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Even If You Don’t Mean Them, Words Matter
I am keenly aware that society is full of people, in all lines of work, who simply cannot speak their minds. Fear of being labeled, canceled, or otherwise disadvantaged means that everyone toes the line.
But the result of an executive toeing the line and spouting Woke nonsense is that their staff are not free to simply ignore what the Boss says. No, they have to follow direction and focus on the Corporate Mission – even if that means spending half their working day on Woke matters and not taking care of business. See “Failures: Banks.”
Is it any wonder that going Woke means going Broke? And the problem is that nobody has to really believe what they are saying in order for the damage to be done. Words matter. If we say it – even if we don’t mean it at all! – then the words we have spoken make an impact.
Woke is just like paganism in this respect. Maybe we aren’t sure that the Earth is really a goddess. But if we keep treating it like it is, then the perceptions of the listeners follow our words, not any underlying beliefs.
The corollary, of course, is that once we say something, even if we know it is nonsense before we open our mouths, then that thought or idea has a way of going out of our lying mouths and coming back into our ears. And then the next time we say that stupid thing, we are less quick to reject it. Over time, we become lost in our own well-intentioned lies.
Published in General
It’s risky. It’s easy to get lost.
The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.
— Elena Gorokhova
As I normally tell people. It is a Red Letter Day when somebody tells me the truth. In my youth I used to believe people were truthful. I now know they are not. I am not sure they ever were or if they have just gotten less truthful as time went on.
This is why I think workplaces would do well to become everything-free.
Parties, politics, religion, and of course wokestuff.
Don’t you people have work to do?
What you allow in your ears will eventually come out your mouth.
I am not so sure of this. I am a Torah Jew in a secular world. There is quite a lot I hear that never comes back out of my mouth.
I find that this is generally true. I also think that to the extent you have your own mental armor, this is less true (your condition, I would say). Most people, IMHO, have very little discipline of intentionally maintaining their mindset, and are swayed by propaganda and hearsay.
So my little aphorism is meant to remind people that they can at least build a fence — and to perhaps give them an A-Ha! moment when they see it happen to others.
As you say — words matter.
[Insert adorable pic of pepe wearing the armor of the almighty, screwing up his courage to do battle.]
And much of the corporate world has fallen for all of that. LinkedIn is the wokest site I ever go to on the internet.
Currently, I work for a small company and we have no time or interest to care about such thing. But in 2020 I was working at an insurance company. When the “Summer of Floyd” kicked in, management (led by a CEO with ties to the first Bush White House) decided to go all in on BLM and even pulled ads from Facebook because they had not banned the sitting president from their site. Somehow they claimed that wasn’t political. I ended up quitting even though I didn’t have another job yet.
I end up using pop phrases and it pisses me off every time I do.
Whenever Mr. Charlotte tells me about the latest wokery at his large consulting company (Ibram X Kendi virtual lecture! Self-care workshops! Women’s Advancement Task Force! Diversity Report Card Update! Transgender Day of Remembrance!)* all I can think of is how every penny devoted to this nonsense is a penny that will not appear in his paycheck.
*All 100% true examples.
How does the Transgender Day of Remembrance work?
“Remember back when Gretel used to be Hansel?”
I read that as panties at first!
That might improve the employment rate.