Cultural Suicide

Wall Street Journal editorials are often infuriatingly silly. Recently Gerard Baker claimed western civilization was committing suicide because of “woke” business practices, which apparently to him means caring about anything but short-term making money. He crowed about how he along with other best and brightest happily made the world great as employees of Goldman, KKR, Bain and so on.

For me, the great divide was the “”Chicago School “of economics, which claimed that the only rule of business was immediate profit, the only proper goal of the elite “makers” was to generate money, the only role of the masses of impoverished “takers” was to be religious, and the only function of government was to aid the wealthy, who deserve it all because in a meritocracy by definition the best are the richest.

Actually we know that in the “good old days”, in the US, business was more complex. Small firms were part of the community, large firms were part of society, and there was an implicit agreement that for the most part employers and employees were in it together for the long term.

The corporate raiders ended that. They trumpeted “creative destruction,” but they practiced pure piracy. Gobble up anything with a bad quarter resulting in excessive assets, plunder it, sell it off, move jobs offshore, close plants, get rich on paper stock manipulations.

They turned life nasty and mean. If cultural suicide happens, it is because they have already stabbed and poisoned civilization into everyone-for-self hedonistic nihilism.