Book review of Woke, Inc. by Vivek Ramaswamy

Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam

by Vivek Ramaswamy

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Vivek Ramaswamy is a remarkable person. He is an American entrepreneur who founded a pharmaceutical company, and is currently a presidential candidate for the Republican Party (the youngest contender at only 38-years-old). He mocks virtue-signalling on climate change, gender equality, and racial justice (whether by companies, individuals, non-profits or by governments):

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“The modern woke-industrial complex divides us as a people. By mixing morality with consumerism, America’s 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 as Americans lack both.”

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“There was nothing fundamentally woke about capitalism, no natural compatibility. When corporations started proclaiming that wokeness and capitalism were inseparable and offering money and status to anyone who could help spread that message, each side accepted the proposal not because there was any truth to it but because it was profitable… Wokeness and capitalism simply tolerate each other because each feels it can use the other. They will turn a blind eye to each other’s faults as long as they themselves can still benefit. But a marriage in which each side secretly has contempt for the other cannot end well.”

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He has some excellent specific examples of hypocrisy, gaming of the system, and of companies distracting their consumers from poor practices.

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“America was founded on the idea that we make our most important value judgements through our democratic process, where each citizen’s voice is weighed equally, rather than by a small group of elites in private. Debates about our social values belong in the civic sphere, not in the corner offices of corporate America.”

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“Skin-deep diversity metrics like race and gender often subvert true institutional purpose in a woke world by supplanting that purpose with the activist goals espoused by critical race and critical gender theorists. By contrast, CDT (critical diversity theory) invites leaders of organizations to actually use diversity – in particular, diversity of thought – to define the true essence of an organization by defining the areas in which diversity of thought is desirable and the areas in which it is not.”

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He argues that the Business Judgement Rule is supposed to apply to business decisions, and not to social decisions (which removes the BJR as a defence in instances where companies have become too woke).

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“A critical feature that distinguishes executives and independent directors – members of the “managerial class” – from shareholders is that the former have a reputation to maintain while the latter do not. This is itself a conflict of interest, even through it’s not one that the law recognizes today.”

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Vivek argues that the managerial class serves their own interests:

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“CEOs can do whatever they want so long as they say they have everyone’s best interests in mind. Wokenomics is a powerful weapon for CEOs, which they can readily deploy as a smoke screen to distract from greed, fraud, and malfeasance. It provides the perfect alibi: accountability to everyone is accountability to no one at all.”

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Vivek points out the cost to university students, consumers, and citizens:

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“The core mission of a university is supposed to be education, and universities’ relevant “stakeholders” were originally supposed to be their students, the ones who were paying them to be educated. But as socially conscious managers have gradually taken over the universities, they’ve expanded their conception of their stakeholders to include racial minorities, sexual minorities, future generations, the environment, and whatever other groups progressive activists say they should care about… A 2014 analysis found that from 1987 to 2012, the higher-education sector added more than half a million administrators… Samuel Abrams, visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, found that liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by an astonishing ratio of 12 to 1… The “diversity administrator” has a vested interest in perpetually preserving the perception of a “diversity problem” – or else their own job becomes superfluous.”

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“The deeper problem arises when the CCP flexes its muscles as a gatekeeper to the Chinese market to then convince corporations to spread the CCP’s own values abroad. It does this implicitly through the rise of woke capitalism – with companies like Disney, Marriott, Apple, or the NBA expressing their moral outrage about injustices like “systemic racism” and transphobia in the United States while staying completely silent about human rights abuses like concentration camps, force sterilization of religious minorities, and beatings of innocent civilians in China.”

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He is quick to call-out vested interests and widespread grift:

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“Silicon Valley’s titans restricted debates between ordinary Americans, just as monarchs like MBS do in Saudi Arabia. They appointed themselves as the sole arbiters of truth in science and silenced dissent, just as the CCP does in China. They banished century-old newspapers. They interfered in our elections in unprecedented ways… It’s no wonder that Big Tech stacked the decks of public debate to favour lockdowns, even as in retrospect we find these policies were of dubious value in preventing the spread of COVID-19 while markedly effective in spreading economic calamity.”

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“The analogy between Christianity and the Church of Diversity is so strong that it’s evident that wokeness plays a religious role in one’s life, and therefore really is a religion, for legal purposes. Under the woke worldview, being born white, straight, male, or – worse – all three is an original sin that one must spend their life atoning for. Just as Catholics think we inherited the sins of Adam and Eve even if we’ve done nothing wrong, disciples of wokeness think we’ve inherited the sins of the Founding Fathers – the mechanism for group guilt is just called systemic racism instead of original sin.”

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“Buttigieg was trying to continue a tradition that goes back not only to JFK, but even further, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, which helped the country dig its way out of the Great Depression by putting millions of young men to work rebuilding the country, giving them food, shelter, jobs, money, and, most important, a shared sense of purpose. The Civilian Conservation Corps was the most popular of the New Deal programs.”

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The book does ramble on, mostly regarding the various aspects of woke capitalism but also as an autobiography of Vivek’s relatively short life. I found it partially convincing, but didn’t completely go along with the narrative. However, it is well worth reading to understand this sceptical perspective.