The Corporate World’s game of pretending to care about justice in order to make money is quietly wreaking havoc on Western democracy.
BY ALEXANDER ACKLEY R.A. FOR THE INTERNATIONAL CHRONICLES
The Captains of Industry righteously peddle their do-good Green/ESG/DEI schemes in order to virtue-signal and expand not only their market power, but their power over every other facet of our lives… and every 21st-century corporate widget and Capitalist Overlord is supposed to shut up and play along: lead via a practiced vulnerability, applaud diversity and inclusion, and muse on how to make the world a better place at conferences in fancy ski towns. Or else…
The Corporate World’s game of pretending to care about justice in order to make money is quietly wreaking havoc on Western democracy. It posits that a small group of Wise-Men investors and CEOs determine what’s good for society, rather than our democracy at large making that choice. This new trend has created major cultural shifts. It is not just ruining companies… it’s polarizing our politics. It’s dividing our societies to a breaking point. Worst of all, it’s concentrating the power to determine Western values in the hands of a small group of elitist, self-serving, moralizing, and opportunistic capitalists, rather than in the hands of the citizenry at large—which is where the dialogue about social values belongs. That’s not being “enlightened” or “progressive”, but a distortion of it.
Wokeness has remade Western capitalism in its own image. Talk of being ‘‘Woke” has morphed into a kind of catch-all term for progressive Identity Politics. To the Corporate Overlords being Woke means spectacular virtue-signaling about “social justice”, race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation… and “climate change” too.
This new Woke-Industrial-Complex gains its power by dividing us. When corporations tell us what social values we’re supposed to adopt, they take Western values as a whole and divide us into tribes. That makes it easier for them to make a profit, but it also coaxes us into adopting new identities based on skin-deep characteristics and flimsy social causes that supplant our deeper shared identity as Children of the Western Enlightenment.
Corporations win. Woke activists win. Celebrities win. Even the Chinese Communist Party finds a way to win. But the losers of this game are the people who are used as pawns… and Western democracy itself. The subversion of the West by this new form of intolerant, top-down, Globalist-Oligarch-Capitalism isn’t just a bug; as they say in Silicon Valley, it’s a feature… and a destructive one.
