Elon's Hole

Sometimes it's just best to stop digging.

...the prescriptions of corporate culturists commend and legitimize the development of a technology of cultural control that is intended to yoke, in totalitarian fashion, the power of self-determination exclusively to the realization of corporate values.¹

— Hugh Willmott

My favorite take on the Vivek / Elon debacle so far is “Vivek Ramaswamy is Right: But not in the way he thinks,” written by the Librarian of Celaeno. In part he says:

In order to help him [Vivek Ramaswamy] and Musk I advocate ignoring their pleas for fresh serfs in favor of a system that produces the free men who will actually be of use. Culture is indeed the way, real culture, authentic modes of being that transcend habits of employability.

Back in the 90s I wrote about corporate culture a lot. During that time one of the bestsellers out there was In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters. I wrote a review of his other book, A Passion for Excellence, entitled “A Passion for Mediocrity,” which I could have probably entitled “In Search of Workaholics.”

The book advocates for getting people to buy into corporate culture and the techniques, often totalitarian in nature, to get them to do so. There are some disturbing quotes in the review, but this one always stuck with me. Peters wrote:

We are frequently asked if it is possible to ‘have it all’—a full and satisfying personal life and a full and satisfying, hard-working professional one. Our answer is: No. The price of excellence is time, energy, attention and focus, at the very same time that energy, attention and focus could have gone toward enjoying your daughter’s soccer game. Excellence is a high-cost item.[emphasis mine]

High-cost indeed! Why do I bring this up? The solutions that Vivek and Elon are advocating are materialistic in nature. It’s a “whatever it takes to have a profitable company” approach. This approach doesn’t see countries or people who make up those countries, it sees the world as one big business and if, as an employer, you can get cheaper labor from some other country then why not?

I trust Steve Bannon’s assessment on this:

This whole narrative about needing H-1B visas for “geniuses” is a lie. If you’ve got an Einstein every 25 years, maybe we can make an exception—if it’s proven. But this is a scam by the oligarchs and Silicon Valley to take jobs from American citizens, give them to foreign workers as indentured servants, and pay them less.²[paraphrase]

Elon is an elite. He really has no country, much like the globalists he has attacked.

But us regular folks, us nobodies, we belong to countries. We belong to cities and our neighborhoods. We belong to the places where we work, live, relax and worship. I’m an American. I don’t want to be a German or an Indian and ideally I wouldn’t expect a German or an Indian to want to be an American.

Mass migration is ultimately intended to turn the world into one big country, to remove our national identities.

Elon and Vivek, whether they know it or not, are contributing to this with these kinds of hiring practices.

America will not be made great again at the expense of Americans.

A note from The Inmate: The email header that went out with this was for a different post…this, obviously, was a short post with only one meme. The long one is coming next week.

Notes

1. Willmott, Hugh, “Strength Is Ignorance; Slavery Is Freedom: Managing Culture In Modern Organizations,” Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 30, Num 4, 1993, pp. 534, 537, 525-526.

2. Bannon, Steve, quoted on Grace Chong, MBI, X, Source