Maybe I'll be there to shake your hand, maybe I'll be there to stakeholder capitalist the land

That they'll be givin' away / When we all live together. May God help us.

Like many things faddish and ephemeral — disco, Pet Rocks, feathered hair, taking Michel Foucault seriously as an intellectual — the 1970s gave birth to the concept of stakeholder capitalism, one of the most unfortunate yet enduring of the bad ideas that polyester decade bequeathed us. At its essence, stakeholder capitalism is Marxian capitalism run through a lens of business ethics. It is the attempt to maintain authoritarian control over capitalism by displacing the Invisible Hand with a Velvet Glove, then using that glove, which hides an iron fist, to pound the world into adopting values that both assert and maintain its worldview. It is Theory applied to markets, marketing, wealth creation and management, and an overall globalized ethos of required and policed “virtue,” with the end goal being — as it always is under the discourses of Cultural Marxist thought — power: who has it, who controls it, and who uses it for their own ends most effectively and ruthlessly.

Of course, nobody participating in the push to replace shareholder capitalism with stakeholder capitalism would describe it this way. But then, euphemism and branding are each crucial tools in the Marxist’s verbal toolbox. So when you ask a stakeholder capitalist to describe stakeholder capitalism, what you ordinarily hear is that, as a business ethic, it combines the “sustainability” shareholder capitalism supposedly lacks with the “inclusivity” we’re not supposed to recognize is merely stultifying, policed conformity, the yield being a Woke capitalism that replaces production and consumption with “sharing and caring,” taking it out of the realm of the invisible and mechanical, as Adam Smith would have it, and placing it into the realm of values, where it can be used to shape the Greater Good the Marxist pretends he cares about. It’s fascism with a smiley face.

In the stakeholder capitalist system, investors aren’t — or at least, they shouldn’t be — solely interested in profits driven by production and consumption. And this is because to the stakeholder capitalist, itself a euphemism for collectivist corporatist, “it is well proven that our current form of Capitalism is inherently unsustainable because it requires endless growth on a planet with finite resources.”

Of course, none of this is “well proven” — the history of shareholder capitalism suggests the opposite, in fact, as innovation has led to the production of more and more out of less and less — but whether this is or isn’t the material case is incidental to those who are working on this inorganic worldwide paradigm shift commonly known as The Great Reset.

Because the move toward a “caring and sharing” worldwide economy, especially one that we’re told will be both sustainable and inclusive, requires those who care, those who share, and — most importantly, and at the very heart of the turn — those who get to determine what is cared about, who must do the sharing, and how most effectively to police the excesses that the ruling elite determine aren’t sustainable, while slowly dissolving the idea of the individual and his will to make way for an inclusive collective required to run the machinery of the self-installed Elect. It’s a global system of neo-Feudalism dressed in the finery of familiar values that have been deconstructed and re-signified, often without their consumers even aware that the values they reference — which were once commonly understood and largely shared by the civil society — are now their precise inverse: “tolerance,” thus, becomes the violent rejection of intolerance, as they define it; free speech is separated from “hate speech,” as they adjudicate it; individualism is but a controlling fiction maintained by the white male power structure that must be replaced by an ordered and value-determined collection of identity markers that construct you, while simultaneously acknowledging that there is no “you” beyond this assembly of discourses that assign your being its social situatedness, then places you within a collective of those with similar — though never identical — constructions. Once here, you are graded on the intersectional scale. Your relative worth and power come down to not to the content of your character, but rather to the collection and arrangement of your victimization tokens.

If all of this sounds de-humanizing, that’s because it is. The goal of the Great Reset as it is being marketed, particularly to Western sensibilities, has been to hide the dehumanization that underlies the program. It recognizes that by appealing to traditional moral values, it can subsume those who wish to display virtue without knowing that the virtue they’re displaying has been entirely corrupted by Theory’s interrogation of it. That is, the rhetorical strategy is to adopt and promote certain signifiers both familiar to and championed by the West, while hiding the sign that they’ve created, which involves mapping onto ideals entirely new meanings with entirely new intentions animating them. After all, who doesn’t wish to be “tolerant” and devoid of “hate”? Who doesn’t wish to champion “freedom” — albeit a freedom that comes from being able to remove “hate” and “intolerance” from the social and cultural mainstream? CEI, or ESG, or other methods of coercion peculiar to stakeholder capitalism, then, are well-positioned to paint themselves as but neutral referees of righteousness and fairness — of sustainability and inclusivity — when in fact that are the new Invisible Hand, though this time, one unabashed about placing its fat, moisturized and manicured thumb on the global economic scale.

Why this all matters comes down to how dedicated you are to the Western Enlightenment and its principles. If you seek to uphold those principles, you’ll reject attempts by Marxist theorists to tear them down and, from the rubble, build their own Utopian vision of the New Man — the transhuman, made more efficient and less filthy by the New Gods, who will literally program it, not just ideologically but with bio-technical, medical, and behavioral upgrades, to create an artificially manufactured consent — using flimsy meta-narratives as their bricks. Who knows: maybe you just like chaos. Maybe you’re just bored. The purpose of this essay isn’t to judge you. Though I do, naturally: if you’re a leftist, you’re part of an aggressive disease, a malformed cell attacking its host like any other mindless parasitic free rider. Obviously.

No, instead, my goal here is to describe why this push to change the entire economic system of the world, dreamed up through the best intentions of some of the Seventies’ most privileged sociopaths and narcissists, is happening so aggressively now. And the answer, so far as I can tell, is timing. From Mike Sha, writing at Forbes:

Over the next two decades, parents and grandparents are expected to pass down trillions of dollars (approximately $84 trillion, by one estimate) to charities and younger generations—particularly, Millennials and Gen Xers. This will drastically shake up the financial services industry as players jockey for position with beneficiaries.

It is important to acknowledge that the Great Wealth Transfer is not a static event, but one that will be impacted by big swings in the economy, technology and culture. The ability for financial advisors and wealth managers to compete will depend on how prepared they are to address inevitable changes.

[…]

Heirs and beneficiaries of the Great Wealth Transfer won’t necessarily trust their new-found windfalls with their parents’ financial advisors. Certain incumbents may have been kept on by older generations because of inertia or because switching financial providers has historically been a hassle. But they should realize that today’s seamless digital interfaces and automated processes have made it easier for investors to make a change.

And who are these new investors for whom “seamless digital interfaces and automated processes” will make it easier “to make a change”? To Sha, it’s Gen Xers and Millennials, as he notes; but to those thinking more long-term — say, to the year 2030, to pick just one random landing spot — the demographics, which they themselves are creating as the product of the long march they took while David French and Bill Kristol held cruises, upon which sockless men in blazers and penny loafers discussed tax rates and immigration as a function of cheap labor for business, tell a different story:

A total of 7.2% of U.S. adults identify as LGBTQ, and younger generations – particularly those 25 and under – are driving the numbers, according to a poll released Wednesday.

The Gallup survey of 2022 data also shows that the number of U.S. adults who identified as LGBTQ has more than doubled in a decade: In 2012, Gallup found that 3.5% of U.S. adults said they were LGBTQ. That number surged to 7.1% in 2021 before holding steady last year.

The fact that the numbers stabilized in 2022 after recent dramatic jumps is not unexpected, Gallup Senior Editor Jeff Jones told USA TODAY. 

‘We’ve seen a doubling, representing a total 3.7-point increase in 10 years,’ he said. ‘At that rate, in most years we would expect to see rather incremental changes on the order of tenths of a percentage point.  If you look at it over time, though, the incremental increases add up to something more substantial.’

One of the key takeaways from the annual poll in recent years has been the growing presence of Generation Z in embracing new identities  – an indicator Jones says is likely to continue. 

‘I think the data (is) clear that LGBTQ identification is highest among the younger generations,’ Jones told USA TODAY. ‘I don’t put much stock in year-to-year increases or decreases that are within the margin of error ... but over a longer period of years you’ll see a more definite trend emerge.’

That “emerging trend” shows that, among Gen Z and Millennials, the adoption of the left’s conception of the world as one controlled through intersectionality, ally-ship, solidarity, and the “queering” of traditional Western norms, has taken a substantial hold on their beliefs, which economists — and those who run the economists — are noting will manifest in a future demand, flushed with all the wealth of the past but with none of the wisdom gathered while accruing it, of new directions in economics — specifically, those built around the ideas of the stakeholder capitalist vision. It’s the appeal of the bromide to the mind of those raised on self-righteousness and activism. To them, wealth just is. Not having created it but having their entire lives lived inside its comforts, they were easy marks. For sleezy Marx.

At times like these, it’s fair to ask what the supposed “conservatives” were conserving as cultural Marxism ran its now nearly completed coup against what was once the world’s most successful experiment in self governance — and the greatest net good materially for the globe, both in terms of its animating ideals and its impact on poverty worldwide. The truth is, rather than standing athwart history yelling “stop!” as they so long boasted, too many of them in positions of political influence, aside from daily lecturing social conservatives and “conspiratorial” traditionalists about the dangers of being seen as fighting for a particular vision of American culture, spent most of that time providing the intellectual cover for the spread of Cultural Marxism, having adopted a view toward speech that was so accommodating that it invited in as its welcomed guests those whose explicit intent — which they weren’t exactly silent about — was to burn down their homes.

The Global Elites behind BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, the WEF, the WHO, the UN, et al., have never liked that presumptuous, barely-credentialed nobodies, can get on planes and travel the globe, just as they do. They never accepted that the filthies can eat a fine rib eye, or drive a nice car, or own a comfortable home — and not have to rely on their largess, or answer to their diktats.

Americanism in the way it was founded and performed up until recently was anathema to their desires to re-order the global hierarchy around their monumental self importance, and their persistent rejection of the idea that people should be free to live lives that aren’t controlled by the ideas and orderings that the Elect demand. As the Iron Law of Woke Projection predicted, their unmasking of the oppressor / oppressed binary was not something they wished to name and destroy. It was something they wished to control and deploy.

So they set out to do just that.

And today we’re seeing the fruits of surrendering language, individualism, metaphysical ideas of truth, rationalism, science, and the very idea of a propositional nation — one wherein identity and tribe is, by the force of equality before the law, disincentivized in favor of a shared culture that expands as it engages with newness — to an ideology that has tried and failed in all its other iterations.

Unless you were part of the ruling elite, that is.

Those fellows always ate well.

****

Buy me a cup of coffee? Lunch? A sports car?