The Terrible Threes

 Tyrants of all kinds LOVE slogans—the more vacuous and innocuous sounding the better.  They are meant to be devoid of real meaning, or to camouflage precisely where they are taking society.  Most often, the actual results are the exact opposite of the slogan’s purported aspirations.  The Bolshevik’s “Peace, Land, and Bread,” gave them war, an invasion by the Germans and mass starvation.  Likewise, Mao’s “Serve the People” and the “Great Leap Forward,” resulted in 36-45 million deaths.  And we all know where the infamous “Abreit Macht Frei” went.

And here we are once again, subject to an onslaught of slogans.  But this time, it’s from within.   The slogans and messaging are back, in an effort to reshape society.  But this time, they are being broadcast in the West, in an effort to reshape free societies into something different.  Once again, as in the case of the Bolsheviks, the Maoists, and the Nazis, they are the propaganda tools of the central planners.  It’s scary stuff, and scarier still that today’s central planners have a propaganda reach to be able to manipulate the population through social media that the Bolsheviks, Maoists and Nazis could only dream of. 

Build Back Better
The alliteration rolled off the tongues of all the Western leaders from Macron to Biden to Merkel to Boris Johnson.  It seemed to gain traction after the horrendous policy decisions to shut down Western societies in response to the COVID pandemic.  And it sounded great, especially in America, where we thrive on innovation, fresh starts and renewal.   But it never answered fundamental questions.  Who was going to do the building?  What, exactly was being built?  With what money?  A high speed rail like the one in California that cost millions with not an inch of track being laid?   Millions of electric cars with no infrastructure to service them?  

Social Emotional Learning
SEL is marketed as a way of developing emotional control, empathy and facilitates students “feeling and showing empathy toward others” and establishing “equitable learning environments.” It can help “address various forms of inequity.”  All of this sounds nice.  Who isn’t FOR empathy?  But the more you read about SEL, the more you realize that this is simply the State elbowing its way into the space that should be occupied by family and church.  It is state education sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong.  It's the role of parents and pastors to form identities and teach empathy and cooperation.  SEL is simply an academic sounding slogan to displace family and faith and substitute the state.

Environmental, Social and Governance
Like SEL, ESG is being applied to corporations and states.  And like SEL, it’s hard to argue against.  Who doesn’t want companies and sovereignties to be environmentally aware?  Who can be against the health and safety of employees?  ESG is deliberately formulated to be a direct counter to Milton Friedman’s theory that a firm exists primarily to satisfy its shareholders.   Like SEL, ESG exists to promote an agenda.  It assigns a score to companies and sovereignties WITHOUT REGARD TO FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE.   It ignores an essential truism of economics and of life itself—that all problems involve tradeoffs, constraints and boundaries.  Further, all of the issues that ESG purportedly is set up to address are amply dealt with in federal law, various state laws, and administrative bodies.  It is highly duplicative of the EPA, Department of Labor, EEOC, the SEC and various state corporate laws.

Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity and Inclusiveness
CRT and DEI and their corrosive effects on higher education, corporate life and society in general have been amply written about by writers like James Lindsey, Gad Saad, Jordan Peterson and others, and I will not attempt to regurgitate what they have said here.   All I will say on these topics is that, like ESG, they ignore actual performance as a measure of success. And both ignore the social good of social cohesiveness as an end in itself.   CRT and DEI have led to the diminution of standards across academia and corporate life, and in a host of other environments.  About the only place they have not corrupted is competitive chess.   Rankings are formulaic and color blind.  There are no diversity quota for grandmasters.  You either make the cut or you do not.  Period.

Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter was probably the most clever of the three word slogans.  It’s impossible to argue the converse.  But it is an inherently racist statement.  Black lives do, indeed, matter.  But so do white lives, Asian lives, Indian and Pakistani lives, Hispanic lives, and Indigenous lives.   Further, Black Lives Matter the organization was conflated with the notion that black lives matter.  And as we saw, Black Lives Matter was a scam, a shakedown of monumental proportions, that leveraged the death of George Floyd to enrich its founders like Patrice Cullors.  The organization collected millions, but bestowed nothing on HBCUs, or health organizations or anything else for that matter that actually enriched Black lives.

The three word slogans have become endemic in our society.  They are vacuous, antithetical to a democratic, capitalist society, and are leading to the degradation of standards, of innovation, and of excellence.  They are all deliberately designed to be difficult to argue against.  They are constructed in threes because that is easy to remember and impound But each is also designed to convey power to the State and to the central planners and will end with the Sovietization of America.