Officers of the New Regime

Have you heard? A Chief Purpose Officer earns a six-figure salary in a Fortune 500 company. His job profile is to supply meaning to corporate moneygrubbing. Not any meaning, but the “approved” meaning as handed down with Solomonic gravitas by the Woke cognoscenti. “In today’s climate,” reports Forbes (Feb. 14), “companies are expected to take a stand on a multitude of societal issues…. That’s where purpose comes in.” In a fit of Orwellian newspeak, Forbes informs us that “the role of a chief purpose officer can supercharge a company’s efforts to be truly purposeful.”

Working alongside the Chief Purpose Office is another handsomely rewarded executive, the Chief Ethics Officer. If any action, glance, raised eyebrow, inflection, choice of words or absence of words (especially pronouns) smacks of heteronormativity, patriarchy, cultural appropriation, white supremacy, etc. (the full list of crimes is longer than Leviticus’s dietary regulations), the Chief Ethics Officer is off and running, and termination lies on the horizon.

If this sounds bizarre, you haven’t lost your mind. What should trouble your mind, however, is that these business titans, whose bottom-line mentality once immunized them to such vacuous academic bilge, now slavishly bow down to it. The madness is propagating like some deadly green algae, smothering common sense in its path.

Have you heard of the Harassment Specialist? Still another plump position populating not only the Fortune 500s but the whole of academia. This too is a cutting-edge profession for a culture on the skids. Its principal focus is pious devotion to micro-examination of the growing problem of “person-on-person sexual harassment,” the secular sin du jour.