I bought this book at Dubray Bookstore, Henry Street, Dublin. Woke is defined as aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).
According to the author :
“white progressives have appropriated ‘stay woke’ as a general-purpose term that refers to being aware of all identity-based injustices.”
This is what gives birth to the cancel culture and woke-industrial complex. He describes it as woke capitalism or stakeholder capitalism :
“Under the banner of stakeholder capitalism, CEOs and large investors work with ideological activists to implement radical agendas that they could never pass in Congress. Woke culture posits a new theory of who you are as a person, one that reduces you to the characteristics you inherit at birth and denies your status as a free agent in the world. And it deploys powerful corporations to propagate this new theory with the full force of modern capitalism behind it. The antidote isn't to fight wokeness directly. It can't be, because that's a losing battle. You'll be canceled before you even stand a chance. The true solution is to gradually rebuild a vision for shared American identity that is so deep and so powerful that it dilutes wokeism to irrelevance, one that no longer leaves us susceptible to being divided by corporate elites for their own gain. 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.”
Then he continues:
“Stakeholderism is the philosophy that posits that institutions should not only advance their essential purpose but also advance societal goals that go beyond the institution's essential purpose.”
He said, institution such as corporation should be more focusing in innovating good products and services rather than interfering with social agenda :
“Institutional investors should stop playing this game of shuffling money around and rewarding companies that they like and punishing ones they dislike based on factors that have nothing to do with commercial value. CEOs should stop playing the same game on the other side by making hollow proclamations that have nothing to do with their companies. If you want to improve the world through your business, there's a better way: make a great product that you believe in.”
Finally, combination of woke and capitalism is a bad news for democracy :
“The wedding of wokeness to capitalism offers a tempting, individually rational choice that harms the nation as a whole by handing corporations social and political power. They don't truly have wokeness's best interests at heart, and the two systems aren't truly compatible. Wokeness and capitalism simply tolerate each other because each feels it can use the other. They will turn a blind eye to each other's faults as long as they themselves can still benefit. But a marriage in which each side secretly has contempt for the other cannot end well.”
Even though he sounds like a far right conservative and sometimes quite defensives of Trump, I don't mind reading something that is having different point of views from mine. But he may have good points on how corporation in the past such as Dutch East Indian Company has colonized and milked third world resources under the name of international trade.
A five stars book. Highly recommended.
Comments
Post a Comment