C-Suite Zealots

Anyone who has worked in a big company has encountered a variety of "tropes" in the corporate bestiary. One I've often harped on is the fief builder - the middle manager who is more interested in stuffing his branch of the tree with loyalists than in the company's health or bottom line. A friend reminded me of another trope. Let's call it "the zealot."

The zealot prioritizes political agendas over company or institutional health, and would rather pursue hot-button and wedge-issue stances/viewpoints than do his or her job. The zealot has much in common with another trope, the hall monitor (no explanation needed), and when you combine the hall monitor and the zealot, you get the Human Resources Administrator.

Such have routinely been a pain, but a manageable one. However, we are seeing an increase in zealots rising up to C-Suite ranks, on both sides of the public/private divide, as evidenced by the proliferation of DEI, ESG, and other woke policies and behaviors. Their elevated status amplifies the damage they can inflict.

The C-Suite Zealots differ from the normal executives in that they aren't simply playing along with the ESG/DEI farce in order to keep the fanatics at bay. They are true believers who prioritize it over their actual jobs.

With predictable results.

Behold, the Silicon Valley Bank debacle. That mess can be traced to poor management and bad decisions, and it's not hard to look at a board of directors where only one of twelve members had an investment banking background and ponder how much "woke" was to blame for the mess. On the other side, the chief of the San Francisco Fed was apparently more interested in "understanding the economic and financial risks of climate change and inequities" than keeping an eye on the banks under her purview.

I’m a small-time commercial real estate investor. About a year and a half ago, I saw obvious signs that interest rates were heading upward and would continue to head upward, so I scrambled to refinance my near-maturity loans before I got trapped by those high rates. I’m just some podunk outsider, so if I could see the obvious, why couldn’t the Best-and-Brightest that populated SVB’s board and C-suites? As I understand it, they were heavily invested in mortgage backed securities that would lose value in a rising interest rate environment. Were they incompetent, or were they so distracted by woke that they simply didn’t notice?

Many pundits have voiced concern that woke's displacement of nuts-and-bolts education in universities may collapse some bridges in the future. At least one noted that the harm of under-education and misplaced priorities is already here, in the guise of this bureaucratic bungling and institutional capture.

There's a gag running around leftist circles these days that claims conservatives cannot define the "woke" they denounce and decry. I'm not a conservative, but since I'm not a leftist, I can safely presume they include me in their snarky straw man. In response, I offer:

Woke is coercion. Woke is divisiveness. Woke is a demand for submissive conformity. Woke is racism, sexism, and a fistful of other bigotries. Woke is the dehumanization of all who don't agree with you, so you feel less averse to treating them like shit, denying them their rights and liberties, and kicking them out of 'your' society. Woke is a club, in two ways: a weapon with which to smite your enemies, and a restricted space where undesirables are denied entry.

One such restricted space is the World Economic Forum that recently took place in Davos, Switzerland. Best-and-Brightest billionaires and their brethren get together, via private jets of course, to figure out new ways to not leave us alone, to make our lives more expensive, more difficult, and more miserable. For our own good, of course.

How many WEF attendees are C-Suite Zealots, and how many are just playing along because doing so keeps them in the cool kids' club? Already, there are too many of the former, and their misplaced priorities are already doing us real harm. They won't suffer the consequences of their woke-trumps-job mistakes, because their club cronies will cover for them. As the Feds did for SVB.

This only ends when good people wake up to the truth about woke, and reject its fascistic ways and totalitarian demands.