It seems to be me that our culture and how we see ourselves seem to be very similar to a culture war battle they are fighting over in the United States of America.
It is the idea that America and now it seems Australia is a systemically racist country and that your identity is defined by your race, your gender and your sexual orientation.
Why all of the sudden do we believe that our culture is defined by this? We certainly did not even talk about race or gender, or sexual orientation when I was a kid.
However, there was a certain event in 2008 that changed the world more than we realised.
And no it’s not me leaving school to attend University however it was the end of my innocence and the time I left a rather blessed childhood for a world that has changed.
The 2008 Global Financial Crisis
There was a mortgage crisis that very nearly led to the entire collapse of the global banking system.
The banks were taking excessive risks, which lead to foreclosures and the collapse of the US housing bubble, the value of the stock market collapsed.
Sadly it was the taxpayers that bailed out the reckless banks.
There were two schools of thought about how to deal with the issues of the banks.
There was an old socialist way of seizing the banks' money and redistributing it to the poor as a form of punishment for the banks.
Then there was an emergence of the ‘woke left’ who blamed this economic injustice on 300 years of white patriarchy.
This idea which has grown to become Critical Race Theory presented Wall Street with a way out of this PR disaster, we can go from being the bad guys to the good guys.
All they had to do was admit their eyes had been opened in other words they ‘woke’ up.
How did Big Business become woke?
They had to be seen as the ‘good guys’ to improve their PR.
You want us to stop climate change? No problems
You want us to get on board with the LGBTIQ movement? We can do that too
We can be whoever you want us to be, just don’t talk about systemic financial risk.
So they had added token minorities to their boards, added logos of the latest fads to their social media profiles, they would preach on Climate Change about reducing to net-zero emissions after flying in their private jets, as long as the banks said the right things they were free to do as they please make as much money as they want with little regulation as possible.
This all changed in 2016, the man who was not supposed to win became President of the United States.
This time the scrutiny changed from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley just followed Wall Street’s playbook, we want to become the good guys, we will censor and cancel opinions we don’t like, and we will make sure the next election goes the way it should.
Then big tech kept their monopoly and did what their masters could not do and that was censor political speech.
We have seen that through Donald Trump and even those who speak out against Covid vaccines.
All of a sudden their views became the views of the mainstream, accept them or risk being ostracised.
So how do we respond?
We know how they work, generally, when a company like to be virtuous it is usually because they have bad PR somewhere.
It means they enforce these virtues on their employees, we see this when Rugby Australia forced Israel Folau to keep his convictions to himself and fired him for speaking them.
It is a scary prospect because it would mean we have to choose between speaking our minds or putting food on the table.
But we have power in our voice and how we spend.
Support companies that trade ethically and let God shape our lifestyle.