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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
Woke, Inc. summary
Vivek Ramaswamy
Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
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4 (146 ratings)
23 mins
7 key ideas
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What is Woke, Inc. about?
Woke, Inc. (2021) explores how the ideology of wokeness has come to infect America’s corporate sphere. While paying lip service to various social-justice causes, major American companies are acting in ways that are anything but just – and generating major profit in the process. Aside from being a nefarious way for corporations to make money, this strategy is also doing lasting damage to American democracy in surprising ways, and it’s time to snuff it out.
About the Author
Vivek Ramaswamy is an entrepreneur and political pundit. He has degrees in both molecular biology and law, and he’s the founder of the biotech company Roivant Sciences. He appeared on the cover of Forbes in 2015 for his work on drug development and now serves on the board of directors of the Philanthropy Roundtable and the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity. In 2021, he stepped down as Roivant’s CEO in order to focus on political analysis and commentary.
Table of Contents
Key idea 1 of 7
Corporations use wokeness as a virtuous smokescreen.
The term woke originated decades ago, when Black activists warned each other to “stay woke” – in other words, to be alert to the realities of racism. Since then, the term’s usage has expanded greatly. Now, you can be woke to any number of race-, sex-, or gender-based injustices, such as microaggressions – small offenses that add up to a lot of harm. If you’re woke, you’re hyperaware of invisible power structures operating everywhere.
Woke, progressive ideology has gained a lot of traction in America in recent years, particularly among white, coastal suburbanites. And corporations have taken note. They’ve seized on wokeness as a way to curry favor with a rising political sector, profit off their social values, and dictate those values back to the rest of America.
The key message here is: Corporations use wokeness as a virtuous smokescreen.
Innumerable companies have co-opted wokeness for their own purposes. A good example of one involves the famous investment firm Goldman Sachs.
In January 2020, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon declared that Goldman would only take a company public if its board included at least one diverse member. What exactly did diverse mean? Goldman failed to specify, simply saying it would have a “focus on women.”
Of course, the social value Goldman was claiming to champion had already been popular for a while. In fact, by July 2019, every company in the S&P 500 already had at least one woman on their boards. So, Goldman was taking zero risk by making this pro-diversity proclamation. It was merely emblazoning its logo on the cause.
While headlines focused on that, attention was conveniently diverted from a much less flattering scandal. It had come to light that Goldman had paid over a billion dollars in bribes to get involved in raising money for the 1Malaysia Development Berhad Fund, which was supposed to be for public development projects but instead became a slush fund for corrupt Malaysian officials. Goldman had just agreed to pay different governments a total of $5 billion in fines for its role in the scheme.
This is just one of countless examples of this form of what the author calls woke capitalism, where companies profit off of social values to distract from their less savory dealings. In the process, those social values become debased, and, ultimately, American democracy bears the consequences – a topic we’ll explore more in the next blink.
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Who should read Woke, Inc.
- Conservatives and centrists worried about the excesses of progressivism
- Liberals who want to hear the other side’s perspective
- Anyone interested in American social ills
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