Article: Message to CEOs

We are in the midst of a culture war. Although it started in the universities, particularly in France, through the open portal of the damnable Yale and then into the rest of the institutes of higher education, it is not only the faculty and administrators of our colleges and universities who are at fault. Those charged with the privilege and responsibility of running the corporate world are lining up to kowtow at the D.I.E. altar: diversity, inclusivity, and equity. This is happening at a rate that exceeds and with a cowardice comparable to that characterizing the most contemptible of pencil-necked academics.

I had hoped that CEOs, in particular, evil capitalists, all would reject this nonsense, this idiot post-modernism with its denial of any objective world, divine or material. This appalling and murderous Marxist wolfery in sheep's clothing, but it turns out that the left's ability to weaponize guilt and the contempt that far too many in the business world have for ideas have proved an unstoppable combination. Perhaps I should have seen this coming.

Part of what doomed the benighted universities was a thoughtless corporatism. The introduction of managerial speak among the administrators, too many of whom were failed and therefore demoralized lecturers and researchers, turned in desperation to ape the business world. When all academics worth their salt, so to speak, at least have the spine to have some contempt for their competitors on the public status front, deserved as it is in some ways or not.

I knew too, from extensive experience talking to corporate types, that the human resources departments were resentful, corrupt, ill-informed, and desperate for power at any cost. Even worse than the dreadful HR D.I.E. combination, perhaps if that is even possible, is the new corporate and government craze for environment, social, and governance dicta—so-called ESGs. As every idiot fad needs an oh-so-in-the-know acronym, as one set of corporate consulting half-wits and moral posturers put it: quote, "Investors are increasingly applying these non-financial factors as part of their analysis process to identify material risks and growth opportunities. ESG metrics are not commonly part of mandatory financial reporting, though companies are increasingly making disclosures in their annual report or in a standalone sustainability report."

Non-financial factors applied to identify material risks; stand-alone sustainability reports—all this smacks of central planning. Not to mention a low, shallow, self-justifying moralizing which can and does in no wise stand in for genuine ethical action. Those planet-saving sustainability goals can simply and finally not be instituted from the top down, particularly not when they will be both formulated and enforced by people who are very interested in looking good but very short on experience, ability, and wisdom.

CEOs, how can you not see? Oh yes, there's that contempt for ideas again; there's that guilty pandering to the utopian leftist mob. The D.I.E. mandates, ESG disclosures, and the massive administrative bureaucracy that thrives on such pseudo-work is precisely equivalent to the worst sort of fifth column. You CEOs are elevating the least competent people in your corporations—that's you, human resources personnel—to the highest positions of decision-making and company planning, turning over your hiring decisions to those deluded enough to think that diversity is a substitute for ability and to believe that equity merely means equality of opportunity.

What does it mean? How about you take the time to find out? A hint: it means equality of outcome, a principle utterly and absolutely antithetical to every free market principle ever established and a doctrine as opposed to the operations of the capitalist world as anything conceivable produced by the dread imagination of the hypothetical bastard child of Karl Marx and Michel Foucault. If you can't see this, or worse, won't, then you are either too ignorant to be doing what you are doing or willfully blind, and precisely in the manner that will usher in the darkest of days you can possibly imagine.

And what of ESG principles? Do I know of what I speak? Well, throughout 2010 and 2011, I worked with the sole Canadian contingent on the UN's 2012 original sustainability plan document, "Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing." I learned something about how such sausages were made. Although the so-called high-level panel charged with this overwhelming and Tower of Babel-like task was hypothetically made up of the typical stellar luminaries (ex-presidents and prime ministers and their ilk), in reality, the task of actually writing the paper, and therefore thinking through the details where the devil hides, was typically shunted down the hierarchy of authority until it landed on the desk of someone who had the interest, time, and presumption to devote some real effort to the task: someone like me.

I say this without cynicism. Ex-presidents, etc., have calendars that are fully booked, often months or even years in advance, and simply do not have the time, resources, or often the ability to sit down and think through, write, and edit the vast research proposal. Because that's what the UN report really was: that makes up a plan for the planet. And who does—who's an expert in planetary sustainability? No one. It's too complicated, and that's why we have a decentralized free market economy.

Oh, captains of industry! 169 goals reduced without much thought to a still unwieldy 17. By what mechanism? By whose choice? With what evidence that such planning is desirable, to say nothing of possible, or more likely counterproductive in an absolute sense? We have a decentralized free market economy so that the invisible hand—which is actually a gigantic distributed computational system calculating adaptation to the transforming horizon of the future—can guide us as unerringly and selfishly, thank God for that, as possible into the future.

This simply cannot be replaced by the utopian handwaving of centralist globalist planners, even if they are blessed with the charisma and brilliance of that consummate conference organizer, Klaus Schwab. The computations of the decentralized free market system, guided as it must be by a necessary minimum of political constitutions and international treaties, simply cannot be replaced by brute force top-down machination, no matter how well-intentioned. Remember what the road to hell is paved with.

We tried that with the bloody five-year plans of Stalin and Mao. Remember how that turned out? If you think the comparison is ridiculous, then just start thinking about the 150 million people who will be hungry later this year when the first results of the decision to scuttle the energy industry in the name of planetary survival roll out. Just give some consideration to the fact that the idiot environmental utopian faux moralizers have proved themselves in the last few years entirely willing to sacrifice today's actual poor to the thriving hypothetical poor who will, if we haven't ethically depopulated ourselves entirely in the next few decades, grace the planet with their sustainable low-carbon footprint in the "lower your expectations" future we are all guiltily planning.

And just remember who enabled an emboldened Putin and pray that wasn't a fatal mistake, as it probably was. And so, CEOs, you need to shed your guilt. You are evil capitalists, just as charged. You've worked your whole life to be precisely that. Are you going to capitulate now in the face of social criticism and disavow everything you have done? Instead, you should wear that badge proudly: evil capitalist, recognizing explicitly that there is simply no better alternative.

Although capitalism produces inequality, and inequality, when unchecked, poses a real danger to social stability, every economic system ever created by man does the same, and often more egregiously. But not every system produces wealth; in fact, none have except free market capitalism, which has, in recent decades, lifted an unprecedented number of people—not least in putatively communist China—out of the absolute poverty that has been the rigid and certain destiny of everyone for the entire span of human history.

Capitalism indeed produces inequality, but it also remediates dire privation. For the first time in the entire painful temporal span comprising life here on earth, everyone has enough to eat, except when political machination interferes and malevolence gains the upper hand. Obesity is now a bigger problem than starvation, but not for long if the D.I.E. enthusiasts and the ESG moralists and centralizers have their way.

Why are you kowtowing to those who despise your companies and your accomplishments? Perhaps it's genuine guilt. The conscientious drivers who often come to occupy positions of authority in conservative corporate institutions are dutiful, industrious, orderly, and hardworking. This also makes them guilt-prone. When such people look at their lives and their, let's say, demographic characteristics—white, middle or upper class, disproportionately male, and English-speaking—they feel, and rightly so, that some of their so-called privilege, and everyone who uses that word is the mortal enemy of C-suite executives, was and is, in fact, undeserved.

All of us in the Western world were, in a sense, fortunate to be born here and now when these vast educational resources and realms of computational power are available to us, when we will never have to ask, “Will we have enough to eat?” or “Will we have somewhere to rest our heads?” Some of that is undeserved. None of us alive built the amazing cities, roadways, or industrial machinery that has brought about our wealth. All of us alive are the beneficiaries of the hard work of our ancestors and worse have the temerity to thrive on the blood-soaked lands of plantation and imperialism and atrocity that make up the states, provinces, and countries that house, shelter, and protect us.

And so we must atone, and rightly so. But we cannot and must not do this by bending a knee to the rabid centralizers and fulminating ignorant and resentful who shake a moralizing fist in the air and object so loudly: “Anyone with more money than me is an oppressor.” That is a very bad pathway. That is the true road to a future that no one except the devil himself wants.

So, if you are a CEO and you are wringing your hands about the planet, and you wake up at three in the morning upgrading yourself for your shenanigans on the moral front—your untrammeled and narrowly self-serving greed in the service of your hedonism and narcissism—then do what you must most truly do to become a better person. Justify your money and your unparalleled opportunities by becoming a shining light in the darkness.

It is said, "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required; and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more." What does this mean? It means, as the rest of the Sermon on the Mount insists, that the way to pay for privilege is by doing the good that is commensurate with that privilege, and this is the way out of the guilt, CEOs, that makes you such easy targets for the demented and satanic moralizing of the accuser.

Are you wealthy? Be better. Do so much good with your money and your other privileges that when the mob comes, you can say, "I have devoted myself truly to the highest good and can stand innocent before you and my own conscience." And you mobsters, have you looked to your own redemption? Have you borne the responsibility of your own unexamined privilege? You who dwell equally in the exploitation and atrocity of the so-called imperialist West—who exactly are you to call me and my talent and privilege out?

In closing, I cannot help but think that there is an appalling greed in all this D.I.E. and ESG posturing. One of the things I found most intolerable about the Ivy League environment was the fostered narcissism of the students. All who gain entry to Yale, or Harvard, or Princeton, or Stanford, or even to the University of Toronto, where I lectured for 20 years, are already part of the elite by any standards, historical and present.

But they are enticed, as an easy escape from their privilege, let's say, into identifying with the oppressed, agitating in principle on their behalf, and atoning for their good fortune, purchased at the cost, in no small part, of the atrocity of the past, with the reflexive and thoughtless activism whose promotion has come to substitute for genuine apprenticeship and education. This means that the new elite, the youthful privileged, get to have their cake and eat it too. They have all the stature and opportunity bestowed upon them and available to them as a consequence of their university affiliation and the hard work and ability that was required to open those doors.

And then, also all the moral high ground that accrues to the unjustly oppressed. That is just too much. That is just asking too much: to be privileged and victimized simultaneously. Just as it's too much for university professors to ask, and even more so, it's too much for CEOs and other denizens of the executive suite to request.

So stop saving the world with the centralizers, globalists, narcissists, and eternal builders of the Tower of Babel. Stand forth instead, as I said, as proudly evil capitalists. Do your fiduciary duty. Provide your customers and clients with what they need and want and let the great invisible hand—that immense computational device—play its necessary role.

Make your enterprise productive and profitable. Make yourself generous and abide by the dictates of your conscience. Do enough signal good so that your great wealth rests lightly on your shoulders. This is a more difficult task, take note, than generating that wealth itself. Put the human resources D.I.E. personnel back in their place. Stop hosting faux democratic town halls. Since when do you care what the stock boys think?

In a few decades, if they have the fortitude, ability, and industriousness, they will be sitting in your hard-won place and making the decisions that you are currently charged with making. Did you not earn that right? Then why forego it under moral pressure? If the answer is guilty conscience, then straighten yourself out. Get your oppressive super-ego under control or stop doing those possibly terrible and unworthy things that make you guilty when the mob knocks at your door.

Stop making obeisance to the alphabet brigade. Stop educating your customers. Remember them as to what political opinions are acceptable. Stop with the full communist pretense unless you want to go there, and if you do, think again, sunshine.

Stop pretending that there are a hundred and fifty different genders and that it is your job to be so compassionate toward all narcissistic outsiders that you tempt children into ill-advised and terribly destructive surgery. Make the following pledge: I will rename human resources personnel as those who performed that role were known in the so sensible 1950s.

I will dispense forthwith with all the diversity, inclusivity, and equity consultants' flotsam and jetsam. Those who have allowed themselves to be possessed by that ideology are not your friends. If you are consorting with them to look good for reasons of greed and vanity, then think again once again because the system of ideas that animates the woke moralists is dead set and in the most serious manner against you and everything you stand for, particularly when you are being genuinely good.

More pledge: I will stop flirting with the grandiose ESG mavens. Isn't saving your company enough? Do you really have to so casually and thoughtlessly save the world to have some humility and stay in your already plenty large wheelhouse? And more on the pledge front: I will pay some more attention to the realm of philosophical, even theological ideas. As I said, and as so many are insisting, we are in a conceptual war, CEOs, and it goes all the way to the bottom.

What side do you want to be on when the chips are down? Don't be thinking you can play both sides against the middle. The deepest chasms of hell are reserved for those who play that game. Don't be thinking either that you can cheaply escape from the burdens of your responsibility with all that money and so-called power, that you can pull the wool over the eyes of the human resources moralists, that acquiescing to their insane demands will solve any problems whatsoever, or that you will not be called upon directly to account for your privilege in the most real of senses.

Pledge further: I will stop manipulating the psyches of my employees. I will stop educating them politically, and I will stop anyone in my company from ever doing so. Political education is the job of KGB commissars, not of corporate executives. CEOs, I implore you: start standing up for what you are and what you do. If your company is genuine, if it is addressing the true needs and wants of genuine customers, if the people you serve are being informed honestly by the agents of your company about the services you offer and if you deliver what you are paid to deliver, then there is nothing to feel guilty for. Quite the contrary.

And if there is, because something shady is going on, then stop inhabiting the dark places and the shade, and do well enough so that your conscience, to say it again, is clear. Perhaps you should at least be on your own side.