When companies go woke

We live in an age of both public and private tyranny.  Self-determined parameters no longer define our lives.  We used to feel secure, with family, friends, work, and shared histories and beliefs.  Now artificial constraints are imposed from all sides, with fancy names endorsing "diversity and inclusion" and decrying "unconscious bias."  We all know that these phrases are false and vacuous.  Diversity blatantly excludes conservatives, and bias against them is the norm.

These constructs serve to divide us into those who see what's happening with alacrity; the seemingly willfully blind, who just don't seem to care about their hypocrisy; and those who want to make their name and fortune by fixing your erroneous thoughts.

The Biden administration wants to spy on us, even reading our texts.  Bidenistas want friends and relatives to tattle on us, too.

With COVID as the excuse, we must struggle against the absurd strictures to our movement and livelihood.  We are told we are disloyal Americans if we don't want to be vaccinated with an unproven substance (and one that's killed more people recently than the virus itself), and we're kept from hearing any of the truth about either virus or vaccines, "for our own good."  At work or school, we're no longer free to express ourselves; instead, we are subjected to woke ideology and demands for groupthink at every turn.  We wonder, indeed, at our receding memory of a free society, one we lived in until recently.  How did we lose it?

As a concrete example, corporate entities have publicly bowed to wokeness.  If you scroll down to the end of this CEO pledge to "diversity," you'll notice that 1,670 large, public companies endorse what it says.  They embrace and pay lip service to CRT, despite it demeaning a broad swath of our society, including, most likely, themselves.

Investors in these companies' stocks should be aware of this.  People who buy their products need to know about it.  Their self-destructive promises don't fulfill fiduciary duties to their stockholders or serve their customers, who certainly have the right to expect companies to pay attention to business, and not become social justice "warriors."

As Andrea Widburg wrote me, "My current stance is that anyone who is white and waffles on about diversity and systemic racism must give his job to a minority or other 'diverse' person.  Otherwise, I'm plugging my ears and singing 'la, la, la.'  Unless they stop preaching and start practicing, what they say is meaningless virtue-signaling."

This is all well and good, except when your plane is being flown by a person hired to combat the employer's "biases" rather than his ability to do his job properly.

The CEO document's intent is clear: to bow to the woke, no matter the absurdity.  Spend a little time copying phrases into a Google search, as I have, to expose the underbelly of this beast.

Searching "Strategic inclusion and diversity plans" gets you myriad responses.  I found it interesting that even the SEC has a diversity plan.  I guess it's now a requirement, a bowing down to be done by all.

I also searched this clunky paragraph: "We will commit to rolling out and/or expanding unconscious bias education within our companies in the form that best fits our specific culture and business. By helping our employees recognize and minimize any potential blind spots, we aim to facilitate more open and honest conversations."

This gets you quickly to this oh, so helpful sales pitch.  It's by a company selling anti-bias training.  (And of course, asana's leadership is mostly made up of White people; privilege much?)  No doubt, it's a company that is flourishing.  It lays out the philosophy, quite helpfully.

From it, I learned that our life experience, accrued wisdom, and ability to sort impressions of others based upon trusting our own instincts and knowledge, are untrustworthy.  We must wipe the slate clean.  Asana suggests, in repetitive ways, that we throw over experience to combat our innate "biases."  As a retired business owner, I can say with authority that had I not trusted my own experience and abilities to winnow through the field of potential hires, I would have made business decisions detrimental to my clients' well-being, as well as to my own bottom line.

To combat gender bias, companies must both set "gender-neutral" recruitment standards, and (in the very next bullet point) "create diversity goals."  Don't these two statements contradict each other?  What on Earth do they have to do with the qualifications of a future employee?  It matters not, because it sounds good.

We're told that our "learned attitudes or stereotypes" involuntarily affect the way we think or act.  We're fed a long laundry list of such "biases" to guard against.  After all, if we are guilty of "idiosyncratic rater bias," how on Earth would we know it?

The process is inherently false, and the companies participating in it are being duped.  Welcome to the New Age of Enlightenment!

Image: Stock photo of “diverse” business people by rawpixel; text added in Pixlr.

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