Wokenomics: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam

[Secular Sanity]

I like this guy. He was on this morning with WSJ at Large.

He’s got a new book coming out.  "Wokenomics: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam"

"...CEO Ramaswamy expressed a variety of concerns with ESG spreading across the business landscape. ESG has pushed corporations beyond their traditional model of profit seeking into the unstable realm of social activism. In such stakeholder capitalism, the problem is that workers and investors in a corporation could become worse off with such an outside focus. Investors in a company, for instance, are not meant to try to exemplify a society’s supposed core values.

...Further, the reality is that business leaders have no better judgment than average citizens in terms of making ESG decisions. Our values should be reflected in our democracy and our voting. Instead of setting the social agenda, corporations should stay in the market and provide quality products. Extending beyond this primary purpose is the wrongful goal of acquiring more political and social power.

...Indeed, the hypocrisy in woke capitalism must always be exposed. China, of course, is the real winner in the ESG movement. Thus far, corporations involved have shriveled from offending the dictatorial Chinese Communist Party because that means risking access to the immense Chinese market."

The Folly of Woke Capitalism: Stakeholders and the Future of American Democracy

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NXvUr_5_vZk

[C C]

Thanks, SS. Useful buzz-word conception: "woke capitalism".

"Perhaps the biggest problem is that 'woke capitalism' has created career-ending risk for those daring to speak out. We are now dangerously installing an idea-fixing cartel that continues to constrain debate. 'Cancel culture' has ensured that any person going against the thinking of the movement can very easily lose a job or career. We must all stand up for the free thought of ideas, and business leaders should actively promote freethinking, a pillar of American society."

The idiots played with fire too long. Now the posterior appendage is wagging the dog. In the old days the corporate complex deftly appropriated Leftist, progressive, and globalist narratives in a pretentious good-buddy like way, and subtly to flagrantly manipulated hegemonic issues to serve its own ends. That facade of "moral nobility" and desire for exploitation is still there, but maybe it's become blocked from the inner control panel like a body possessed by a demon spirit (an invading political-pathological agency that similarly portrays itself as goodness and light).

More down to earth dissection, these Millennial executives are probably as sheltered from direct experience as the propagandist elites (self-describing quote at bottom). The latter's contact with everyday people and that life is through a mediated reality of digital social platforms, a militant entertainment industry and its horde of stereotypes/caricatures, a science academic establishment infected with non-objective crusaderism, and the selected background theories that legacy journalism preconceptually interprets events and data with.

They believe online trolls reflect real personalities, that venting speech habits parallel corresponding personal deeds, behavior, thought outlook, etc. They allow a pseudo-intellectual orientation to prod and poke them around which -- once all the layers of technical gibberish are excoriated -- borrows from some religions a non-spectrum good/evil dichotomy as a fitting adjunct for its similary simple-minded conspiracy templates lifted from Marxism. With the population of flyover country assuming the role of Devil or the sinners.

Michael Tomasky: "I myself am an elite liberal. I tick all the major boxes. I’m not religious. I have few Republican friends. I have deeply conflicted feelings about patriotism. I would never consider living anywhere other than a major city, or at the very least a liberal university town where the odds are slim that I would end up next door to an actual racist. I think a lot of liberals in places like New York, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles are too suspicious of middle America. I thought this long before Trump came along..."

[Syne]

Like justice, any qualifier to the word only works to undermine it, like "social justice" that undermines individual justice or "woke capitalism" that undermines the free market. Free markets are wholly reactive to the consumer, but this woke nonsense is making demands of the consumer that would be better suited to a church pulpit, if only leftists had any analog.

"Cancel culture" will only end one of two ways. Either it works to teach conservatives to seek out that same moral purity in companies that the left does, thereby opening a segregated market pandering to each...like Parler, MeWe, etc., but expanded into brick and mortar businesses...or the specter of the loss of monopoly finally makes businesses realize that it's a plan for mutually assured destruction.

[Zinjanthropos]

An serious investor doesn’t care about the culture, they only follow the money.

[Secular Sanity]

There’s no Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerbergs in Marxism. Do you think that what we are seeing is a form of global neo-feudalism?

[Syne]

There’s no Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerbergs in Marxism. Do you think that what we are seeing is a form of global neo-feudalism?

Well, they're definitely representative of the kind of people who demand no guns and no border walls while they have gated communities and armed, private security. Seems to fit the bill of double-standard elitists.

[C C]

There’s no Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerbergs in Marxism. Do you think that what we are seeing is a form of global neo-feudalism?

Magnates or their enterprises still have to compete in the marketplace, and they cripple themselves in that respect if they coddle political orientations that encourage underachieving and low standards in the worker herd in order to establish radical equality.

Leftist thought is undergirded by "crabism" or crab mentality in more ways than one. There's a subconscious pathology to it where the factions most attracted to it covertly (below direct, verbalized awareness) crave radical equality in terms of suffering -- everyone suffering under the watchdog persecution of the authoritarian government Leftism ultimately gravitates toward. Everyone suffering as they conceive their own groups having experienced misery through the centuries via the various social-class, ethnic/race, ability/disability, and sex-based hegemony conspiracies.

The anarchical orientations of Leftism may seem to dodge the Orwellian or 1984 scenario, but that's purely due to their reality impairment of believing collectivism can be established and maintained without a dominant government. Just because a movement is wallowing deep in naive idealism doesn't excuse it from still facilitating the subliminal pathology of the rest or other mainstream schools of thought.

Robots and smart machines could potentially dodge the competition problem for magnates, however, when it comes to employees short-circuted by fear of achieving beyond the herd average in terms of creativity and work output. Today the latter revolves around white and male "privilege" -- trying to make _X_ groups feel guilty because they constitute the majority in high places. But Asians (including Indians, Arabs, etc) and emigrant Africans, Latin Americans would be garnering similar degree of attention as tall poppies that needed to be cut-down, if they had greater numbers. As demonstrated on other continents, any group can excel if capitalism and its own developing, inner reforms could run long enough without constant obstructions from the zealotry of its para-religious enemy.

[Syne]

Leftist thought is undergirded by "crabism" or crab mentality in more ways than one. There's a subconscious pathology to it where the factions most attracted to it covertly (below direct, verbalized awareness) crave radical equality in terms of suffering -- everyone suffering under the watchdog persecution of the authoritarian government Leftism ultimately gravitates toward. Everyone suffering as they conceive their own groups having experienced misery through the centuries via the various social-class, ethnic/race, ability/disability, and sex-based hegemony conspiracies.

I'm fairly certain that is a case of "misery loves company", where these people are already suffering from their own personal choices and neuroses and just obsessed with everyone sharing their pain. Have you ever noticed that the most professedly empathetic are those most desiring of empathy themselves? So much so that they really seem to want the government to force others to empathize (share the feelings) with them. It's like the poor people who give to the beggar, in some misbegotten hope that karma will come back around to themselves. Neither is truly selfless or noble...which may be why it needs to cloth itself in pseudo-religious righteousness.

[Secular Sanity]

There’s no Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerbergs in Marxism. Do you think that what we are seeing is a form of global neo-feudalism?

Magnates or their enterprises still have to compete in the marketplace, and they cripple themselves in that respect if they coddle political orientations that encourage underachieving and low standards in the worker herd in order to establish radical equality.

Leftist thought is undergirded by "crabism" or crab mentality in more ways than one. There's a subconscious pathology to it where the factions most attracted to it covertly (below direct, verbalized awareness) crave radical equality in terms of suffering -- everyone suffering under the watchdog persecution of the authoritarian government Leftism ultimately gravitates toward. Everyone suffering as they conceive their own groups having experienced misery through the centuries via the various social-class, ethnic/race, ability/disability, and sex-based hegemony conspiracies. 

The anarchical orientations of Leftism may seem to dodge the Orwellian or 1984 scenario, but that's purely due to their reality impairment of believing collectivism can be established and maintained without a dominant government. Just because a movement is wallowing deep in naive idealism doesn't excuse it from still facilitating the subliminal pathology of the rest or other mainstream schools of thought.

Robots and smart machines could potentially dodge the competition problem for magnates, however, when it comes to employees short-circuted by fear of achieving beyond the herd average in terms of creativity and work output. Today the latter revolves around white and male "privilege" -- trying to make _X_ groups feel guilty because they constitute the majority in high places. But Asians (including Indians, Arabs, etc) and emigrant Africans, Latin Americans would be garnering similar degree of attention as tall poppies that needed to be cut-down, if they had greater numbers. As demonstrated on other continents, any group can excel if capitalism and its own developing, inner reforms could run long enough without constant obstructions from the zealotry of its para-religious enemy.

Ah, similar to Nietzsche’s critique of the slave morality of Christianity—the collective degeneration of man. Egalitarians being motivated by resentment. Aristotle thought that it had to be with someone that the subject can perceive as competition, so that typically very great disparities in well-being are not envied. Hmm...that would make sense.

God Is Dead – Now All We Have Is Victimhood Culture

...Contemporary victims perceive themselves as unalterably suffering at the hands of the social status quo,  a largely inaccurate perspective.  Given that there is at present a competition to be seen as “more oppressed,” this moral frame is less prevalent in contexts where social oppression is, in fact, more common. Their insistence on lack of autonomy, together with their reliance on third-party sympathy for one’s moral status is precisely what the philosopher Nietzsche was so critical of.

...In fact, the dominance of victimhood culture could lend evidence to the theory that what Nietzsche called the “slave revolt” in morality as the driving force behind egalitarian democracy has in fact succeeded.

[C C]

Ah, similar to Nietzsche’s critique of the slave morality of Christianity—the collective degeneration of man. Egalitarians being motivated by resentment. Aristotle thought that it had to be with someone that the subject can perceive as competition, so that typically very great disparities in well-being are not envied. Hmm...that would make sense.

God Is Dead – Now All We Have Is Victimhood Culture

...Contemporary victims perceive themselves as unalterably suffering at the hands of the social status quo,  a largely inaccurate perspective.  Given that there is at present a competition to be seen as “more oppressed,” this moral frame is less prevalent in contexts where social oppression is, in fact, more common. Their insistence on lack of autonomy, together with their reliance on third-party sympathy for one’s moral status is precisely what the philosopher Nietzsche was so critical of.

...In fact, the dominance of victimhood culture could lend evidence to the theory that what Nietzsche called the “slave revolt” in morality as the driving force behind egalitarian democracy has in fact succeeded.

Like a bold noodler, Nietzsche poked around in a lot more social-matter and rhetoric holes than one typically ascribes to earlier philosophers. Of course, Marx knife-ripped the canvass or kicked that off in the 19th-century, so actually expected of most many thinking authors afterwards.

Developmentally, Nietzsche was a creative person first (literature, music) before steering into philosophy and critical intellectualism. That artistic and literary resonance is perhaps why he's so approachable and appealing to the public -- whether it's the angst-ridden young person (teen, college) or older people that have a crisis later.

Because he made the transition early, he was much better than many conventional writers venturing into philosophical fiction and blocked any stray or skeptical conception of himself as the latter (as they do Ayn Rand) by producing more technical works than the other (even though creative prose, allegories, and verse are sprinkled throughout the "non-fiction" stuff).