I had a terrible nightmare last night.
I dreamt I was living in a strange dystopian city called Progressiville where thousands of innocent children were having their genitals surgically removed and old ladies were imprisoned for timeworn tweets while gang rapists were freed to make room for TV licence dodgers. It was weird. Everyone had their own nonsensical pronoun and a global HR department, high on a new kind of McCarthyism, ruled the world. The city centre was overrun with blue haired non-binaries daubing businesses with orange paint, toppling statues and throwing soup at works of art. The streets were lined with tents for drug addled zombies bent double in hallucinogenic stupors while menacing youths waved giant machetes amid the haze of dope that permeated the air. Suddenly, a howling gang of looters burst from a moribund department store, arms full of Nike sneakers only to make their getaway past a row of multicoloured ‘Be Kind’ posters pasted over old advertisements. The city was completely lawless as the police had been defunded and were only permitted to observe the chaos as they drove past impotently in their garish rainbow liveries. I ran indoors to escape the madness but every TV programme warned me of some impending doom I was partly responsible for, or berated me for being overly privileged. I switched to the Disney channel in the hope of some family-friendly entertainment but all I could find was Ms Marvel a film about a Muslim teen superhero or She-Hulk: the adventures of a bright green man-bashing lawyer.
You guessed it. I awoke I in a sweat only to realise it was in fact all reality, if a somewhat cartoon version.
French miserabilists, Foucault and Derrida, must be looking down on us, smiling knowingly. The virus they unleashed upon us, catalysed by university academics with gargantuan shoulder chips, has infected the West to the point that phrases such as ‘cultural appropriation’ ‘diversity is our strength’ ‘systemic racism’ ‘toxic masculinity’ ‘my truth’ and ‘cancel culture’ have slipped neatly into our daily lexicon. We know how we got here: In short, the rich West tormented with guilt and privilege has embraced every stupid idea that promised to punish it a little in some vain attempt to level the playing field. A kind of reset I suppose.
Well, tides turn and like some divine intervention things are shifting much faster and more graphically than I could ever have predicted. A year ago, if I’d suggested that Mark Zuckerberg would be sacking his DEI department and replacing Nick Clegg with UFC CEO Dana White you’d have thought I’d lost my mind. That’s like a remake of Bambi with King Kong as the lead part ffs. His Joe Rogan podcast was nothing short of a religious confessional and is deeply significant. Sporting a gold medallion and 70s perm, Zuck chatted enthusiastically about martial arts and how masculine aggression and energy is a good thing for business. A damascene conversion if ever there was one. And there’s certainly lots of evidence that points to testosterone levels being directly linked to entrepreneurship in both men and women. Yes folks, testosterone has had a rough time of it lately but, like perms and medallions, it seems to be coming back into fashion.
In the last few weeks alone we’ve witnessed super-activist AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) dropping pronouns from her bio, and a multitude of mega-corporations including Google, Walmart, Amazon, McDonald’s, Ford, John Deere, Harley Davidson, Jack Daniel’s, Molson Coors, Lowe’s and Toyota backing away from, or at least loosening, their DEI policies. Trudeau has resigned, Pope Francis had the epiphany that much of the news we rely on is fake and dare I mention that the very breeding ground of much of this woke culture is currently battling fires of Biblical proportions. You couldn’t make it up.
Meanwhile, here in cowering Britain our awakening won’t arrive for another four or five years, but arrive it will.
Over the last decade I’ve noticed how the companies I work with have changed. In meetings and brainstorms I can sense that people are scared to speak out, challenge ideas or simply tell the truth. Primed to take offence at every opportunity they appear visibly terrified of suggesting something that might not be ‘inclusive’. It’s as if our businesses are inadvertently mirroring the technocratic model of government: sticking firmly to the narrative and ignoring or censuring contrarian ideas. Our entrepreneurial sprit has become diminished amid of fog of pessimism and a storm of acronyms (ESG, DEI, CRT). Moral relativism and identity politics have pushed us to the brink.
So when you read that Starmer is contemplating turning pub landlords into Maoist informants don’t get too upset. See it as the swan song of tyranny: the last vestiges of a technocratic authoritarianism that failed us. As it always does. The backlash is sure to be beautiful.
Let’s hope that in 2025, like the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, this soul destroying, business despising culture war comes to an end and we finally get to escape from Progressiville.
Happy new year!
Howard Saunders is a writer, speaker and The Retail Futurist
howard@22and5.com
@retailfuturist
