why woke, ESG, and DEI are so seductive to weak leaders
one of the most ineffacable truisms of organizational structure is this:
A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s.
it’s just basic human nature. excellence seeks to surround itself with excellence that it may achieve and mediocrity seeks to surround itself with sub-mediocrity that it may prevent itself from being supplanted.
there is nothing mediocrity fears more than excellence. it’s how you get turfed out of the cushy gig you do not really merit. positions of power are slippery and when you have one that consciously or merely instinctively you know that you do not deserve and are not truly qualified for, the last thing you want is some high caliber competitor coming up behind you, showing you up, and taking your chair.
A’s don’t sweat this because competing is what they do. but B’s live in terror of it. and this is why the B’s and C’s love “woke”, ESG, and DEI:
these alleged philosophies of inclusion are, in fact, ideologies of exclusion.
and what they seek to exclude is excellence and meritocracy.
it’s the literal point of the practice and it’s the reason that so many weakling leaders gravitate to them: it’s job security for the unqualified wrapped up in a neat little philosophy that makes self-serving nepotism and plunder look like virtue.
as seems ever the case, the words of bastiat may inform us here:
for why should this most durable of definitive dictums hold any less for plundered positions of power? if anything, it would seem doubly applicable:
the B’s who wish to remain atop the game will erect a legal system to thwart excellence and a bogus moral code that makes it seem like justice and progress.
this is literally what “woke” is.
the whole point of DEI (diversity equity inclusion) is to place and sustain in positions of power those who could not otherwise attain them and to glorify this practice through the cultivation of some sort of grievance entitlement or fabricated “other value to be maximized” by rendering “diversity” (but only of certain selected types) an end unto itself through circular systems of value ascription. “diversity is good because diversity is good.” (well, apart from diversity of ideas or diversity of excellence.)
the whole point of ESG (environmental, social, governance) is to allocate resources away from “best uses as determined by market” and into “hobbyhorses determined by cronies and capture.” it’s just another way to avoid competing while claiming to serve some facile “greater good” erected as pretext for plunder.
and this is how the world has become such an intolerable and increasingly dysfunctional mess. it’s rule by rube and ideological invasion and inversion of best practice and sound function.
it’s endlessly seductive to the hopelessly mediocre and it is infesting everything because once you infect the top, the whole rest of the fish rots from the head down. the B’s selected to lead purge the A’s and render what was once excellent the sub-mediocre domain of the C and call it progress.
and this keeps rarifying until you have F’s hiring H’s…
and this is how the center does not hold.
and this is how the world falls apart.
let’s be very clear about something: i am not saying that lots of diverse people from lots of diverse backgrounds and of highly varied hue, gender, race, and whatever cannot be highly qualified A+ players and suited to lead and thrive.
they can.
what i am saying is that such people need not compete by being preferenced for personal characteristics non-germane to the tasks they will undertake. they can do it on merit.
what i am saying is that choosing leaders for the color of their skin or their sexual orientation and not the content of their capability set demeans and debases them. it renders their achievements suspect and their positions less trusted for always will a whiff of nepotistic stink accrue to them.
what i am saying is that we’re putting fools in charge, chosen for ideological and identarian criteria that have little or nothing to do with the actual sound performance of the tasks entrusted to them and that to shore up their own power, they are adopting and accelerating the practices of exclusionary wokedom in order to feather their own nests and prevent competition and competence because these ideas threaten them and their positions.
and this is a race to an ever sinking bottom.
it’s how competence is destroyed and how “unknown unknowns” proliferate.
pretty soon no one in power has any idea what they are doing.
and the stupid games these people increasingly wish to play are bringing home increasingly stupid prizes.
because these people are clowns.
serious, weapons grade, dangerous clowns.
and we’re past the point where “sari” is going to cut it. (sorry)
really stop and take this in. dozens of cites fell for this guy and his made up country. no one even googled it. and you’re leaving these people in charge? seriously?
the greatest social need in america today is to wall ourselves off from this.
it’s the antithesis of everything.
this broken philosophy of self-ennoblement and plunder praxis has infected academia root and stem. our universities are putrefying and the folks who run them becoming ever more absurd.
and it’s reaching the breaking point.
longtime gatopal™ emily burns nailed it as “the suicide of the elites.”
but it’s more than just the preposterous preening polemics they are discrediting themselves with.
it is not just this act of bringing the bright into range of dishonest discourse then sucker punching them as mediocrity theater that constitutes the self-immolation of once august academies.
this is just a symptom.
the disease itself is the elevation and glorification of mediocrity and incapacity.
the pathogen is the drive to disallow thought and reason by replacing it with doctrinaire dogmatism.
the suicide was putting a bunch of bloviating B’s in charge.
and their goal is to keep being a B-boss by cultivating a society of C’s and vilifying and silencing anything that looks like actual excellence.
and everything this touches falls apart.
the debacle of silicon valley bank is just another object lesson. (quite a good primer HERE for those wanting more info)
SVB was quite probably “america’s wokest bank.”
many had leveled accusations of ponzi, circularity, and self-dealing around it as well esp around the practice of funding “social goods” in circular fashion. SVB was an LP in many VC funds. those VC’s would then pressure portfolio companies to take out venture loans from SVB and SVB would, in turn, require those companies to keep their funds at the bank as part of the lending agreement.
many of the VC’s were engaging in “invest on ESG and then force adoption of the products through lobbying” crony corporatism.
there was an awful lot of “flow of funds to non-economic ends.”
they all glom onto this derangement of markets. why compete when you can mandate?
but is was all ignored and swept under rugs because you had a pile of raging B’s and C’s swinging their sub-mediocrity glorifying moral code around their heads like a morning star and preventing criticism or even assessment.
they all loved it. the politicians loved it. the regulators loved it.
because it was all B’s and C’s, chosen for mediocrity and ideology, not talent.
and no one seemed to see the problem.
it’s positively soviet.
but it turns out that “woke” is not great risk management
but they sure did have a lot of it…
and perhaps this is why the very VC’s that benefitted from the circular back-pat squads so suddenly turned tail and fled causing a run on the bank for fear of what might be under the covers.
because the ringmasters knew it was a clownshow and that these non-real measures of “success” were empty clothes in want of an emperor.
the whole self-aggrandizing ecosystem is bankrupt.
check this date.
and so the 16th largest bank in america went from “forbes list/respected silicon valley icon” to “we just got taken over by the regulators and are out of business” in a couple days.
people act surprised, but the rot was obvious.
i honestly don’t even know if there was anyone at SVB that understood that having a huge portfolio of mortgage backed securities held unhedged for interest rates (most banks use swaps to do this) funded with demand deposits during historic rate hikes was even an issue or if this is just some stunning peter principle object lesson.
and you can try to blame to ones who saw the scam/got out, but clearly the level of true confidence was wanting.
astonishingly, many of the rubes are still braying about their hilarious delusions instead of learning the real lesson:
that elevating mediocrity is fatal to companies, agencies, and societies alike.
truly, there is just no smartening up these chumps.
whole ecosystems of indoctrination and belief have been ingrained here. they have stacked the turtles of sub-adequacy all the way down and purged any who might threaten their retention of power.
did you seriously think that selectors like “if you believe in free speech or biological gender you cannot work here” were some sort of genuine enterprise as opposed to just the seductive self-delusion used in most machiavellian fashion to cull the sane and sound so that the plundering neiman marxists could keep the capable away from challenging their power?
the absurdity is a feature, not a bug.
the entire point of the woke/DEI/ESG alphabet soup multiplex is to orchestrate a war on competence.
and it has become endemic.
you’re being ruled by rubes who have elevated the inability to reason or rotate shapes to a sort of ethical code that worships uncritical incapacity.
it’s the simple and inevitable emergent outcome of putting B’s in charge. they purge the A’s, hire idiots, shore up their power, and gin up a song and dance to not only justify but lionize having done so.
then everyone looks baffled when nothing works any more and the engine of everything starts to sputter.
“go woke go broke” is not just a law of economics.
it’s also one of morality and of sanity.
it bankrupts everything.
and it’s time we knocked this off.
the society we save may be our own.
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https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-glorification-of-sub-mediocrity?utm_medium=email