It’s Stone Age magical thinking:
Based on his study of a Stone Age culture in New Guinea, Bronisław Malinowski argued that when people face uncertainty, they turn to magic to propitiate the capricious spirits responsible for their incomprehensible misfortune. Being ever-so-sophisticated people who attended business school, corporate executives don’t hire shamans to replenish fisheries or to avoid a storm. Instead, they bring in consultants to help the firm embrace best practices. But as Charles Fain Lehman explains, John Meyer and Brian Rowan’s 1977 paper in the American Journal of Sociology, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” argues that this distinction is a farce—that much behavior as practiced by modern corporations, NGOs, and government agencies is not about technical efficacy that rationally orients means to ends but ritual, vaguely intended to elicit good fortune by achieving legitimacy with the firm’s “environment.”
So “wokeism” is the new Stone Age “magical thinking.” I’m reminded of a quote from Walden by Henry David Thoreau:
“The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.”
He was talking about clothing fashions but it works for social fashions too. Just substitute ‘government’ for Paris and ‘corporations’ for America.
Source: Why Woke Organizations All Sound the Same | City Journal
