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Like the sound of birdsong over the trenches after the machine guns have ceased roaring, the Financial Times reports bankers are once again using the words “pussy” and “retard” in the course of their work with no fear of reprisal. The culture war is over. Hurrah.
How funny though for those of us who over the last decade have observed closely as corporate CEOs throughout the West have professed to be driven by so-called “purpose” — rooted always in the ideals of social justice and far exceeding the generation of mere profit — to now see these same CEOs junking said purpose without a backward glance. It’s so wonderfully shameless.
Suddenly no one in corporate America wants to talk about previously fashionable causes, such as hierarchies of intersectional grievance
Take Meta, for example, whose products, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, are used daily by about a third of humanity and whose purpose statement is not “to make billions of dollars by providing excellent digital services” but rather “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”
Founder Mark Zuckerberg since the start of the year — and the re-election of “you know who” — has not only ushered from the premises international liberal poster boy and former British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who has served as Meta’s president of global affairs, but also ordered the removal of all tampon machines from the company’s male restrooms.
Zuckerberg has appointed, too, to the Meta board Ultimate Fighting Championship supremo Dana White, a man who was not so long ago filmed striking his wife and who likes to describe his approach to doing business thus: “if you’re a savage, you can run all these kids right over, man.” Gone suddenly is also Meta’s practice of censoring supposedly problematic online content — for example, user comments that question trans ideology or seek to discuss laptops owned by Hunter Biden. All Meta Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs have likewise been halted.
Elsewhere, the startled corporate herd is enacting identical hurried 180s, with increasing speed.
Amazon has hoiked from its website black staff “solidarity” pledges and canceled specialized benefits for trans employees, including for controversial gender-affirming care. McDonald’s has said it will stop setting “aspirational representation goals” for its workforce — corporate-speak for no more obsessing about diversity — and both Walmart and Harley Davidson have announced they will withdraw from the Human Rights Campaign’s decidedly right-on Corporate Equality Index. The list goes on and on.
Evidently, suddenly no one in corporate America wants to talk about previously fashionable causes, such as hierarchies of intersectional grievance. Trump, with his “drill, baby, drill” business credo, is getting the credit for this, but I believe the change in direction really started when Elon Musk last November at the DealBook Summit in New York electrified an audience of corporate luminaries that included Disney CEO Bob Iger by berating them unequivocally for meaningless virtue signaling.
“What I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil. Fuck them,” he said. Quite.
For the last decade, I have worked as a speechwriter for a wide variety of FTSE CEOs and from this front row seat have come to understand that if there’s one thing corporate types hate more than anything, it’s the sneaking realization that everyone knows what they’re up to. In fact, I’ve long wondered — even while sometimes energetically helping in their articulation — if the mania for utterly disingenuous purpose statements isn’t the result of a deeply held desire for obfuscation, it is most likely the result of repressed guilt about earnings.
Anyway, I digress. Of all the statements made recently by major corporations signaling they will henceforth row back woke business practices, the one I welcome most is Ford’s. CEO Jim Farley says the company will no longer offer commentary on every pressing issue society faces.
In a leaked memo to staff, he stated: “We will continue to put our effort and resources into taking care of our customers, our team and our communities versus publicly commenting on the polarizing issues of the day.” Bravo. How nauseating it has been in recent years to witness highly paid business people climbing over one another to fill the vacuum left by the decline of religion in western societies by passing themselves off as moral leaders — rewriting with the aid of ambitious corporate affairs teams and lavishly remunerated advertising executives the moral codes that have long underpinned all human endeavor.
By definition, corporate leaders want our money and therefore do not have our best interests at heart. How then does it follow they are best placed to advise us on, say, climate change, or the extent to which black lives matter, or whether women can have penises? The simple answer is they aren’t, and that the unstated corporate belief that opinions are more valid if the people who hold them earn more money than those who don’t is a sickness — one for which finally it looks like a cure has been found.
It is worth stating that capitalism is unarguably the greatest force our species has ever created, a system that has improved quality of life for billions of people by lifting them from poverty.
For capitalism to continue to succeed requires only for businesses — and the people who lead them — to concern themselves with making profit. There is no added requirement for anything else, certainly not for corporate moralizing or the passing of judgement on the rest of us. Not least, I’d venture, because that path leads to precisely the kind of weird places in which men’s office bathrooms are equipped with tampon machines and large-scale censorship is required.
“It’s a new dawn,” the FT’s rapacious bankers are quoted as saying — one in which it’s OK again to use sporty language in the pursuit of great wealth. Long may it last.
