Social Justice Scam
Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam
By Vivek Ramaswamy
Some books can be read through quickly, others take time to ponder and digest. Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam is definitely the latter. “The modern woke-industrial complex divides us as a people. By mixing morality with consumerism, corporate elites prey on our innermost insecurities about who we really are. They sell us cheap social causes and skin-deep identities to satisfy our hunger for a cause and our search for meaning, at a moment when we lack both.” That’s a snippet from the description of the bestselling book by Vivek Ramaswamy but, that is barely the beginning of this deep dive into the woke cultural shift that is changing America and the capitalism that built it.
Kyle Pratt with his copy of Woke Inc.
On the second page, the author states there is, “a new invisible force at work in the highest ranks of corporate America... It’s the defining scam of our time—one that robs you of not only your money but your voice and your identity.” While that sounds conspiratorial, Ramaswamy spends much of the book showing just how this force has corrupted American culture.
The author states that many corporations are selling wokeness not as a truly held belief but to be on the correct side of the current cultural wave. In a New York Post article, he said, “Pretend like you care about something other than profit and power, precisely to gain more of each.” However, to the extent that corporations believe in the woke mindset they are changing the way business is conducted. Ramaswamy discusses how these ideologies are polarizing politics, dividing the country, and changing American values. He asks, why should a few corporations have the power to determine American values? The new wokeness is distorting the capitalist system that built the nation.
Today we routinely hear terms like woke and stakeholder capitalism but what do they really mean? Ramaswamy states that woke, which in the past meant being aware of racism now means, “obsessing about race, gender, and sexual orientation.” Generations of leaders have proclaimed that government should not meddle with religion and more recently citizens should not focus on skin color. However, in the book he writes that the “American vision of separating church from state, and democracy from capitalism has been supplanted by this new global vision of mixing them all with one another—leaving us with none of them in the end.” The words stakeholder and capitalism both had traditional meanings but now they are joined together in, “a game in which greedy executives play stakeholders and shareholders against each other.”
Vivek Ramaswamy’s parents emigrated from India but, the author was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He graduated from Harvard summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa and later received a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School. His love of America and capitalism runs throughout his book.
If a conservative look at the impact of culture upon business is of interest to you, Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam is a must-read. I highly recommend it.
Have you read Woke Inc? Are you worried about the growing influence of woke ideology on business? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
