevolent' part of the state apparatus, proposing to occupy positions of power and influence in order to 'fix things'.

In both cases, the system bred more ideological producers than it could absorb. And in both cases, those producers turned their disillusionment into new systems of value that rejected the old order - but lacked the power to overthrow it. So instead, they did something subtler: they redefined what power meant.

Conclusion: Rhyme, Not Repetition

History does not repeat, but it rhymes. The Taoist recluse and the woke activist share little in lifestyle or tone. But both are ideological children of blocked aspiration. One decoupled from imperial collapse with serene detachment. The other reacts to neoliberal sclerosis with permanent cultural revolution.

Neither can fix the state; both can explain its failures and make a kind of virtue out of exclusion. And in that lies their ideological momentum and persistence.