n the last six years, we’ve seen a curious moral homogeneity grip the corporate world. Suddenly, the rightful arbiters of what is good and what is shameful in the world are corporations. The very same corporations who have raped our planet with their emissions, shamelessly taken advantage of child labour in third world nations, profiteered from global financial crises, bulldozed innocent species in the Amazon and engineered the chronic illnesses of millions.

Now, there’s nothing fiendish about companies having values in the first place. Even if those values are the generic, manufactured, ‘good-cop’ edicts that social justice activists bullied corporations into glibly adopting. But what is diabolical is the fundamental inauthenticity of the adoption. Corporations parading themselves as the leading educators of morality is comically hypocritical and hollow, particularly when you consider their motives for doing so are generally to seek greater market share, and to tactically protect themselves from the wrath of viciously vitriolic leftist Twitter gangsters.

In the last two weeks, news of crypto exchange FTX’s spectacular collapse has dominated headlines. Fallen founder Sam Bankman-Fried had cultivated a reputation as one of the world’s top altruists (only because he donated millions to Democrats, and claimed to support the most fashionable causes, of course). He siphoned billions from firms and investors by hollowly positing himself as the image of angelic benevolent liberalism. Pandemonium ensued when, following his Icarus-like downfall, Fried was revealed to have told a reporter ‘he feels bad for those who get screwed over’ by ‘this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us’. Despite his obvious self-awareness of the fundamental hollowness a ‘righteous’, ‘altruistic’ persona can be built on, the fact remains: curating this inauthentically progressive corporate identity enabled him to defraud billions from investors. No wonder Warren Buffet proclaimed cryptocurrency a haven for charlatans.

I suspect that in the last six years, most boardrooms have been home to a cornucopia of frenzied ‘woke-washing’ acclamations – and to an extent, I sympathise with them. It can’t be easy feeling the pressure to appease hordes of directionless, deranged, jargon-happy young consumers who use Twitter like a weapon of mass destruction and leverage the victimhood privileges of their variegated psychological maladies to confer ideological dictatorship over corporations and institutions.

The stark, self-imposed disenfranchisement of these consumers most often manifests in a way that is so hideously abrasive, you wonder why corporations are so quick to yield. Though chasing coveted demographics is an understandable pursuit, most companies often seem to get high on their own supply after basking in the glow of moral arbitership, suddenly believing they are in the position to sanctimoniously dictate and lecture the masses on acceptable moral beliefs. Which is ironic, given the primary pursuit for suddenly feigning an ardency in feminist, trans activism, LGBT and climate conscious values is often the desire to secure and maintain market share.

Winston Churchill once said ‘the appeaser is the one who feeds the crocodile, hoping it will eat him last’. The dark side to companies appeasing the crocodile farm is the permeating impact on culture and individual beliefs that corporate mimicry of progressive values establishes. Corporate messaging and advertising largely informs behaviour and beliefs. When that messaging is reduced to disingenuous, sickeningly self-righteous ‘acceptable’ values, the masses follow. Suddenly, anything outside that narrow window of acceptable values is evil. Leftists generally have a way of deploying moral absolutism to ostracise and shame people for not falling in line with their dictatorial ‘moral’ disciplines. Ultimately, we’re left with a social and cultural landscape that is so painfully barren and milquetoast that any diversity of ideological opinion, potential political incorrectness or embodiment of traditionalism is brutally eroded. Men don’t approach women any more because they’re terrified they’re displaying ‘toxic masculinity’ by doing so.

Women are too afraid to admit they want marriage and children because the feminist crusade will rain down on them for ‘setting us back 50 years’. Stand-up comedy shows are but a vestige of our entertainment landscape, having devolved into a pathetic parade of unfunny woke one-upmanship. Lingerie brands sheepishly replace the beautiful models most women admire with obese, stretch-mark laden tools of appeasement that inspire precisely zero rational women to purchase the feminine wares they hawk. Legendary sitcoms, shows and films of the 90s and early 2000s, which were markedly original in concept and left a lasting legacy in their wake can no longer be enjoyed without guilt. Even worse, our box office is reduced to an uninspiring cycle of derivative, dull, unoriginal spinoffs and left-pandering productions that have been thoroughly sanitised to appeal to an existentially insecure, anxious population educated at the University of TikTok. Statues have fallen, masculinity has been erased, critical thinking shamed out of existence for no reason other than to satisfice a group of loud, bitter, cultural castrators. And corporations have facilitated this. They’ve appeased. They’ve given in and enabled this gross homogenous sanitisation of our culture.

A certain Australian ad agency once shamelessly brandished the fact that their core, esteemed achievement in gender equality, which they demanded congratulations for, was having several women in highly-paid executive leadership roles. Incredibly inspiring, given that these women are part of the global 1 per cent whose cushy lives will never be touched by real misogynistic tragedies that most women around the world face, like female genital mutilation, forced child marriage and displacement.

It’s a brilliant example of corporations doing what is expedient, rather than authentically righteous. As long as they can maintain a superficial alignment with their hastily adopted values, then that is A-OK. Because what matters is the perception that this false espousal projects. Edgar Allen Poe once quoted ‘believe none of what you hear, and half of what you see’; it’s a wonderfully prescient reminder to take the sanctimonious progressive positionings of corporations with a grain of salt.

Our culture continues to celebrate those who feign adoption of a narrow set of values that eschew traditionalism and ideological diversity, while mindlessly flogging support for the rights of grown men with beards and male genitalia to enter women’s sports and shelters.

However, the hollow men have begun to be exposed for what they are; their sanctimony widely called out as unwarranted, their stances on sociopolitical issues seen as phoney. A reptilian reckoning may just be on the horizon.