Mar
19
The Woke Industrial Leviathan
“The modern woke-industrial complex preys on our innermost insecurities about who we really are as individuals and as a people, by mixing morality with commercialism.” — Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.
Who the heck is Vivek Ramaswamy?
Ramaswamy is a second-generation Indian-American (though I’m not sure he uses that term) who earned a biology degree from Harvard. Then he became an investment banker, including a summer internship at Goldman Sachs and several years at QVT Financial, where his focus was biotech. Meanwhile, he got a law degree from Yale. In 2014, Ramaswamy switched over to the pharmaceutical industry, founding the company Roivant Sciences, which he ran until stepping down as CEO in 2021. He then co-founded Strive Asset Management, where he has been branded by the Left as “the leading anti-ESG crusader.”
I became aware of Ramaswamy just a few weeks ago, when he announced his candidacy for the 2024 Republican Party presidential primaries. I haven’t watched or listened to any interviews he has given. But, I figured it might be a good idea to “hear” what he had to say, so I am currently reading the first of his two (soon to be three) books, Woke, Inc. (2021). The following is an excerpt from the Introduction…
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“Financial success in twenty-first-century America involves the same simple steps [as in a magic trick]. First, the Pledge: you find an ordinary market where ordinary people sell ordinary things. The simpler, the better. Second, the Turn: you find an arbitrage in that market and squeeze the hell out of it. An arbitrage refers to the opportunity to buy something for one price and instantly sell it for a higher price to someone else.
If this were a book about how to get rich quick, I’d expound on these first two steps. But the point of this book is to expose the dirty little secret underlying the third step of corporate America’s act, its Prestige. Here’s how it works: pretend like you care about something other than profit and power, precisely to gain more of each.
All great magicians master the art of distraction — flashing lights, smoke, beautiful women on stage. Today’s captains of industry do it by promoting progressive social values. Their tactics are far more dangerous for America than those of the older robber barons: their do-good smoke screen expands not only their market power but their power over every other facet of our lives.
As a young twenty-first-century capitalist myself, the thing I was supposed to do was shut up and play along: wear hipster clothes, lead via practiced vulnerability, applaud diversity and inclusion, and muse on how to make the world a better place at conferences in fancy ski towns. Not a bad gig.
The most important part of the trick was to stay mum about it. Now I’m violating the code by pulling back the curtain and showing you what’s really going on in corporate boardrooms across America.
Why am I defecting? I’m fed up with corporate America’s game of pretending to care about justice in order to make money. It is quietly wreaking havoc on American democracy. It demands that a small group of investors and CEOs determine what’s good for society rather than our democracy at large. This new trend has created a major cultural shift in America. It’s not just ruining companies. It’s polarizing our politics. It’s dividing our country to a breaking point. Worst of all, it’s concentrating the power to determine American values in the hands of a small group of capitalists rather than in the hands of the American citizenry at large, which is where the dialogue about social values belongs. That’s not America, but a distortion of it.
Wokeness has remade American capitalism in its own image. Talk of being ‘woke’ has morphed into a kind of catchall term for progressive identity politics today. The phrase ‘stay woke’ was used from time to time by black civil rights activists over the last few decades, but it really took off only recently, when black protestors made it a catchphrase in the Ferguson protests in response to a police officer fatally shooting Michael Brown.
These days, white progressives have appropriated ‘stay woke’ as a general-purpose term that refers to being aware of all the identity-based injustices. So while ‘stay woke’ started as a remark black people would say to remind each other to be alert to racism, it would now be perfectly normal for white coastal suburbanites to say it to remind each other to watch out for possible microaggressions against, say, transgender people — for example, accidentally calling someone by their pre-transition name. In woke terminology, that forbidden practice would be called ‘deadnaming,’ and ‘microaggression’ means a small offense that causes a lot of harm when done widely. If someone committed a microaggression against black transgender people, we enter the world of ‘intersectionality,’ where identity politics is applied to someone who has intersecting minority identities and its rules get complicated. Being woke means waking up to these invisible power structures that govern the social universe.
Lost? You aren’t alone. Basically, being woke means obsessing about race, gender, and sexual orientation. Maybe climate change too. That’s the best definition I can give. Today more and more people are becoming woke, even though generations of civil rights leaders have taught us not to focus on race or gender. And now capitalism is trying to stay woke too….
An essential part of corporate wokeness is this jujitsu-like move where big business has figured out that it can make money by critiquing itself. First, you start praising gender diversity. Next, you criticize Wall Street’s lack of it, even though you’re Wall Street. Finally, Wall Street somehow gets to be the leader in the fight against big corporations. It gets to become its own watchman and, even better, get paid to do it.
Sincere liberals get tricked into adulation by their love of woke causes. Conservatives are duped into submission as they fall back on slogans they memorized decades ago — something like ‘the market can do no wrong’ — failing to recognize that the free market they had in mind doesn’t actually exist today. And poof! Both sides are blinded to the gradual rise of a twenty-first-century Leviathan far more powerful than what even Thomas Hobbes imagined almost four centuries ago.
This new woke-industrial Leviathan gains its power by dividing us as a people. When corporations tell us what social values we’re supposed to adopt, they take America as a whole and divide us into tribes. That makes it easier for them to make a buck, 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 Americans.
Corporations win. Woke activists win. Celebrities win. Even the Chinese Communist Party finds a way to win (more on that later). But the losers of this game are the American people, our hollowed-out institutions, and American democracy itself. The subversion of America by this new form of capitalism isn’t just a bug; as they say in Silicon Valley, it’s a feature.
This is a book that exposes exactly how this disaster unfolded and tells us what we can do to stop it. I’m not a journalist reporting on my research findings. This is the stuff I’ve encountered firsthand over the last 15 years in academia and in business. I’ve seen how the game is played. Now I’m taking you behind the curtain to show you how it works.”
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It is encouraging to “hear” another multi-millionaire businessman who identifies the dangers of ESG, DEI, wokeness, etc., and refuses to buy in or give in to it. I may not fully agree with all of his observations or suggestions, and I’m not sure just yet how “conservative” he is. I doubt he’ll be my first choice in the primaries. But, the book has been a decent read so far, and I’ll probably post another excerpt or two down the line.
